Brady Cagle, also known as Flintwick, produces electronic music in Fayetteville and performs it all over the country. This week, he will be performing alongside 5 A.M. at the Momentary in Bentonville as part of that venue’s Collide series. It’s taking place in the RODE House tomorrow night at 8 p.m.
Ozarks at Large’s Sophia Nourani caught up with Flintwick to hear about the show and his beginnings in music. He’s a Fort Smith native who’s been performing live for almost 10 years, but he’s been interested in music his entire life.
Brady Cagle: I’ve just kind of been obsessed with music, like listening to it my whole life. And then I think around high school — or no, I’m sorry, it was junior high — I started messing with producing electronic music just as a fun hobby, just because I heard some dubstep or some cool experimental electronic music, and I was super interested and just kind of put myself into learning this software, then kind of just gave up and eventually picked up actual instruments and gave up the electronic side.
And then by the time I was out of high school, I knew I wanted to be a musician, and I didn’t know if I really wanted to play on stages or not, but I kind of just rolled with it and moved to Little Rock and then started getting booked for festivals to play solo.
Sophia Nourani: Maybe tell me about one of your first performances live.
Cagle: It’s kind of difficult. I think just going to a lot of music festivals and enjoying funk music and just live jamming and people dancing, that really inspired me to push to making more funky music, doing things that’s more dancey and gets people’s body moving instead of maybe stuck in your head or too emotionally charged music.
I was like, more of like, no, we want to forget the worries in the world and have people dance. And so I started performing live looping, which is like when you kind of play every instrument one by one, and it keeps — you record it and it keeps playing and looping over and over, and then you add another instrument, add another instrument.
And I was doing that. I was 19 and posting videos online of me doing that, and then eventually got booked for a music festival and played a couple performances where I’m doing everything all myself, all at once. And eventually I kind of hit a wall where I was like, I really want to play instruments, but I also really want to produce high-quality electronic music that actually smacks really hard because the live looping, it’s really hard for it to smack a dance floor. It’s such a slow build and not much big climax. It’s more of a performative thing.
And so I was like, no, I want something hard-hitting and well composed, but I have to have two different things. So I ended up splitting my inspiration into Flintwick for my electronic music. And then my band Deep Sequence, which is a jam band.
We’ve been on hiatus for two years now, but that’s where I got my musicianship, my playing and throwing down the funk out. And then I had my electronic music output as Flint, where I could just do whatever I wanted because it’s all me.
Nourani: Maybe tell me a little bit more about these specific projects and about EPs that have come from that. I’m on your website. I see “Whiskers” — it all has a very specific vision. Maybe first tell me about how you got there and how you got the sound.
Cagle: I think one thing with my music, it all kind of revolves around funk. I wanted to be a big fan of the Grateful Dead and Phish and jam bands and hippie culture and festival culture. I had to have a jam band, so that’s where I created Deep Sequence. It was actually picking up pace. We were playing a lot of festivals, played on tour with the band Papadosio, who’s established in the scene. And we all ended up getting busy. Things changed. We had a couple different drummers come and go, which makes things really difficult for the kind of music that we were composing.
And then eventually it just kind of fizzled up, and we were like, you know, we’re going to put a placeholder on that. Flintwick is just always my constant.
Nourani: And where does that name come from?
Cagle: I had been thinking of names for like a year. I had plenty of music made, and I was just like, I have to figure out a name that’s really good because I want to make this a thing. I thought of Flintwick because it kind of has this onomatopoeic quality. My music has a lot of that in it, a lot of foley samples and weird little sounds that are flicky. I didn’t like it at first. After a year of thinking of all these names, it was the only one that kept coming back. And now I love it. It’s stuck.
Naranjo: Yeah. That’s great.
Cagle: But besides Deep Sequence, to get back to the other projects, I also have Acid Katz, well, that’s spelled K-A-T-Z, Acid Katz. That’s me and the producer Lucid, and he’s from St. Louis. That project has gone through all kinds of different waves of where we started to where we are now. Currently Acid Katz is like psychedelic western electronic music. It’s like cowboy meets swamp meets ancient China. It's like world music but has anchors in western cowboy music.
We wrote this whole story by hand of these two cowboys in this alternate universe, and we come to town and a lot of psychedelic occurrences end up happening throughout the story to displace us into weirder events.
So we wrote all this story and then went into the studio and wrote the tracks song by song to the story and just let it happen. And you can hear all the little Easter eggs and all the like, oh, there’s the door opening into the gator chase scene. Or they slam the door into the swamp hut after they escape the alligator. So yeah, it’s just like a really fun storytelling thing.
And we’re both on our own journeys. Like, Lucid’s very successful and I’m doing my thing. We’re both not really investing a whole lot in Acid Katz. It’s just like our fun side thing. And then we released it, and it just so happens every now and then we’ll check Spotify and it’s like doing really well, and it’s like generating all these fans and streams, and we’re just like, we just put it out there because it was fun. And yeah, he’s about to come visit and we’re going to work on the second album.
Nourani: I also wanted to ask, I saw on your Instagram, “Slingshot”. Can you tell me a little bit about that? Is that your most recent EP?
Cagle: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just released that EP last December. I thought it was about done in July. After months of playing shows, it’s really difficult to go back into the studio and continue working and wrap things up with all the travel and all that comes with it.
So it ended up getting pushed all the way to December, which is the worst time to release music, by the way. But I was like, man, I’m going to be so sad if I go this whole year without releasing that EP that I thought was done in July. But, you know, I thought it was done, but I knew I needed some mixdowns and some mixing and mastering. Things ended up in that time frame adding a lot of things and really kind of switching things around, but for the better. And I’m really glad it took me this long, but I made sure to release it before the year just to make myself feel better.
And this is the first time anybody’s going to hear this, but I just confirmed a full remix album of it. Each track is going to get two remixes from some really awesome producers. I have a collection of amazing producers and good friends of mine who are remixing all the tracks, and it’s going to be a banger, hopefully in March.
Nourani: So Collide at the Momentary. Tell me about that.
Cagle: I know that the Momentary had been throwing the Collide series in their smaller room, and it was more of a local DJ situation. It was really sick. But yeah, they hit up my agency in November and they said, ‘Hey, we want to have you do a back-to-back with Five A.M.’
And for those of you that don’t know what a back-to-back is, that’s when you get two producer DJs and put them on stage together and have them share the decks and share the turntable and hopefully come up with a very cohesive experience. You typically get two artists that have some similarity or some overlap and put them together and see what happens.
Nourani: Thank you so much.
Cagle: Of course. Thank you.
Ozarks at Large’s Sophia Nourani spoke with Fayetteville DJ Flintwick last week. He expects another EP released early this year and a full-length album to be released near the end of this year. He’ll be performing alongside Five A.M. Music at the RODE House tomorrow night at 8. Tickets are available at themomentary.org. You can find out more about Flintwick at flintwick.net and find his music on Spotify and SoundCloud.
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