Warming Up! In Conversation with Thanet musician Jaime Rosso
Thanet musician Jaime Rosso on embracing humour, orange cagoules and the traffic light corporation
Images by George Vicary
Electronic artist and producer Jaime Rosso makes music that is experimental and groove-heavy, rooted in his love of UK sound-system culture.
Released on Domino Recording Company, Jaime’s music blurs nostalgia, his clubland influences and his own voice through a sample-heavy, psychedelic lens. With the new Keep Stepping! EP released in September, Jaime has the ability to create leftfield pop that’s instantly memorable while always keeping one foot on the dancefloor. We got in touch to find out more…
Your music has a bit of a throwback feel to it, with influences across from early 2000s house back to funk. Where does that all come from?
Well, my brother was listening to music when I was growing up that was a bit more off the beaten track, maybe.
I was hearing a lot of club music around the time I was about 12 and 13 as well as things like Limp Bizkit. So there are all these different sorts of sounds coming in, but I’ve always liked stuff that’s a little bit loose and a little bit playful, groovy and also musical.
The stuff I liked normally had a similar through-line of melodies and bass lines and that was kind of danceable, even if it wasn’t dance music. Later on, I started listening to early ’90s music and also ’80s and ’70s.
There are pop elements to tracks like Walk and Speak that gave me thoughts about Fatboy Slim and those artists that straddled club music and chart stuff…
Yeah, definitely. A fairly obvious reference is probably Daft Punk and that kind of French wave because that was very poppy but harked back to a lot of the music coming out of Chicago, Detroit and New York. Daft Punk was kind of like an entry point, but then I dug a bit deeper into all of the stuff that was influencing them. You start getting into the roots of where all of that came from and how they're all sampling the ’70s and ’60s stuff. You kind of get the threads and then you’re going further and further back in time and seeing where it all comes from.
I guess it’s all influenced by something, isn’t it? So, you’re living in Margate now?
Yes, I do. I grew up in a tiny village near Manston and then moved to London for uni and stayed there for five years before I came back to Margate.
I’ve been really enjoying it because it’s nice to be where I grew up, but now it feels like there’s lots of things happening. To be surrounded now by so much energy – it’s very vibrant and there’s people creating things. Being able to go to the small shops and bars and getting to know people is great and there’s so many great venues as well.
For the Keep Stepping! EP (out 11th September) you’re wearing an orange cagoule zipped up around your face, which is replicated across all the artwork and music videos. What’s the story with that?
It’s nice for every project to have a bit of maybe a colour or a look. The first EP, there was the blue jacket and the bobble hat, and then this one, I kind of doubled down. I had that jacket anyway and it was also cold. Yeah, I get very cold and I’m known to my friends as ‘the guy who just doesn’t ever take his jacket off’. But also I’ve been leaning more into embracing the humour in my personality. When I started making music, I was a bit more introspective and introverted and I’ve been trying to get more in touch with this side of myself. It’s kind of a little bit slapstick and, you know, it’s a bold colour, it’s a memorable thing.
Does that also apply to the puppet character Cornelius that you use in the videos?
Yeah. Well, I think the first EP had a theme. The first video was a paper plane that had a life of its own. I think for this video, when I was making it, I needed another character. I was building the narrative bit by bit in my head while I was filming it with my friend Chester and I don’t know where the puppet came from, but it was a continuation of that idea of a mascot of some sort. It allows us humour and playfulness, which is very important.
It’s certainly memorable and adds a narrative to the song’s theme.
Yeah, he’s kind of the boss of the traffic light corporation. I guess in a sense it is a part of my own brain. ‘You have to work, do the work. Don’t allow yourself to stop working. You can’t have a break. You need to keep going’ is essentially the idea. My character in the video is trying not to do that. It’s the battle between the two sides. And again, this EP was very much about allowing you to express yourself and take time to connect back with yourself and have time out from just being in your head and working and not stopping. Cornelius, the character, is kind of an embodiment of the slightly impatient, slightly evil side of your brain.
You’ve got 25k monthly listeners on Spotify, which is no mean feat. Is that something you monitor a lot?
I do care about them in the sense that it’s nice to know there are people listening to the music, and I think getting it in front of more people ultimately is a good thing, and also people all over the world and in different territories and all of that kind of stuff. But I think, equally, it’s one type of audience. It’s also very important to not forget that you need to have your local community and semi-local community who are maybe seeing you in real life, or seeing your performances, or watching your videos, which is slightly different to probably a streaming metric where people are listening to things through playlists. I think they’re both useful to have, but I try not to get too fixed on it.
You played a couple of festivals this summer, what’s next on the cards?
It’s mainly releasing at the moment, but also live dates at the moment are DJ dates essentially – that’s kind of my bread and butter in a way. I’ve been DJing for a long time and it is a nice way to connect with an audience in a kind of holistic community-based way.
I’ve also been throwing a party with my partner Annabel - she’s a DJ called Vandorter - called Bis Bis Bis, and it’s a night in Margate Arts Club. So again, that thing of building a local community and doing something in Margate, that kind of comes alongside the releases and ties into that.
Have you had a ‘pinch me’ moment yet, or has it been a steady build?
I think it’s definitely been a steady build. Releasing the first EP was a really great experience because you don’t have any preconceptions of what it’s going to be, you’re just kind of putting it out. It was great to see it connecting with people I’d never met before. I’ve been making this music over a long period of time, so it’s a bit surreal to have it going out there, but it’s an important lesson in kind of relinquishing control and letting things go.
INSTA: @rossojam
