How Big Gigantic and Opiuo produce their unique genre of funk-fuelled electronic musicNot that many years ago, iconic artists were trashing EDM and its culture for its “stupid simplicity”. Today, talented multi-instrumentalists, such as Big Gigantic and Opiuo, are designing a new version of EDM that seamlessly blends virtuosic jazz saxophone, dubstep growls and deep house basslines. Maybe it’s not so simple after all?
Big Giantic and Opiuo often write boom-bap beats that sit in the 80-100 BPM range, which is their ideal foundation for genre-melding. Major rappers such as Waka Flocka Flame and Logic have recorded with Big Gigantic, and Opiuo has covered funk classics like No Parking (On the Dance Floor) from the iconic 80s outfit, Midnight Star.

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At this point, both have released numerous albums fueled by this crossover flair. Big Gigantic just put out their eighth album, Fluorescence, back in June, and Opiuo’s next record, Ascension Seeker, will be released in September.
With so much experience, this established approach has seen them booked at major non-electronic events such as the Newport Jazz Festival, and they’ve arranged their music to perform with full symphony orchestras. To boot, they are far from the only ones supporting this style. The electronic trendsetter GRiZ is a fellow champion, while younger acts such as Marvel Years and Vincent Antone are bringing their own, decidedly guitar-driven flavour, to the trend.
Opiuo’s live show, complete with orchestra. Image: Press
But in terms of sheer longevity, Big Gigantic are among the originators, putting out their saxophone-heavy EP, High Life, in 2009.
“It’s cool to see it keep developing, as it will continue to develop for years to come, hopefully,” says Dominic Lalli of Big Gigantic.
“The more people bring it, the more people hear it, but also the more it gets pushed forward and pushes other genres forward,” says Opiuo, real name Oscar Davey-Wright. “As that evolves, it impacts everything else.”
Big Gigantic consists of Lalli playing saxophone and producing electronic beats, and Jeremy Salken playing drums. They evolved into leaders of this crossover movement from playing jazz and funk gigs together for years. But their interests overlapped with artists like STS9 and Pretty Lights, who were early ambassadors of using electronic music elements, like samples, over jam band formats.
Big Gigantic’s Jeremy Salken on drums. Image: Press
“What we were trying to do early on was somewhere in that realm. [Asking ourselves], ‘How can we mix some of this live element jamming and some of the sampling and beats mixture of what Pretty Lights was doing into our own sound?’” Lalli says.
Davey-Wright grew up attending electronic music festivals in his native New Zealand, where he appreciated the widespread, but also stock and trade genres being presented.
“[At festivals,] there was always a trance stage, a house stage, a hard house stage, and I loved it all,” Davey-Wright says. He paired this universal appreciation with his upbringing of playing drums to fill a gap in what he wasn’t hearing at those events. “I always had a heavy passion for rhythm, and I loved big bass lines. Often, the beats in my music are relatively simple, but it gives me the opportunity to fill all of the extra groove with sounds that are foreign to that genre.”
Integrating electronic sounds has been vital to filling that gap, but Lalli and Salken also saw an overlap within the underlying form of electronic music and jazz and funk. No matter how different they sounded, there was always tension and release, similar to a buildup and drop.

“Whether it was a jazz gig or a funk gig, there was this element of building a solo. You build it to a peak, and then you drop it,” Salken says. “That concept of building energy is the same in dance music as it is in a jam band. Bringing the two together to make this experience felt unique. It was a way to nerd out on our instruments, but still play dance music, and have that concept.”
Both artists have their ways of nerding out when they’re building their music in the studio. Lalli often works with samples, just like Pretty Lights. When he records his saxophone into an electronic backdrop without any embellishment, the divide between organic and synthetic can create a discrepancy in the mix.
“It just doesn’t have the same flavour if you just do it directly, especially when you’re trying to build a new horn line,” Lalli remarks.
However, after creating in this style for so long, he’s developed a series of horn samples that are already EQ’d. He layers these samples around the live saxophone or other horns he may record, so they’re not prominent in the mix but provide support to the instrumental line.
“[The samples] are not far out in the mix, because it would sound weird. They’re back in the mix a bit. It gives it this really meaty [sound] that you wouldn’t get if I brought in five horns,” Lalli continues. “Adding this element is the core. You can put all this stuff around it. It really gives it that beefiness that it needs in the song.”
The resulting mix is so seamless that Salken, who is often separate from the production process, wasn’t even aware that Lalli incorporates this technique into the music.

Davey-Wright isn’t a horns player, so when he needs recordings, he reaches out to fellow musicians like Russ Liquid, who also operates in this instrumental electronic space, and Benny Bloom, the trumpet player from the celebrated funk band Lettuce. Once he has their parts, his process is subtractive rather than additive:
“No matter what I get back, I’m always going to pull it apart. They give me a palette of sound. I’ll try and make a new song using the minimal amounts of things possible to give it just enough of the original,” Davey-Wright says. “That’s the same as when I have live instruments. I like grabbing the piece they gave me, and messing with it as much as I can to see where I can go with it, and then sometimes coming back closer to the original.”
Davey-Wright’s method of smashing and rebuilding can mean dragging and dropping pieces of the recording into an entirely new horn line. One example is his 2016 song, Jelly. He was sent a recording, then he chopped it up, then a saxophone player rerecorded his new version, then he chopped it up again.
“It’s kind of a never-ending thing until it just hits, and you can just imagine someone rocking it,” Davey-Wright says. Overall, whenever he reaches out for horn recordings, he treats it like a collaboration between two equal parts:
Big Gigantic. Image:Press
“Maybe they’ll nail your vision. Maybe they’ll be miles away. Maybe your vision doesn’t even exist until you hear someone playing on it. When you can sit there for hours on end, playing a loop, grabbing singular hits for different saxophone tones, and moving them around, there’s freedom in that because you’re not influenced by anything else. After a while, you’re actually starting to create this instrument that you can’t play, potentially, and that’s pretty satisfying.”
Whatever anyone may think about electronic music or EDM, it’s the only genre that allows for the opportunity to create an instrument that can’t be played. Such a feat requires the union of technology and music. Opiuo and Big Gigantic are taking that union in a funky direction, but there’s no telling how it will evolve in the future.
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