VIA Festival presented by vitaminwater

Drew Cyrus Lustman is a musician in love with complexity and beautiful simplicity alike. On the one hand, the 26-year-old one-time sushi chef grew up playing piano and upright bass in jazz and classical groups, and cites Frank Zappa, Miles Davis, Squarepusher and Weather Report as life-changing influences; on the other, he loves clubs, loves to dance, and considers hip hop, house, jungle and UK garage to be as important as any of those virtuoso musicians.

Vitally, there is no sense of any divide between these influences – Drew does not see technical music as separate from music that is there to stimulate good feelings and soundtrack good times. His first releases in 2007 may have been unashamedly Squarepusher-influenced IDM, but they were tracks for the rave and not mere exercises in programming complexity, and listening to their tear-out jungle breaks now, they are unmistakeably the work of a man who dances in the studio. Which he does. And even more impressively, in his more recent releases, these precursors from across the globe and throughout musical history are tied together on the later tunes that brought him to global attention into a sound that could only come under the city lights of his adoptive home of New York in the 21st century.