Meet Matt and Chris Drake of MC4D in Downtown LA

Today we’d like to introduce you to Matt and Chris Drake.

Thanks for sharing your story with us, Matt and Chris. So, let’s start at the beginning, and we can move on from there.
Being identical twins, we did most everything together growing up from playing sports to hanging out with friends, to sharing a bedroom. We both started playing the piano at a young age (around 7 or 8), and that really started our interest in music. In middle school, we discovered garage band and started playing around with music production, but it wasn’t until high school that we got involved with dance music. Hearing Kygo’s early tropical house remixes opened us up to a melodic genre of dance music we’d never heard, and from there, our pursuit of dance music production began. During our freshman years of college at Duke and Dartmouth, we more heavily invested in honing our production skills, leading to us signing with Duke University’s record label the following fall as their first signed DJ’s and producers. Having previously been the starting point of artists such as Mike Posner, Small Town Records gave us a team and a budget to more seriously pursue music. In the year and a half since, we’ve been fortunate enough to release official remixes for major artists such as Frank Walker, Justin Caruso, NEIKED, Tep No, Youngr, and Sara Diamond, receiving several million online streams on labels such as Sony, Universal, and Ultra music. We’ve also moved from DJ’ing bars and clubs around our campuses to opening for major artists such as Icona Pop and London on da Track. Currently, we’re working on more remixes with some artists we’ve always looked up to, as well as beginning to write, produce, and record our own original music out in LA.

Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
It was definitely an adjustment going off to different colleges after having never been apart. Being able to work on music together was difficult at first, and we had to really streamline our writing, producing, and mixing process to make it efficient despite being apart. In the long run, being apart has definitely been beneficial for us, as it’s allowed us to form so many new relationships and connections at our respective schools that have opened us up to new ideas and helped get us to where we are. Breaking into the dance music and DJ’ing industries with no initial experience or connections in either was a challenge as well, but with a lot of hard work and some amazing people who have helped us along the way we’ve been able to make a lot of progress in a short amount of time.

Alright – so let’s talk business. Tell us about MC4D – what should we know?
Our music group MC4D doesn’t really specialize in one genre of dance music, as we listen to and love so many types that we try to pull a bit from each. We aren’t afraid to jump from making a progressive house song to a future bass song, as long as it’s music we enjoy then we want to share it with people. Us being identical twins has also definitely allowed us to create a unique DJ duo image, and we’re really excited to introduce our new live performance look that we think will be really engaging for audiences.

Any shoutouts? Who else deserves credit in this story – who has played a meaningful role?
Our parents have always encouraged us to be creative and explore our interests, and nobody has had a bigger impact on our overall success than them. Music-wise, our manager Ethan Udell has been incredible, and we couldn’t be luckier to have such a passionate and hard-working friend to be on the journey with us. Sang Wook Nam, a professor at Dartmouth and a grammy-nominated mastering engineer, taught us most everything we know about mixing and technical skills, and we’re very thankful for his help and generosity. We also have to give credit to the Booth DJ’ing collective at Dartmouth for teaching us all the ins and outs of DJ’ing, and for Small Town Records at Duke for seeing talent in us and getting us off the ground.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.mc4dmusic.com
• Email: [email protected]
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mc4dmusic/?hl=en
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MC4DMusic/

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