Santa Cruz‘s Harbor High School is situated so close to the Pacific that, on some mornings, the salty air permeates the parking lot before first period even starts. It’s not the type of school that frequently appears in origin stories about the music industry. Oliver Tree Nickell, however, seemed to be shaped by that specific stretch of California coastline in ways that no formal curriculum could ever hope to. He was unhurried, a little eccentric, and quietly creative.
Before he was old enough to read chapter books, he began taking piano lessons. He had already developed an ear for electronic music by the time he got to Harbor High, something that most teenagers his age hardly knew existed. At the time, dubstep was this underground movement that circulated through obscure SoundCloud pages and online forums. Oliver discovered it, assimilated it, and began DJing at school functions with a seriousness that likely confused some of his peers. They might have believed it to be a phase. It wasn’t.
The fact that a high school DJ in a mid-sized California beach town was able to attract the interest of a London record label by merely posting self-produced songs online is something worth stopping for. Not a manager. No connections in the industry. Just recordings with the kind of unyielding conviction that either burns out silently or leads somewhere. For Oliver, it took him somewhere. When he was eighteen, he had his first recording deal on the table after a U.K. label heard what he was producing.
You can learn a lot about him from what transpired next. He slowed down instead of racing to fame. Before transferring to CalArts, where he earned a degree in fine arts in 2016, he enrolled at San Francisco State University to study business, which was practical and almost stubbornly rational for someone with obvious musical talent. In his work, commerce and creativity were never completely separated. His music videos resembled works of conceptual art. His persona was both artificial and genuinely bizarre.
The bowl was cut. The enormous outfits. The largest kick scooter in the world holds the Guinness World Record. These weren’t haphazard antics. They were the hallmark of a person who had studied the mechanics of attention as well as the delight of actually perplexing others. Although Pitchfork’s description of him as a “polarizing, meme-powered pop singer” seems accurate, it also somewhat downplays the skill beneath the ridiculousness. There were more than 11 million Spotify subscribers each month, and they weren’t just there for the show.
He performed at Coachella. He performed in Lollapalooza. Together with DJ Robin Schulz, he created songs that were simultaneously sardonic and sincere. His most recent album, “Love You Madly, Hate You Badly,” was released independently through his own label, Alien Boy Records. This was a calculated move away from Atlantic Records that implied he had more faith in his audience than most musicians would.
He was traveling throughout South America last summer. There were seventy more shows planned. August’s schedule included a homecoming date at UC Santa Cruz’s Quarry Amphitheater, which is located in the same town as Harbor High, where the salt air still permeates the parking lot.
That unplayed show is difficult to ignore. About a crowd that would have assembled in a city that molded him, eager to discover the true extent of the Harbor High dubstep kid’s journey. Miles are not used to measure all distances.
