Halloween is basically New Year’s Eve for LA electronic duo Made Monster. Ryan McKay and Chris Roberts (aka DJ Red and Spryte) are the robot-masked pair headlining this year’s Fetish & Fantasy Ball, which returns to the Joint, with the perfect vibe for Devil’s Night festivities. The Weekly recently unmasked the monstrous pair for a quick chat.
You guys have been making music together for more than five years but only added the masks recently. When did that start? Roberts: Last Halloween, and they went over incredibly well. We were just goofing around with it. … We got some really nice ones made from this artist in Germany, [and] people just really attached to it and it really helped us grow. What started as a joke turned out to be a really cool thing.
McKay: Apparently, no one likes our faces.
Roberts: Or that. That’s very true.
McKay: We should have done this three years ago is what we’re saying.
Tell us a bit about your evolving sound. McKay: We’ve always been more the song-album kind of producers. We felt there was a culture that you had to—especially early in our career—that you had to spit out a track every two weeks to be relevant. We did an entire integrated video for PUBG [online game PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds]. We actually got sole permission from the video game company to have an animator go in and do actual stills inside the game for this music video that we did. That would have never happened if we were trying to put out a track every two weeks.
Speaking of the gaming world, you’re also part owners in Pretzel? McKay: Our label has turned into a monster of its own and is growing a lot more with the new music-streaming app called Pretzel. Pretzel is basically Spotify for the video game world, and it lives inside the Twitch space.
What sort of Halloween plans do you have for your Fetish & Fantasy set? Roberts: We always try to work on a couple of routines back and forth. We’ve done this the past couple Halloweens. We even go to these Nightmare Before Christmas parties where we will tailor a special intro and do some Halloweeny-type stuff for sure.
FETISH & FANTASY HALLOWEEN BALL October 27, 10 p.m., $82. The Joint, 702-693-5000.
