Q&A: The Glitch Mob shares history, style, hometown love

Los Angeles-based three-piece electronica group The Glitch Mob will be performing Friday at the second weekend of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival at the Sahara tent at 7:30 p.m. Composed of DJs Edward Ma (edIT), Justin Boreta (Boreta) and Josh Mayer (Ooah), the DJ collective, known for its blend of electronic and live instrumentation, sat down with Daily Bruin’s Aalhad Patankar to talk about the group’s upcoming performance, style and the story of how the trio met.

Daily Bruin: One weekend down, and you guys are up on stage again in a few hours. How do you feel right now?

Josh Mayer: Feeling really good, man, we’re all really excited. We had some really good conversations about what we wanted to do this time, and iron out the kinks from last time, so we’re feeling really good. Everyone’s pumped up.

DB: Your last album, “Love Death Immortality,” was a big hit, but you guys built up a reputation as a live band. What’s different between your live and recorded music and which best captures your sound?

Edward Ma: I think our music is best experienced live, we think of ourselves as live musicians, electronic live musicians. We don’t really approach it as us being EDM DJs, so to speak, not that that’s a bad thing. What we do is try to create this amazing epic experience for people in a live setting. When we wrote the music, that’s how we conceived it all, like how’s the music going to sound, how are we going to perform it, and how’s the story going to be told?

DB: Your music sees many influences, from glitch and trap to electronica. How would you describe your music and style?

EM: We normally think of it as adventure dance music, as super epic. We like to tell very grandiose stories through our music. … People call our music so many different things, from glitch hop to dubstep to electro to trance, and none of that’s wrong. If you think our music is any of that, then that’s totally cool.

DB: How did you guys get together?

Justin Boreta: We all started off as friends, we come from very West Coast-based (places). I come from San Francisco, these guys live in Los Angeles. We were playing in a ton of different underground scenes, like Low End Theory, a club in Los Angeles and Burning Man parties in San Francisco, and we just became friends first and foremost, and we were also solo DJs playing at a lot of these events … . Eventually, we just decided, “Why don’t we try to DJ at the same time?” So the whole thing started as a DJ collective … we never actually intended to do this, we never sat down and said, “Hey, let’s make a band.” We were just (messing) around. Eventually, the collective morphed into what it is today.

DB: Ed, you and Aloe Blacc went to USC together, and collaborated on projects long before either of your Coachella debuts. How does it feel for you to be performing in the same venue as Blacc?

EM: I actually recorded a lot of his earlier music, when he actually used to be a rapper with a producer called Exile, and they used to be called Emanon. I recorded a lot of the early Emanon stuff at my apartment at USC. It was actually one of the first times Aloe was experimenting with singing, because he used to just be a rapper. I recorded one of the first times he ever sang, and I remember thinking, this is crazy, you’re singing and stuff, and he was like, “Yeah, you know, I thought I’ll try something different,” and now you know he’s a humongous soul singer.

DB: Ed, you’re from USC, and we’re from UCLA, but it’s all L.A. And you guys have a huge fan base in L.A. Any words for your hometown fans?

EM: We’ve been around the world so many times and back and L.A. always feels so good to come home to. We have so much love for L.A.

JB: Life is a taco, enjoy it.