Electronic Dance Music Artists & DJs In Recovery Share Their Stories
It all came to a head for Stefan Tisminezky, the artist known as Stefan T, in the parking lot of a job he was on the verge of losing, along with his sanity and possibly his life. The night before, he told The Ties That Bind Us recently, he’d met up with former co-workers at a music studio job from which he’d been fired because his drinking was out of control. By that point, he added, he was up to two bottles of wine and a pint of vodka a night, and he didn’t give it a second thought when the guys called him to come hang. “They hit me up halfway through that pint of vodka to come hang at the studio, and I just said, ‘Alright, I’ll be right there,’” he said. “I remember blacking out and coming to doing 120mph on the 10 (Freeway), and once I…
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Courtesy of Valerie J. Bower With two months clean and sober under his belt, Nathan Hose – the lo-fi punk-meets-EDM performer known as N8NOFACE – is beginning to see the light. It hasn’t been easy, given his background and his long dependence on substances to change the way that he feels. But if there’s one lifeline pulling him out of the shadows and into the light, it’s music. For Hose, music isn’t just a hobby. It isn’t just a career. It’s something his soul needs, as much as his lungs do oxygen. “The way I move, I don’t think about it, because I do it every day,” he told The Ties That Bind Us recently. “I always tell people that the way I work is the same way some guys go home and play ‘Call of Duty’ – it’s something they do that gives them enjoyment, that they’re not doing…
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The EDM — electronic dance music — community isn’t that different from the hedonistic rock ‘n’ roll heyday of the 1960s and ’70s, Paul Conversano believes, but unless you were in that scene, it’s difficult to appreciate just how much drugs are a part of the culture. For Conversano — better known as the deejay and producer Ravenscoon — the stigma of EDM as a drug culture as much as it is a music genre has some merit. After all, he’s been in the thick of it and come out the other side, clean and sober these days. And from the very beginning, when he once followed various artists around the country, he’s had a ringside seat to just how prevalent drugs are in the community he loves so fervently. “When I was getting into that culture, everybody was drinking and doing things like cocaine, acid, molly (also known as…
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