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Whistler's dubstep wizard

Mat the Alien starts new residency at Garfinkel's next Friday
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Did you know that Mat the Alien travels around every week? What a guy. What a lucky, talented, hard-working, bass-dropping, party-smashing wonder of a guy.

Mat the Alien, better known to his mother as Mat Andrew, is Whistler's premier local DJ. He's also a staple of the West Coast electronic music scene. Every weekend, he flees the confines of this cozy mountain town to play shows in cities all over the U.S. and Canada. When Pique catches up to him he's gearing up for a show in Saskatoon — but he reveals that there have even been the odd sets in Moscow, Berlin and the Philippines.

All this to say, of course, that it's about time that you give him some love, if you haven't already.

Starting next week, he'll begin a summer-long, Friday-night residency at Garfinkel's, which he says will counteract the "Top 40 kind of vibe" that dominates Whistler nightclubs during the weekend.

His Maxx Fish residency, Really Good Tuesdays, is arguably Whistler's most popular club night. Even on cold, snowless Tuesday nights, when the bars are mostly empty right along with the hotels, the line outside the club will be inching up the block by 10 p.m.

He's held that residency for about 12 years but it's been over the last eight that he's established himself as one of the Sea to Sky's bass music pioneers. He was spinning dubstep when Skrillex was still thrashing out punk rock.

In a town struggling to find its cultural identity, Andrews has helped establish Whistler as a must-play for international DJs and in the process helped cement Whistler's most clearly defined (and largely marginalized) cultural offering.

Not that he'll admit it. He's a modest father of one who speaks with a soft Northern English accent. He deflects praise, suggesting that others, from DJ Phroh to The Librarian, have been just as influential in Sea to Sky as he has. And there's no doubt that it takes a group to create a scene but Andrews is by far the most internationally recognized.

He recently completed a tour with Araabmuzik and Zed's Ded, two of the most celebrated new artists worldwide in electronic music. Andrews himself is celebrated, in part, for his superb musical taste but more importantly for his willingness to experiment with new styles while mostly ignoring the latest trends. As a result, he's won Pique's Best of Whistler "Favourite DJ" category for several years straight.

"I enjoy playing like not necessarily commercial music," he says in a phone interview. "We played a show in Las Vegas. It was a fun gig but the crowd there wanted to hear the songs they knew and it got a bit draining as a DJ. It's not really what I want to do. I don't want to be a jukebox playing the hits."

What he wants, mind you, is to get the people on the dance floor moving. He wants to make it fun. He's no dubstep purist either — he'll spin funk, drum 'n' bass, glitchhop or whatever's necessary for the time and place. It's the DJ's (some say sacred) duty to inspire the audience to dance, to feel the pulse of the room, to play to it and to move it along.

If you've ever seen Maxx Fish on a Tuesday night, with the dance floor jammed to the tilt with kids grooving right along to what Mat the Alien is throwing down, you'll get the idea. Mat the Alien certainly knows what he's doing.

Born and raised in a town outside of Manchester, England, he started DJing in 1988, fascinated with the dominant electronic music at the time (acid house, etc.). He immigrated to Canada with his family in 1994 and settled in Whistler, where he snowboarded by day and scratched at night.

He first discovered dubstep in 2006, just as the genre was first emerging. He'd been playing more drum 'n' bass, breaks and mashups at the time, but in dubstep he saw (or, well, heard) the potential for bringing diverse crowds together.

"There's a lot of different sounds within dubstep — there's the heavier stuff, there's the reggae influenced stuff, the dub-influenced stuff, of course," he says. "When I got into it, it just seemed like something different to do."

When he first started playing it, he says some people "didn't know what to think," but it took no time at all for the Australian and English kids to latch on to it. They started coming out on regular nights and the scene started growing from there until today when, he says, it got "crazy busy."

"It's funny how (dubstep) got, I don't want to say commercial, but so popular so fast," he says.

"Of course, as it gets more mainstream it gets a bit watered down maybe but there's still the underground scene. Just to see these guys that started the scene or are going from playing 200-person shows to 5,000 and selling out arenas, in the end it's all about getting the music exposed to more people," he says.

"It just brings more awareness to electronic music."

This summer, he'll make appearances at all the major Canadian electronic music festivals this summer, including Shambhala and the Basscoast Music Festival, along with a recently announced spot in LIVE at Squamish.

He's also prepping the release of seven records through his re-launched record company Really Good Records, including music from Piranha Piranha and Miles Away, along with some of his own beats. He says these releases will run the board from dubstep to glitchhop with some rock influences peppered throughout.

"I like to see a variety because when you get in a genre, it gets really sort of same-sounding," he says. "I like it when people can push new sounds on people and not necessarily just the one thing the whole time."

What a guy. It's no wonder Moscow's so interested.