By Steve Graham
Maddy O’Neal doesn’t consider herself an artistic visionary or a gender warrior. She’s just making music that she likes to hear, and she’s getting noticed.
The electronic producer moved to Colorado just as the homegrown electro-soul scene was exploding. Now that some of the scene’s founders have moved on or moved away, O’Neal is a new torchbearer for the electro-soul movement — and a woman blowing up barriers and stereotypes in electronic music that has long been male-dominated. Not that she sees it that way.
“I look at myself as an artist, I don’t look at myself as a female, and I’ve gotten respect back,” Maddy said.
O’Neal likens electronic music to some high-tech professions, where a male-dominated field has simply had a lack of role models encouraging other women to jump into the industry.
“The more successful females there are in it, the more you see popping up all over the place,” O’Neal said.
She grew up in St. Louis, where her father and brother were both in rock bands.
“I dabbled in playing instruments growing up,” said O’Neal, noting that she was also attracted to LCD Soundsystem and other bands that were mixing rock with electronic dance music.
She soon turned from traditional instruments to EDM production software and started watching YouTube videos and teaching herself to create and mix beats.
“I said ‘fuck it, I’m going to try. I have the ear for it,’” she said. “I did a lot of reverse engineering of hip-hop beats.”
At around that time, she moved to Colorado, where she watched Fort Collins’ Pretty Lights, Boulder’s GRiZ and some other local artists seemingly create a new music genre out of thin air.
With 20/20 hindsight, a scene that embraces jam bands loves to dance and disregards genre labels would obviously produce a batch of artists that seamlessly meld electronic music with funk, soul, and hip-hop, even without a large local stable of musicians in any of those styles.
However, those first funky and soulful DJ sets were groundbreaking, and Colorado was an unexpected flyover-country mecca for the new sound.
“It kind of opened up my mind a bit to what was happening,” said O’Neal. I just started teaching myself everything. I was just trying to have fun with it, but I got hooked.”
The electro-soul movement spread from Colorado and the founding artists have moved on. Pretty Lights, aka Derek Vincent Smith, moved to New Orleans and has seemingly retired from music.
That leaves a space for O’Neal to fill — a wide-open electronic space.
“I think the coolest part about (electronic music) is that there are no limits or boundaries to it,” O’Neal said. “The way the music and genres have evolved, I can have an idea and make it 1,000 different ways.”
Though she works as a “one-man band,” she is keen to collaborate with other local musicians. Her acclaimed 2019 EP is full of guest musicians, including Dominic Lalli of Big Gigantic, and Iranian-American genre blender YaSi.
“I really like to support people in my own scene,” she said. “It’s important in terms of community building and supporting your friends.”
She hopes to bring some of those collaborators to her Aggie headlining show at the end of January.
“Those are my favorite sets when you can vibe off of someone else,” she said.
She said she was quickly embraced by her new home state, and she always tries to take Colorado shows to the next level.
“Denver and Fort Collins have been there for me since day 1,” O’Neal said. “I try to go big for the home team.”