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The Best Interview With Wolf + Lamb Ever

How two nice Jewish boys from Flatbush escaped the Hasids, found drugs, and opened a fake techno hotel... among other things.

I first became aware of Wolf + Lamb when I moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn in 2005—we would go out all night to venues like Rothko or Subtonic or just get smashed in the Lower East Side, and we were thrilled to learn that there was a crazy secret 5AM dark techno party in an apartment building happening down the block. Of course nowadays NYC has Blkmrkt Membership, Resolute, Rinsed, and about 20 other good secret afters, but back then the Marcy Hotel (as the space is known) was a revelation. In a way it still is, as it acheived that perfect balance of intimacy and that eerie sense of danger, in the way that most parties strive for, but rarely ever achieve.

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They say all good things must come to an end, but Wolf + Lamb never really does—parties at the Marcy Hotel continually die and are resurrected, but the space remains a home and studio for many artists on the Wolf + Lamb label (with all the crazy vibes that place has seen baked right in the walls). Plus they're now known worldwide, playing everywhere from Berghain to Burning Man. They've got several different record labels, plenty of cohorts (Pillow Talk, No Regular Play), and they've even changed their sound a few times along the way, moving away from dark, minimal tech and into posi-core house and disco.

Williamsburg is a lot different now than it was eight years ago: massive condos dot the waterfront and there's kale salads and Swedish tourists as far as the eye can see. I sat down with Zev Eisenberg and Gadi "Baby Prince" Mizrahi in May at their friend's fancy loft—they were just back from Miami, where they spend their winters with Crew Love counterparts Soul Clap. To tell the truth, every interview with these guys is probably the best interview ever because they are so funny and personable. But here's the amazing story of how these two escaped the Hasidim, sold thugwear, started a fake hotel, and learned to love Sade over Hawtin. Ladies and gentlemen, Wolf + Lamb.

THUMP: Are you from New York originally?

Z: Yeah. We grew up in Flatbush. We didn't know each other growing up. Gadi was in one Jewish community and I was in another one—we met afterwards. His brother became Hasidic and I was growing up Hasidic. I left Hasidism when I was 15. I'm 31 now.

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Was it a huge deal?

Z: No. I was very carefully planning my escape from Judaism from when I was 11, so I just executed it very smoothly. By the time I was 15, I was out. I left the religion, left my family, everything. I mean, I have a relationship with them now, but I wasn't living there. And I discovered electronic music via psychedelic trance, because I was in Israel.

Why were you in Israel? 

Z: I went there for Rabbinical school. That was my final exit strategy: to get my parents to send me off to Israel, and then I would be so far away from them that I could get out. And by the time I came back, I would just not be religious or Jewish anymore. I heard psychedelic trance and I was like, "This sucks, but I like the idea." I just didn't know how to explore it further. I was like, "At some point, I will find where this leads me." Then I came back to the US at 16 or 17—The Tunnel was just closing and Twilo, and it was the end of that era of the New York scene.

So what did you do to support yourself after you left your family? Were you on the streets?

Z: No, I started working, getting into computers and websites, which linked to all the casinos and stuff. I did design, which is how we've been able to do a lot of this stuff. That's basically how I supported myself until  Wolf + Lamb took off.

Did you get to go to clubs like Twilo and Tunnel and stuff like that?

G: I got to see a little bit of it. It was cool, because Zev and I got a little bit of that to inspire us to see the potential in New York. That all died down in '98, '99—it was finished, you know? And then there were actually fucking cool-ass warehouse parties in the late 90s; DUMBO had fucking shit going off, you know? There were Storm Raves—drum & bass was really big then. The vibe was there. And then all of a sudden there was some point where he and I were like, "This sucks! Why does fucking New York blow? Why is it all fucking shitty, like, electroclash and indie rock?"

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Z: We had seen what New York in all its glory can look like. We weren't trying to recreate it or anything, but maybe that was deep down what was fueling us, like we knew what was possible. But I had moved out to LA to pursue my dreams of being a rich dick.

What did that entail?

Z: A lot of cocaine and hookers and fast cars and a bunch of bullshit. I was into casinos, online gambling, stuff like that. I was developing online casinos. Gadi, meanwhile, had a very successful thugwear store.
G: It was clubbing, hip-hop… yeah, it was thugwear. It was an inner-city clothing store.

Z: It was pretty awesome. When I met him, we would walk down the street in the Lower East Side in NYC, which is where we hung out…

G: And get, like, assaulted by drug dealers.

What year was this?

G: Man, it was right before it exploded. It was pre-Schiller's. I think Schiller's was the turning point.

Z: We met in Williamsburg in 2001. Basically, I moved back to NYC right after 9/11, which is only how I remember anything: Burning Mans and 9/11. So that was probably like 2002. That restaurant Schiller's is when it started to be over. I remember when we walked down the street past Schiller's like, "Oh, that's cool. What are they doing here?" They were building it and building it, and then the first day they opened we saw all the fucking dicks around, we were like, "Wow, this neighborhood's fucked. Let's go to Williamsburg." [laughs] And then we thought we would have some fucking refuge… Well, we did have some refuge here for a little while.

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G: It's still good. Williamsburg's still good.

Z: It actually never got completely lamed-out like the Lower East Side is now.

G: It's lame only on, like, Friday and Saturday. It's not lame the rest of the week. You get that feeling Fridays and Saturdays when you're just like, "Who are these people?"

Zev Eisenberg (left) and Gadi Mizrahi

Were there already techno parties popping off in Williamsburg?

G: There were actually a couple of fucking cool little raves. There was a Kompakt party at this big warehouse space. And there was Filter 14 with Steve Bug, and Richie Hawtin was playing around.
Z: The first thing that gave us anything was Bryan's Bunker. That was the first time Gadi and I played together, really.

When I saw you in Miami earlier this year, we were talking about how you were this dark, New York techno outfit and then you hooked up with Soul Clap, went to Miami, and changed your whole vibe to positivity and Crew Love. 

Z: What happened was we had been going to Burning Man all these years. We weren't playing the first few years—we were just participating—but eventually we started DJing out there. One year we already had an audience for Wolf + Lamb from outside of Burning Man. We were DJing and the sun was rising—it's so triumphant and everyone is like… it's the fucking best day of their life. Then we tried to play a John Tejada techno track or something and it didn't feel right. We started playing pop music like Sade, and that worked.

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    And I remember there was another thing that happened the first year of the Marcy Hotel. It was seven in the morning and we we looked around and there were just, like, 70 dudes in the place, you know? We were like, "This all doesn't make fuckin' sense." The music's dark and it's attracting this, which we don't necessarily want. We'd seen what happens when you take the more heartful, melodic, vocal elements in music out there, so that started the shift.
G: At the same time, Soul Clap was also making dark techno, but they had sent us a couple of disco edits. We had met at this one point where our little microgenre was about techno or tech-house, but we were trying to also make pop music into something you could play at a club. We had them over, and we were like, "Alright, now let's try to introduce more of that sound." Then all of a sudden, everyone in the crew was doing more disco and house—NRP started to make more musical stuff, singing, and Slow Hands is making disco but really slow.

Z: We lost our whole crowd, basically, in New York. I remember the Russians came up to us and were like, "You gonna play something more minimal?" We're like, "I don't think so." They came to a few parties afterwards, hoping it'd be filled with dudes and techno, but it was just slow fucking shit, and they're like, "Aww." Slowly, a new group of people formed—some Burning Man crew and a lot of artists who weren't into fucking raving to techno because it's not interesting to them, but they can get into Sade and slow dancing and taking drugs and hanging out. After a few months, we had three people left from our old crowd of a couple hundred, and 150 new people who were all in it for this fuckin' slow shit. It took it out of that whole show, pumping techno party vibe, and into just like a loft party vibe and hanging out with your friends.

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I feel like it's really easy to make dark and hard music and throw those kind of parties when you live in New York.

Z: Yeah, it's conducive to that. People play hard, they work hard here. So people can very easily shift into that mode.

G: When we go into the studio, it's more natural to be more haunting—especially at The Marcy. Just the nature of that place… it has a haunting feeling. When we produced stuff in Miami stuff or Mallorca, it was very bright.

Z: For the last three years, we've been gone for the winter, which is the hardest season in New York. In the summer, Gadi travels mostly and I live in upstate New York, which is absolutely sunshine every morning. You just wake up to birds and chirping and it's green, lush—it's super positive, you know? But I think that's probably what happened. The music changed, our feelings changed, and we wanted to make our situation better than this grimy dark New York kind of thing.

I have this sort of theory that because the apocalypse didn't happen in 2012, now everyone's like, "Alright, well, let's just be happy, because we didn't die and everything's cool."

G: There's definitely something going on in 2013 in that sense. I've felt it. A lot of our friends have been falling in love—not just flings but, like, major life partner things, within the last five months.

Z: You're talking about yourself, basically.

G: [laughs] Yeah. But Charlie, Eli, all of our close friends. There's a lot of positive stuff and people uniting who wouldn't usually.

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Z: It's really funny because when you set the tone of the party with dark music, that's the kind of energy you'll pull out of the crowd. Same with a lighter vibe. Once you play a couple of shows and you get used to that lighter energy, you can't go back to the other way. You can't oscillate between dark and light. Well, we can't. There's what you like to make, which is very emotional, melancholic, you know what I'm saying? But it's not dark. Wolf + Lamb is more happy music now. Gadi has his label Double Standard which, I would say, handles the more sophisticated emotions. It could be moody or very introspective, but it's not dark. We don't have any dark output anymore really.

Have the drugs changed?

Z: We're still doing a lot of ketamine. [laughs] It's interesting. The drugs haven't really changed.

G: Well, look, there's Molly, which is a very positive drug.

Z: People take Molly at fucking Minus parties! It's the same drugs.

G: I dunno, we didn't do K back then.

Z: I did.

G: The drugs are actually very sensitive to everything else. Your Ketamine experience will be heavily dependent on your environment. If you go do K at a druggy weird party you'll continue that druggy, weird, spooky vibe, and if you do K at a fun outdoor thing, it'll just be more fun and party. I think the drugs are very sensitive to the environment and the friends.

Z: People actually have the capacity to switch. I know our crowd. People come to the Marcy after a whole night of raving at some super dark thing and then come for morning sunshine vibes, you know? But as performers and producers, that was a conscious switch that we made. It was a one-way switch. I don't want to spend my energy pushing a dark feeling. I want to push positivity on every level we can.

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G: Everything's a struggle, so why not at least make music for the beautiful, positive side of things? We really believe in that.

Was there anybody that signed up for Wolf + Lamb when it was dark techno, then dropped off when you guys got all positive?

G: No, it was amazing! It was like this course correction where we dropped all this fucking dark matter and basically made room for all the light stuff to thrive.

Z: There were some minimal techno artists that are not on the label now, for sure. We just knew that they weren't gonna come along for this kind of ride. But the people that are in it now know that it's just about pushing music.

G: We also want to be in the US more. Before it was all about going to UK and Germany: there's more parties, more money, more everything. You play in America and you can get stuck with fucking 30 people at some dive bar in Houston. You go to Europe and you can do, like, 10 shows in 20 days, and they're all packed and every one of these kids knows who you are and every track ever. So you're just like, "Whoa, I wanna be in Europe!" But now that EDM's happening, we want to be here more.

What was the kernel of the idea for Marcy Hotel?

G: All these things are very natural: the labels, the black label, the Marcy. When we starting making music we were like, "Now we have a couple of tracks. Do we send them to Perlon? Do you know anyone at Perlon? No? Alright, let's start a label and then…

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Z: We're doing parties and we're dealing with these idiot bar owners…

G: Going to Orchard Bar and we're like, "Could we play here?" And everyone's like, "We have bookings all week. Who are you guys?"

Z: "Could you send us a demo?" And we're like, "No." We never made a fucking demo.

G: Everything was like that. First we found this music that we liked, then we had the party. We took that for as long as it could and then we were like, "We need our own venue," because we kept dealing with the stupidities at other venues. The hours, the drink prices, all these little things that make a huge difference in the vibe…

Z: We rented this apartment and had this vision of creating the coolest after hours, like what we used to hear. Speakeasy after hours New York vibes with decadence and debauchery.

Z: You could do drugs on the table or whatever you want. As soon as you walk in the door, you're in another kind of thing. It was really hard to do this legally. First we tried getting a liquor license, but we kept breaking all the important rules, like don't sell liquor after 4AM. We'd open at 4AM! Basically going down the line on every violation possible owning a fucking establishment in New York. Then we decided it has to be illegal. Like Rubulad.

G: Zev was actually doing hotel websites at the time, like for the Trump Hotel. So I said let's just build a website for Marcy, since you're doing those anyway. So we built the Marcy website and created room key cards without even knowing why… and we'd just give them out. We made like a thousand of them and gave them to friends. No one knew why, because there was obviously no hotel. But then globally, we figured we would just put them on flyers, and anyone with a key card just gets like, frequent flier admission. We actually just had a contest on Facebook for everyone to upload their most busted-up-looking drug kicked-up card. 10 people sent in. The original printing was 8 years ago. We were the only the only ones who gave it out, so every person that has it got it from either me or him, from us looking at him going, "You know what, that guy's cool. We want him in our fucking crew."

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The website didn't have any info about the parties on it, right? It just looked like a hotel website.

Z: It was just a giant "fuck you." People would like, "We should make a website for our party." You know? Events. Calendar. That's stupid. So we were like, "Why don't we make this mythical hotel that towers above the neighborhood?" This was before any of these fucking condo buildings in Williamsburg existed. It was almost in some creepy way, like, our joke prediction foreshadowed what the fuck this entire neighborhood was gonna look like. On the site, there's actually room layouts and all this kind of stuff. And you could make a reservation.

G: We're actually thinking of spending money on rebuilding the site, making it look even more legitimate.

Z: The reservation form only went to 2011, because I didn't think it was gonna end up being this whole thing. We'd get emails from people like, "Hey, I think your form is broken." Or people would come to the parties, like these DJs from out of town, and they'd just be like, "Wow, this was tough finding this place. I was in the fucking taxi circling for an hour trying to find this 42-story building…" We never told anyone. It's a joke. You have to figure it out yourself. The space has the address, but it's on this banged-up shit door.

Do you own the building?

G: No, we rent the building and squatted the yard next door. The yard has the same owner, but he had these ideas of building a whole building there. Every year, we'd ask him, "Can we have the yard?" "No, I'm gonna do something. No." Finally, after three years, another guy who lives here helped us build clandestine steps you put on either side of our window, so you could climb out into the backyard. Then when the party was over, we'd take the steps and pull it back inside. It actually increased our capacity by 300 or 400 people. We started by doing it on Friday night, because we knew this guy was Hasidic, so we knew he would never catch us if we did it on Friday night. When we finally got caught was when we got greedy and tried to do it on a Sunday night.

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Has it helped you with the Hasidic landlords to have grown up here and be Jewish?

G: Well, we understand them more. We have an edge because we know what they want. They want it to be safe and they want to make a little extra money off of it. I think the fact that we're Jewish adds a level of trust. They know we're not obviously religious, but we're also not dangerous. It would be nice if the story ended with us owning that property, because we did invest a lot into it.

[Someone else]: Yeah, like you put a lot of mold into the property. [laughs]

Z: Oh, we built a steam room in there but didn't know what we were doing.

What are all the different aspects of Wolf + Lamb?

Z: First we gave shit out for free on the web. And then we started selling digitally. That kind of grew into the record label, which has gotten probably 30 records out. I think digitally we're up to 70 or something like that. After that, about four years ago, Gadi started Double Standard, which is his personal project.

G: It's more R&B-ish, slower, weirder, experimental. And then when Soul Clap joined, we started Wolf + Lamb Black, which is illegal edits and bootlegs and stuff like that. It's still going on.

Z: There's about 13 records out on that.

G: Now Soul Clap has their own label called Soul Clap Records.

Z: But now we want everyone to grow past this umbrella, so the latest incarnation is called Crew Love, which is basically, all of these musical forces together—the beginning of a movement. Pillow Talk will open a label soon as well. Interestingly enough, with the addition of this thing, we have a new sound almost. It's like starting a new chapter. There's a lot of live instrumentation, the Crew Love showcases are now like five live acts and two DJs, as opposed to the Wolf + Lamb showcases, which were like six DJs and one live act. It's much more of a show. Crew Love doesn't have a label. For now it's just the output of all the labels together.

The Crew Love posse at Burning Man

Star Eyes likes dancing like a Muppet. Find her on Twitter - @stareyezzz