On Friday February 27th, 2015 the GTA x TJR tour was supposed to stop by The Church nightclub, promising to give Denver what it wanted in trap music and what it needed in bounce music. However, LA-based bounce producer TJR (who until recently resided in my quaint home town of Encinitas, CA) was struck down with a crippling case of food poisoning just before the show and was unable to perform.
Despite the disappointment I felt at finding out my hometown hero, and the head of the American bounce movement, wasn’t going to be in the booth that night, I tried to look past to see the positives in such a situation. TJR’s cancellation meant the Miami based producer duo behind GTA would be spinning for three hours straight. When your ethos is “death to genres” and you are given a three-hour set, something incredible is bound to happen.
After warming up the crowd with an assortment of jungle terror tracks, the duo of Van Toth and Julio Mejia dropped the epic track Bring the Voice by the mysterious DJ super group Cobra Effect. Cobra Effect is a project that has been shrouded in mystery since posting songs on Soundcloud about a year ago. The super group has somehow avoided the level of crowd hype that similar “mysterious” DJs, such as ZHU, have garnished for themselves, causing them to appear as less of a marketing project and more like a purely artistic collaboration between, and for, artists.
That is why I was surprised when GTA dropped a Cobra Effect track early on in their set rather than the trap and festival trap sets they tend to play. It seemed to me to be a clue, meaning to set me off on some sort of Nicholas Cage-esque treasure hunt to find the identities behind the Cobra Effect project.
Contact CU Independent Staff Writer Robert Hylton at robert.hylton@colorado.edu.
