Steve Aoki

Steve Aoki

00:36

Kolony

Steve Aoki

A man with long hair and a beard types on a laptop in a dimly lit room while another man in a cap sits nearby looking at a phone.

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A man with long hair and a beard types on a laptop in a dimly lit room while another man in a cap sits nearby looking at a phone.

Portrait of a person with long black hair and a beard, wearing a dark jacket against a gray background.

A group of people working in a recording studio, seated around a large mixing console with multiple laptops and screens showing audio software.

No Studio? No problem.

Project name

Kolony

Category

Music

Products used

Dropbox

Steve Aoki is a two-time Grammy-nominated producer and DJ, who spends more time out of the studio than in it.

That's by design: the road puts him around new people and new sounds, and he builds his music out of those collisions. For Kolony, that meant a record made almost entirely on tour, shaped around artists he'd never worked with before.

Portrait of a person with long black hair and a beard, wearing a dark jacket against a gray background.

A group of people working in a recording studio, seated around a large mixing console with multiple laptops and screens showing audio software.

A black-and-white studio portrait of a man with long dark hair sitting on a white chair against a plain white background, wearing a white jacket and pants over a dark shirt and white sneakers.

Five men pose in a bright white studio-like room with built-in shelves and decorative objects, one standing and the others seated or crouching in dark patterned outfits and sunglasses.

“In this day and age, you don't need to be in this studio 24/7. I make sure that everything gets uploaded to Dropbox where I can share all my files and sessions from wherever I am in the world.”

Working that way only holds together if the work can travel with you. Aoki kept Kolony moving by uploading his files and sessions to Dropbox, so he could pick up the work, share it, and keep building wherever he landed. The album came together city to city instead of all in one room.

A man with long hair stands in a studio between three large glowing light panels, wearing dark clothes and looking to the side.

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