It's early on a Saturday evening at the 1-2-3-4 Shoreditch festival in London and Lapalux is taking the stage. He's only armed with a laptop, a MIDI controller and some select software, but the hundreds in the audience haven't shown up expecting a flashy light show; the music is more than enough to hold their attention.
Lapalux, whose real name is Stuart Howard, cycles freely between chopped-up, R&B-inflected dance tunes to up-tempo juke and ends with an improvised mashup of Aphex Twin and A$AP Rocky. There's a lot going on. So much so that it requires a lot of attention from the listener, but that doesn't come as a surprise — Howard is signed to the California-based Brainfeeder imprint, which is known for complex electronic tunes on the deeper end of the beat-music spectrum. Label owner Flying Lotus' recent full-length release, "Until the Quiet Comes," is already being acknowledged as one of the year's most demanding listens.
"I've always been a massive fan of 1990s hip-hop and that (West Coast) scene," says Howard, whose new EP "Some Other Time" is out in Japan on Oct. 16 and who will also play at Tokyo club Sound Museum Vision on Friday. He mentions rappers Cannibal Ox and beat-maker J-Dilla as examples, but adds that he's not a hip-hop snob: "I used to listen to Deftones and stuff like that. I like to have a really wide palette of different things." When I ask about some of his earliest purchases and just how far that palette extends, he laughs. "The first single I bought must have been (Canadian band) Bran Van 3000's 'Drinking in L.A.' on cassette tape. So embarrassing!"