The Bassment is a weekly article bringing you coverage of the best in Hip Hop and Electronic music from around Vancouver. Weekly interviews, event coverage, album and concert reviews that show how awesome our city’s electronic and hip hop scene really is.   If you think there is someone or something that needs coverage in this city in regards to the Hip Hop / Electronic community then get in touch with us.

Winnie Cooper is a Vancouver DJ collective that speaks to a generation of music lovers. Through their blog and shows they bring us some of Vancouver’s and North America’s newest and unique musicians. Starting as a way to share music Tristan Orchard and Christian Flores found that they could reach a worldwide audience through blogging. “We used to DJ more corporate gigs” says Tristan, “but we wanted to play the music we liked as oppose to the music that sells to large audiences.”. Now throwing their own shows with bands they want to book and with music they want to play these DJs have a lot to offer the biggest music fans.

Photo: Joel Levy

How long have you been throwing events?

We have been doing this for about three years but have been pushing really hard for the last 2 years. We started at the bourbon but the scene changed and we weren’t into it anymore so we moved to funky winkerbeans after attending the venue for a friends bday. We started a night there and started booking bands. I really liked it there but people thought it was really sketchy so we decided to move on. we started bringing in friends bands because we didn’t know much about the local scene. It forced us to learn about the local scene and we got to meet and find a lot of good local music.

You guys bring in acts of all genres. Explain this.

For me personally I have always been a music lover. The genre doesn’t matter as long as it has a good sound and is unique. There used to be this whole thing with bands vs DJs because DJs stole lots of the places that bands could play. We tried to change this and have them all play together.

Photo: Courtesy of Artist

As well as throwing shows you guys have your blog. What kind of content do you have?

Christian is a big part of the site. He writes the blogs as well as DJing our events. We post photos from events. We have event listings. Videos from events.

We do a lot of our own mixes on the site as well. Christian has a few up there that you can check out.

Any artists that you want to do shows with?

We have always wanted to do a show with Eric Devro. He is one of the best DJs in Vancouver. Is part of Mad Decent. Also Grahmzilla who is here tonight with. He is the DJ from Toronto group Thunderheist.

What do you have in mind for the future?

I want to try and bring in more out of town acts. The more people that have heard of them the better for the success obviously. So trying to keep with our tastes while bringing people the acts that they want to see.

Also bringing artists that we meet through our blogs. One of our first shows we did was with The Local Natives. We heard them through our blog and I asked if they wanted to do a show when they were in Vancouver and they did. They came through and the show was awesome. We made a video for the blog and we were really stoked about the whole experience.

Uniqueness is the biggest selling point for me. I am a huge music fan and the people that come to our shows are big music fans and tat is what it is all about.

Why Vancouver?

Vancouver is so beautiful. There is a ton of talent. It is not like east coast cities that have  so many other cities close by. You kind of have to make your own scene. We are way off to the side and it is kind of nice to be able to highlight all this great talent.

http://winniecooper.net/