Valentino Khan’s name first started popping up on YouTube and SoundCloud playlists around 2012 when he produced instrumentals for the likes of B.o.B. and 2 Chainz. From there, the Los Angeles-based DJ and producer branched out into EDM with a little help from his buddies at two highly influential record labels—Skrillex’s OSWLA and Diplo’s Mad Decent. One of the best-known pieces he’s contributed to is Major Lazer’s completely bananas summer jam “Bubble Butt.” But for our money, his hottest single is “Deep Down Low”—an undeniably infectious piece of white-knuckled deep house goodness.

Valentino Khan
Fri, 10pm, $20+
Pure Lounge, Sunnyvale

Tonee Hayes—better known by his regal stage name, Nef the Pharaoh—is making a major mark on the Bay Area’s hip-hop scene. The young Vallejo rapper has been melding the hyphy influences of his youth with a decidedly modern sound since his 2015 breakout single, “Big Tymin”—now a well-loved regional anthem. His latest mixtape, The Chang Project, features a playful collage of Bay-centric slang and inventive onomatopoeia, as well as trap rhythms and slurring auto-tune warbles. Informed by local legends like Mac Dre and E-40, Nef puts his own whimsical twist on the 707 sound.

Nef the Pharaoh
Fri, 10pm, $10+
Pure Lounge, Sunnyvale

Taking their name from the absurdist, avant-garde movement that swept Europe and America in the early 20th century, Swedish DJ duo Olle Cornéer and Stefan Engblom aren’t afraid to be a little wacky. In true dada style, the pair’s particular fascination with champagne and bananas is intentionally nonsensical. Dada Life fit into the rave culture with progressive house bangers like “One Last Night on Earth,” rattling eardrums across the farthest-reaching EDM landscapes. Coming off the single “We Want Your Soul,” Cornéer and Engblom are preparing to embark on a world tour in 2018.

Dada Life
Sat, 10pm, $30+
Pure Lounge, San Jose

German-born André Tanneberger is a progressive house and trance DJ and producer. His vocal-driven singles cross over from clubs to mainstream pop, making him a mainstay in the late 1990s. “9 PM (‘Till I Come)” was the beginning of a long, prolific career that peaked in the UK singles charts at No. 1. The focal point of most of his tracks are sultry vocals, typically female ones. His euphoric approach to electronic dance music is second to none. His moving melodies stop listeners in their tracks. Witness the man behind the soundboard.

ATB
Fri, 10pm, $25+
Pure Lounge, Sunnyvale

DJs Matthew (Van Toth) and Julio Mejia (JWLS) started making music in their dorm at Miami Dade College in Kendall, Florida, as GTA (Good Times Ahead). Their SoundCloud marriage of bedroom production led to run-ins with Afrojack, Diplo and Laidback Luke. They aren’t the Miami bass party monsters one would expect. Instead, they’re more akin to a stay-at-home kind of beatmaker. Their A-list collabs with Skrillex and Rihanna rocketed their status, leading to their last self-titled album, featuring a varied cast of performers, from the heated Vince Staples to the bubbly Tinashe.

GTA
Fri, 10pm, $30+
Pure Night Club, Sunnyvale

Stoic and powered by swag, this Harlem rapper’s latest effort, Still Striving, offers a peek behind the grill and into the mind of one of A$AP Mob’s marquee emcees. As a fashionista, Ferg designs much of A$AP Mob’s official gear and logos, never shying away from the shock value of masonry and gothic inspirations. Ferg’s prowess on the mic is often overshadowed by the ascendance of his crew’s biggest name, A$AP Rocky. Still, Ferg has a powerful voice and is more than worth checking into—especially as he moves away from the trap sounds that launched his career.

A$AP Ferg
Fri, 10pm, $15+
Pure Nightclub, Sunnyvale

Sunnyvale is about to get a healthy dose of prog and deep house when 3LAU returns to Pure. The Las Vegas producer’s set is sure to include material from the flurry of singles he’s been releasing over the past year, along with songs from the most recent entry in his mashup series—last year’s Dance Floor Filth 5. Aside from original material and mashups, attendees can also look forward to hearing all the standard hits sprinkled in, just like on the producer’s series of 3LAU HAUS mixes.

3LAU
Fri, 10pm, $30+
Pure Night Club, Sunnyvale

Like an ever-increasing number of Americans, Matt Toth and Julio Mejia met online. Toth produced tech house and Mejia focused on hip-hop-centric dance music before a mutual friend introduced them on Facebook—linking them to each other’s SoundCloud pages. The day they met in 2010, the two took their first step towards becoming Good Times Ahead, or GTA, when Toth started playing a System of a Down CD.

“We knew every word,” Mejia says. “We became really good friends, and he’s even better to work with. We have the same thought process when it comes to producing.”

GTA achieved almost instantaneous success. Shortly after uniting, they sent off a collaboration to several studios for feedback. The song, which they had mostly laid down in their first session together, got the attention of Afrojack, a top Dutch DJ who wanted to release the song on his label.

“I honestly have no idea how that happened,” Mejia says. “They said it sounded professional. To us, that was crazy. We’d been together producing for four months. And before then, we hadn’t been producing for that much longer. But we just got lucky.”

After that, they became bona fide by working with major names in the industry, like Diplo, A-Trak and Calvin Harris. In EDM, a genre with hundreds of acts jockeying for listeners on overstuffed streaming services, GTA saw these collaborations as an opportunity to expand their sound.

“There’s a lot of competition because there’s a lot of people doing the same kind of thing,” Mejia says. “So people are just trying to do it better, trying to do something different. We’re getting both aspects: the cool underground thing that we love and then the epicness, and the melodic catchiness of Calvin Harris.”

Soon, the duo attracted the attention of Rihanna. She took them along as openers on her 2013 Diamonds World Tour. They went from playing a club show once every month to 70 shows over six months as they traveled from Montreal to Manila to perform in arenas that held up to 90,000 people. Toth calls it a “crazy, eye-opening experience.” They improved as DJs, learned about global music tastes and incorporated universally beloved songs into their hype-the-crowd set while still mixing “in a way that only GTA can.”

On their newest, eponymous release, they develop a singular vision of EDM that displays their versatility. They get assists from Tinashe, Tunji Ige, Iamsu! and Vince Staples, weaving together the disparate up-and-comers who, unlike more established artists, were willing to experiment with their still-solidifying sound. 

“We love the creation process of music,” Toth said. “We love trying to push music forward in our own ways. We just want people who have fresh minds and love to do something different, but not too weird, too crazy. People who get how to do the right amount of different.”

The songs boast atypical rhythms and novel sounds. Some meander mellowly while others bounce with clubby fervor. The release straddles the intersections between pop, hip-hop, R&B and EDM. On the album’s biggest track, “Feel It,” they collaborate with What So Not to craft shimmering, super-sized synths, then they tap Tunji Ige for some cocky, nasally bars before letting the track breathe with an electro-ballad bridge.

On “Little Bit of This,” Staples bucks against his “activist” label, then lists what he likes: “big guns, fast whips, ass and tits, Mansions and white women, Mike Jackson shit.” In this song and others, GTA seeks to go a bit deeper, lyrically speaking, than most EDM. After rising to prominence on the strength of their bangers, they want to tone down the adrenaline, so they can say something.

“The purpose of dance music is trying to go out and forget about all the hard times, trying to forget about life and all the real shit that’s going on,” Toth says. “So it’s hard to try to incorporate something that’s really real and meaningful. But we had more experience with actually writing lyrics and working with other vocalists. So we’re trying to figure out the right way to incorporate that into our more dancey stuff.”

GTA

Dec 30, 10pm, $25

Pure Lounge, Sunnyvale

The last time Kevi Ford hung out with childhood pal Justin Bieber, the Canadian megastar quite literally shit himself. The Biebs, standing atop a table in a Vegas nightclub, soiling his white leather Dolce and Gabbana pants after apparently succumbing to food poisoning. Bros being bros, Ford couldn’t resist cracking wise about the incident. He kept at it for a while before the pop singer decided he’d had enough and tweeted out Ford’s number to his rabidly faithful followers.

“We stopped being buddies,” Ford says, adding that he received multiple death threats. “I couldn’t stop it. I had to get a restraining order.”

The seriously surreal went down around the time Ford moved in with two soon-to-be best friends, Trevor Dahl and Matthew Russell. The three bonded over music, coming together to produce a rap-electronic hybrid, with Ford on the mic and Dahl and Russell working up beats. Collaborating under the name Cheat Codes, they abandoned crowded production for simple, hypnotizing melodies.

“We just kinda started making what we thought electronic music should be,” Ford says, explaining Cheat Codes’ bare-bones approach to writing. “There’s a concept in psychology that you can basically only focus on three things at once. So if a song has more things going on than three, then the person is not going to hear it anyway.”

Their biggest hit, “Sex,” repackaged Salt-N-Pepa’s anthem, “Let’s Talk About Sex.” The fellas flipped the feminist touchstone into a raunchy club banger where talking factors far less into the equation. Russell stumbled upon the germ for the song while absentmindedly humming the melody over a beat they had been working on. When the sample cohered seamlessly, they scrapped their original idea and wrote the lyrics in 15 minutes, following their tendency towards simplicity.

Their sex-ed-themed video features a beyond-suggestive female teacher acting out various sexual euphemisms, IRL. It’s racked up over 35 million plays on YouTube—a phenomenon the trio maintains won’t affect their process.

“We keep the mantra of keeping it moving,” Russell says. “We don’t get overly hyped on what we’re doing. We never get bummed about what we’re doing. We still have a long to-do list. We’re not just going to play around and get drunk on champagne.” —John Flynn

Cheat Codes
Aug 12, 10pm, $10-$15
Pure Lounge, Sunnyvale

The King of Crunk got his party on at Pure Lounge in Sunnyvale on Thursday, spinning a set of club bangers and spraying the crowd with champagne. Our photographer CJ Supnet was there to capture the action. Whether you made the scene or not, you’re gonna want to peep these photos.