DJ, producer, and "one woman jam band" LP Giobbi started playing around with DJing when she was throwing her own parties in San Francisco around 2012.
"It was a wild queer / disco / underground house party inspired by The Loft and Paradise Garage, etc," she says. "I looked on craigslist for CDJs and asked my best friend (Hermixalot, who co-founded Femme House with me) to go look at them with me to ensure I didn't get kidnapped. I brought them home and had no idea how to use them so I spent many hours on youtube trying to figure them out. I didn't take it very seriously until 2018 when Sofi Tukker asked me to go on tour with them. I sort of learned how to DJ in front of people night after night opening up for them. There were many terrible sets but it forced me to get better pretty quickly!"
She describes her sound today simply as house.
"Which luckily encompasses a lot of sound but I find myself gravitating towards classic house more and more," she says.
Giobbi's sophomore album Door is released on October 18.
"I lost three really important women in my life one month apart last year," she says. "I was also on the road for like 300 days and didn't have much time to process much. So when I sat down to write this album, I wrote the interludes as a way to honor those women and my family trying to find my way back home if you will. The story of the album is told through those interludes. As for the tracks, I worked with some of my favorite collaborators aiming to make music that makes people feel alive and feel good."
As for gear: "When I DJ, I use three CDJ 3000s, one V10 and 1 DJS1000. The DJS 1000 is very important as I route my keyboard into that so I can sample the piano and live loop / make sequences to go along with the tracks I'm playing. When I produce I write mostly in the box (in Ableton) as I'm often on the road and writing on airplanes. Then I try to get into studios and re-run the midi through hardware gear."
Looking ahead, Giobbi has plenty planned for the coming months.
"Headline US Tour: The Way Back Home tour," she says. "I'm on a bus for two month end of October through mid December and will be playing in the round and bringing out some of the artists on my label, Yes Yes Yes."
Photo by CJ Harvey
