Let’s rave.
The sound of warehouse industrial speakers booming techno designed for dancefloor domination is the style that a.k.a. skips is known for. The producer, formerly known as Ducky, took a two-year hiatus from his former moniker to privately transition to a transgender man. He then remerged with a new rave-inspired alias. The artist’s latest track, “I.T.C.T.M.,” best exemplifies his new sound. The song is out on August 2, but Forbes received an exclusive premiere of the single on August 1.
The song features industrial tunes, snarling synths, dark beats, ‘90s-inspired warehouse sounds and more. The creative polymath successfully taps into the carefree abandon of rave. Indeed, the musician, photographer, painter and tattooist prides himself on a sonic vision that revolves around highly visible and unapologetically queer aesthetics.
Under his high-energy and multi-genre Ducky alias, which he retired in 2021, the tastemaker collaborated with Jauz and MUST DIE!, graced the stages of acclaimed festivals such as Ultra Music Festival, Electric Daisy Carnival Las Vegas, Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza, toured alongside the likes of Anna Lunoe, Mija, Kayzo, and NGHTMRE as well as released on Deadbeats, Astralwerks, Dim Mak, Activia Benz, Spinnin’, NEST (OWSLA’s sister label) and more.
Under his full name, CK Neiman, the sound designer has been showcasing an original painting at renowned art gallery La Luz De Jesus, which opened July 15. a.k.a. skips’ first photo book, i want to rest and be held by someone who loves me, was featured at the SF Art Book Fair in July and will be shown at the LA Art Book Fair this month as it gets shipped out to those who pre-ordered.
Here, the Bay Area native shares the inspiration behind “I.T.C.T.M.,” his new sound, advice he would those struggling with addiction and more.
Lisa Kocay: Can you describe your sound in three words?
a.k.a. skips: “Hard, hot and gay.”
Kocay: Can you talk about why you decided to transition into a more rave-inspired moniker?
a.k.a. skips: “I was a baby raver. I grew up in San Francisco. I was 13 or 14 when I went to my first rave. My friend’s mom dropped us off. She was a Burner [someone who goes to Burning Man]. She was like, ‘Okay, here you go. Don’t call me. I’m going to party.’ I was like, ‘Oh my god, this is the best thing I’ve ever been to.’ It was under an overpass. Incredible. I related to it in a way that I had never felt a connection to anything. I had already been doing music, but I was like, ‘This is it. This is home.’ It was something in my last project I really cared about trying to create—that feeling of acceptance, safety and everybody’s welcome here. But it was really hard in the confines of commercial EDM at the time, especially. So this is really about a refocusing for me on that.”
Kocay: How do you think this new sound allows you to be able to push that feeling and be able to get that out there?
a.k.a. skips: “I think it’s twofold. I think a lot of it is just for me, for my own mental clarity and the ability to let go, I think especially for this year. It was really about drawing a line in the sand. This was the stuff that confined me in the old project, and I’m not doing it here. At the end of the day, I’m the artist, I have to make the decisions. But I did get to a point I think in my last project where I felt like, ‘Oh my god, I’m not going to be allowed to be who I am.’ So coming into this project and going…‘We’re being authentic. We’re returning to that space where I know that is still possible.’”
Kocay: Can you talk about the inspiration behind “I.T.C.T.M.”?
a.k.a. skips: “It stands for ‘In the Club Too Much.’
“It’s funny because the first two tracks [I released] were very warehouse ‘90s—big synths, melodic. This one I feel is adding another dimension to the sound where it’s a little more clubby, it’s a little more vibey, maybe a little less hard but still with that very underground feeling, rave-centric feeling. It’s really just me having fun. Everything I’m making, everything I’m putting out now is stuff that I want to play.”
Kocay: Can you talk about your first photo book “i want to rest and be held by someone who loves me”?
a.k.a. skips: “It’s a collection of my photography, which is primarily film but also some phone photos and digital photos thrown in. I started taking pictures when I was 17 on film and kind of picked it up on and off throughout my life and ended up with this kind of mishmash thrown together documentation of my life from 17 to 30. I still obviously take pictures now. [The book is] held together with this writing, so it ends up being a loosely autobiographical book, but it’s written in the second person. When there’s writing, it’s ‘This is your life, this is what happens, this is how it feels.’”
Kocay: Can you talk about some of those images and what makes it that story for those who haven’t seen it?
a.k.a. skips: “It’s all very candid. There are almost no pictures in it that are posed or staged or whatever. It’s really me shooting from the hip, chronicling what was going on around me. It’s kind of separated into these different…what now feel to me like kind of different lifetimes but in these age periods. There are photos of me chronicling when I’m 17. I’m addicted to drugs. I leave home and I go to college. That era through coming to [Los Angeles], getting sober, my project starting to gain traction and grappling with feeling stuck and like I wasn’t seen—what’s going on, falling apart, the pandemic, losing my tour just through and through these deeply intimate and kind of personal to the point where I reread it the other day and I was like, ‘Oh, we’re doing this. We’re putting it out there.’”
Kocay: What’s your favorite song you’ve made and what was happening in the studio when you made it?
a.k.a. skips: “I think that my favorite stuff is the stuff that hasn’t come out yet, which I know is not really fair, but there’s something very precious. I have this incredibly long, extensive back catalog that I continue to fill up because I’m constantly producing. I find a lot of joy revisiting those moments”
Kocay: Where would you be today if you didn’t go into making music?
a.k.a. skips: “I almost went to school. I have had a couple of potential [offers]. I had sponsorship offers for snowboarding when I was 17, [I] almost did a higher education degree in mathematics but I think the honest truth is that I’d probably be doing a different kind of art. I can’t imagine not making art.”
Kocay: That’s pretty cool you were almost sponsored for snowboarding.
a.k.a. skips: “I was 17 and it was right when I dropped out of high school. I had the sponsorship offers and in my head, I was like taking them, moving to Tahoe, I’m doing it. Then I got into [New York University] and they were like, ‘Oh, just tell him you can get his GED.’ I even asked about deferring actually and they were like, ‘Dude, no. We’re letting you come. you need to come now.’”
Kocay: What’s the biggest hurdle you faced in life and how did you overcome it?
a.k.a. skips: “It’s hard because my answer would change in every phase of my life. Obviously, with the book coming out about all these phases of my life, I feel very in touch with all of them right now. I think it came from a really f***ed up family situation and there was a lot of trauma and abuse. Moving through life, obviously being addicted to drugs, there’s all these kinds of big things that I could point to as well that were so hard and that sent me this way. But I think in adulthood, because obviously, your childhood is your childhood, I’m not going to hold my child’s-self accountable for this perspective. But I think moving into adulthood, I feel like the thing that has limited me the most is the stories that I tell myself because bad things are still happening in my life sometimes, but I feel so much more equipped to handle them now and to roll with them. They don’t feel as personal as they did before.”
Kocay: What do you mean by the stories you tell yourself?
a.k.a. skips: “I really believe that everyone has a narrative. We all have a filter that we kind of move the world through so we can understand it. For so much of my life, especially moving through drug addiction and trying to get sober, in those eras, it was like I had such a view of the world that I was unlovable, that I was so unsafe, that everyone was going to leave—like these very stark fear-based stories and then I look to confirm them. I’d be like, ‘Well, that bad thing happens.’ [But] you slowly move into this other space of like, ‘Yeah, but look at all these beautiful things. I got to sleep in a house tonight, I have people who love me, I get to eat food, I get to walk outside and I have a dog.’ It doesn’t protect me from life, but it protects me from all the other [stuff] I add on top of it that makes it way harder.”
Kocay: What advice would you give to those who are struggling with addiction?
a.k.a. skips: “I think not to give up. I know, for me, when I was using and I felt really hopeless and I felt like I wanted to die, there was this tiny, even if it was like 0.001% of me, that was like, ‘No, something better is coming and I don’t know when it’s coming, but we have to chase it. We can’t give up.’ If you have even the tiniest little sliver of hope, go towards where that’s pulling you, I think it can seem so dark and so hopeless, and it’s not.”
Kocay: If you could go back in time to when you first started making music and give yourself one piece of advice, what would it be?
a.k.a. skips: “I would tell myself to listen when I know something’s good and if you go to places and there’s no one there and you feel isolated and alone, you might not be wrong. You might just be early.
“Stick to your intuition and your beliefs. I think there were so many times I can look back with my art in all its forms where I was like, ‘I really believe in this and I really feel like this is so good.’ I want to say this thing or I want to say it this way. And then I’d be looking around and I’d be like, ‘No one is mirroring this back to me.’ Then looking back later, I was like, ‘Oh, this was hot like three years later.’ It’s okay sometimes if you’re alone somewhere, you’re just early. Stick with what you believe and don’t be afraid to stand up for that.”