The first time I heard 26-year-old New York DJ and electronic musician Umru Rothenberg, it was in a YouTube video of Minecraft gameplay. It was the summer of 2020, and the only music festivals in the city were on my laptop. During his set on the digital festival "stage" of Lavapalooza, Umru and his co-DJ Frax played 20 zany minutes of Minecraft-themed covers of Caroline Polachek songs and Skrillex remixes. He kicked it all off by announcing, "What the fuck is up New York, it's me, Umru!" followed by, "What the fuck is up, Boise, Idaho!" The music, like much hyperpop, was hilarious and also sincerely addictive.
It was only later, when clubs reopened in the city, that I realized that Umru wasn't just another anonymous internet musician, and that he had been playing regularly in Brooklyn clubs for years. As a teenager in Cold Spring, New York, he began posting his music to SoundCloud. At that time, he says, he was part of a bass music scene influenced mainly by trap and hip hop, with an emphasis on production rather than vocals. In 2016, he started coming into the city to meet other producers he met online and play shows at all-ages venues. Umru's journey is quintessential to how a certain kind of New York musician works today: The scenes in the city and on the internet are parallel, each always influencing the other.
And then in 2018 A.G. Cook found his music on the internet. Cook, founding father of the record label PC Music, emailed him and brought him into the emergent world that would later be called hyperpop, and Umru made remixes for 100 gecs and Polachek. All the pandemic-era DJing, where, influenced by his collaborators on PC Music he would "just do the craziest thing we can do in 15 minutes," has left its mark on his music. "It definitely influenced how I DJ now, which is still trying to mix things that don't easily mix together," Umru told Hell Gate.
That mindset has influenced the music Umru is interested in making now, particularly on his EP "Matter of Time," which came out on Friday on independent label LuckyMe. On it, Umru moves from a Jacques Greene-assisted track that features the trap 808s of his youth to the tectonic bass thuds and icy, pitch-shifted vocals of hyperpop with Nikki Nair. The whole thing is threaded through with dance floor logic, and UK garage pianos sneak in near the end.
As he prepares to take this new batch of dance music back to Europe for a string of headlining shows in nightclubs, I asked Umru about how his journey through those parallel worlds of the Brooklyn dance music scene and the internet music scene led to the music he wants to make going forward.