“I think a lot of people struggle and never talk about it.” Hrdvsion on being straight edge in dance music
If you need some imagery of the strength it takes to stop drinking/drugging when you work in electronic music, imagine going on a diet when you work at Krispy Kreme. You’re constantly surrounded by donuts, they’re all free, and your colleagues always say ‘go on, have one. It’ll be great.’
You used to love eating the donuts. You ate them all the time. But your mental health was deteriorating and your relationships were frayed and you were starting to feel shit all the time. So you decided to stop eating them.
But now your colleagues feel bad eating donuts around you so they avoid you all together. While you man the tills, craving donuts, your colleagues sneak off round the back with boxes of them. That’s where they plan promotions and business trips and invite each other round for dinner. They plan a work trip to Krispy Kreme Hawaii. Last year you were invited. This year you are not.
And yet you still say no to the cravings and the social pressure and the career progression, because you know it is better for your health, life, relationships. This takes the strength and determination of a super-human. And to top it off, in response to that display of strength, some of your colleagues have written you off as boring.
Fuck that.
It’s time to re-write the narrative. In this series No Filter shares the story of three super-humans.
NATHAN JONSON AKA HRDVSION
A couple years ago, at noon on a Wednesday, DJ and producer Nathan Jonson AKA Hrdvsion was wandering around a flea market in Kreuzberg. “I ran into a DJ I know, and we said hi and a few moments later he offered me a line of ket.”
Nathan said no, because he felt like noon on a Wednesday was very much lunchtime. A few minutes later a club promoter came up to the pair. The DJ offered him the ketamine and the promoter said yes and they went to the toilet together. “That was an opportunity for that promoter to now book that DJ because they have a relationship because they did drugs together,” Nathan says. “And if I’d said yeah and went on a bender with him, maybe I would’ve done a remix for him, maybe I would’ve been on his label, maybe we would’ve done label parties together.”
Nathan’s ‘dabbled’ in sobriety off and on for ten years, and this time has been sober for two. Like many of us, when Nathan discovered raving he finally found a place where he fit in. He grew up on Vancouver Island and was bullied at school. When he went to his first rave at 16, he found a space with compassion. “Even though people were on drugs, it still felt like they cared about each other,” he says.
Nathan started drinking in his late teens to deal with social anxiety and discomfort in crowds. “I’d feel claustrophobic, panicked, anxious. Then I’d drink a beer and it wouldn’t be as bad. So I’d drink two beers and then ten beers. I didn’t crave it, it was just an escape.”
When Nathan got into DJing in 1997 he could forget about how restricted he felt in other parts of his life and grow and flourish through music. Through electronic music he could be anything.
Nathan assumed that if he wanted a career in electronic music then he had to go down the route of being in clubs, performing, having a packed schedule, gigs every weekend and drink and drugs on top of it. “I always felt like an outsider in that club world,” Nathan says. “My ideal performing situation would be me in the corner, I’d share the music and then I’d be gone. I don’t want to have to put my hands in the air and entertain people. I just want everyone to listen to the music and feel it. It doesn’t have to be this cool thing. Just listen and let it inside you.”
Nathan’s career took the trajectory of many talented artists. He moved from Vancouver Island to Berlin in 2009 and started playing local institutions – ://about blank, Renate, Panorama Bar. Over the next few years his hard and fast electro sets gained momentum overseas. He headlined Jaegar in Oslo, played Jamie Jones’ opening party at DC-10 and became a regular fixture at Bass Coast in Canada. He’s released music on Hypercolour, Rinse and Gigolo Records and collaborated with Tom Demac, Eddie C and Peter Power amongst others.
And it’s easy to measure the success of an artist by checking their gig listings, label releases and collaborations. But their RA page doesn’t mention how many night’s sleep they lost that year or how many grams they ingested per gig or the last time they played a show sober. When most of an artist’s success occurs while on drugs, how is that success sustainable? And on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, how can they possibly be in a healthy mental space?
Drinking, drugs, lack of sleep has a staggeringly negative impact on mental and physical health. Yet dance music culture tends to glorify the sesh and normalise social addiction. For a lot of people it’s a vicious cycle that they want to get out of, yet it isn’t openly spoken about.
Once Nathan played a gig in Germany and got trashed with the promoter afterwards. “I thought it would be a good idea to slap the promoter. I hit him super hard and then kept partying, missed my flight back to Berlin. The next day the promoter emailed me and asked if I wanted to do a remix for him. It just shows how many connections are made through partying. Even if you slap them.”
The truth is, Nathan isn’t really someone who likes to get trashed. He’s an introvert. Like many people in dance music he’s shy, he doesn’t fit in with the regular crowd. The music came first and the alcohol and drugs came second, but it’s often not long before that dynamic is reversed and the drugs and the alcohol become a coping mechanism for keeping up with the world of music.
“There was too much noise in my head and the drinking silenced it,” Nathan says. “Often drug and alcohol abuse are ways of escaping. And that’s fine as long as there’s some degree of movement. As long as you’re progressing in any direction.”
In 2018, after a few stints of sobriety, Nathan went on tour and said yes to everything. He missed flights, a seminar he was meant to teach, lost a $400 pair of headphones. He kind of did it on purpose, to check in and make sure it was still a terrible idea. Nathan wanted to explore the dark corners of himself, because “how well do you know yourself if you don’t look at the parts you don’t like?”
After that tour he decided to stop drinking and doing drugs again. Nathan says no one asks him about it in public, but he’ll often get messages on a Monday or Tuesday. “I think a lot of people struggle and never talk about it.”
Nathan says that when he got sober, some people instantly kept their distance. “I probably was drunk at least every three days for ten years,” he says. “My decisions were less based on logic and thought, and more on emotions. I got used to living my life emotionally. And when I stopped drinking I felt like I was turning into a robot, cos everything was devoid of my own emotional influence. The security I felt in my answers and how decisive I was came across as cold.”
Six weeks into sobriety Nathan started smelling things, noticing things. He says that the most difficult part is not the lack of alcohol, but too much reality. “It’s like we’re used to a little softness over everything. It’s like watching a movie on an old TV and then watching it on hi-def and you can see the shit set and tell they’re just actors. It isn’t cool. I wanted the shit blurry TV again!”
When he went sober his real friends stepped forward and those who weren’t good for him fell into the shadows. Nathan’s okay with that. “It’s like, maybe I have fewer friends, but I genuinely care about myself now.”
Everything he was escaping from with alcohol was still there. But instead of pushing it away, he was able to face it in a healthy way. “If you ever have an uncomfortable moment, plant your feet there and stay there and smell it and listen to it and touch it,” Nathan says. “Take that anxiety and breathe into it.”
One side-effect of sobriety is more space for knowledge, and a craving to learn new things. “I’m vegan now,” Nathan says. “I got sober and started thinking and ruined food for myself. When I was drunk I could easily eat McDonalds. Now I can’t do it.”
Nathan lives on Vancouver Island, and sobriety means he’s naturally more removed from the club world. It means he can revert back to making the music he always wanted to. “I just want to make really fucked up music,” he says. “I want to make like ultra refined music. Like unnatural, twisted, manipulated to the farthest depths. I’ve replaced club life with a confidence to follow what I want to do.” He pauses. “I never wanted to stand on a stage with my hands above my head anyway.”
Not that club life is totally erased for Nathan. He still plays gigs and enjoys them – on his terms. The last time Nathan played Panorama Bar he was sober and cites it as the most incredible gig of his life. He went to Space Hall beforehand and selected a cheesy French House track by DJ Falcon and Thomas Bangalter called “Together”. His only plan was to play that track during his set. About 2 hours in he licked the sleeve and slapped it on the wall so it stuck. “The intro says ‘The time has come. Are we in this alone or are we in this together?’ And then it’s just 12 minutes of TOGETHER! Everyone cheered so much I was genuinely crying the whole fucking time. And the point is there are those beautiful moments. The truth is, that’s just life. That moment is going to happen to me while I’m working at the grocery store, when I’m walking down the street with my mom. It’s going to happen all the time. It’s not limited to being in a club. And I can have those connections with people anywhere. I haven’t given up anything. Those moments in the club where I felt loved and felt connected were just genuine life moments. And those won’t ever disappear.”
Hrdvsion’s first EP in six years 666 XXX is out next week. Grab your limited edition shirt here.
Listen to Hrdvsion’s featured artist playlist Meanwhile, the music… via his Soundcloud
And watch out for his show on boxout.fm
Words by Alice Austin, snap by Johan Delétang
