For Immediate Release:                                                                                                                                                        

Wajatta
– AKA Reggie Watts & John Tejada –
Return With Sophomore Album
Don’t Let Get You Down
Via Brainfeeder
February 28, 2020
Lead Single “Don’t Let Get You Down” Out Today

 Album artwork by Maggie Jung 

LOS ANGELES, CA – November 19, 2019 – Wajatta — the musical duo of Reggie Watts and John Tejada — return with their second album, Don’t Let Get You Down, due out on the groundbreaking Brainfeeder label on February 28, 2020. Coming from different worlds, but sharing a passion for the rich history of electronic music, beat-boxer/comedian/musician Watts and electronic music artist/DJ/producer Tejada bring out the best in each other’s formidable skill sets. Where the duo’s debut album, Casual High Technology, hinted at the broad stylistic possibilities inherent in the marriage of Watts’ elastic, soul-stirring vocals and Tejada’s layered, melodically inventive productions, Don’t Let Get You Down makes good on that promise. The new 11-song LP will be available digitally, on CD and on double-vinyl with pre-orders starting on Tuesday, November 19, 2019, at this link https://wajatta.lnk.to/down.

The first single from Don’t Let Get You Down, released today, is the infectious title track. With its brightly pulsing synths and irresistible whistling hook, “Don’t Let Get You Down” is, in the words of Reggie Watts, “the poppiest song we’ve ever done.” With a deliberately open-ended lyric (the omitted “it” in the refrain is never identified) its breezy message offers listeners some reassurance in our chaotic, divisive times. It’s just one example of the myriad ways in which Wajatta will surprise longtime fans of Watts’ cutting-edge comedy and vocal loops and Tejada’s sleek techno productions and floor-filling DJ sets.

Wajatta (pronounced wa-HA-ta) is a mash-up of the artist’s last names. Having grown up with similar musical influences, Austrian-born Tejada and German-born Watts draw from their love of urban electronic music. Exploring the intersection between influences and innovation, the two describe Wajatta’s music as “electronic dance music with its roots in Detroit techno, Chicago house, ’70s funk and New York hip hop.”

ABOUT THE ALBUM:

The first thing you hear on Don’t Let Get You Down is what sounds like a set of congas, followed by a chant that could be in some obscure island dialect. Like most everything Watts and Tejada do together, “Renegades” has a sound both comfortingly familiar and slightly strange — a surrealist spin on a classic electronic sub-genre (in this case, Balearic house).

Elsewhere on the sophomore full-length, Wajatta delivers its distinctive take on everything from ‘80s hip-hop (“Little Man”) to chilled-out, R&B slow jams (“Realize”) to hands-in-the-air Chicago house (“138,” named after its breakneck beats per minute).

Wajatta builds most tracks from scratch, bouncing ideas off one another from initial spark to finished product. It’s all done face-to-face: “We never just share files,” Tejada notes. They also try to keep their sessions as spontaneous as possible, in a never-ending quest to, as Watts puts it, “capture the freshness.” As a result, Don’t Let Get You Down’s 11 tracks crackle with the energy of fresh ideas captured at the moment of inspiration. It’s electronic music made organically, from two masters at the top of their respective games.

TRACKLIST:

1. Renegades
2. Little Man
3. Don’t Let Get You Down 
4. Realize
5. Tonight
6. 138
7. January
8. Marmite
9. Depth Has a Focus
10. Another Sun
11. All I Need Is You

John Tejada & Reggie Watts aka Wajatta. Photo credit: The1point8. 

WAJATTA LIVE:

Wajatta’s organic approach extends to their live shows, at which Tejada rebuilds the duo’s tracks on his samplers and synths, while the multi-octave Watts conjures vocal symphonies out of little more than a loop station and a delay pedal. Besides a number of concerts in Los Angeles, they’ve performed a handful of shows around the U.S. — San Francisco, Chicago, New York City, Taos — as well as high-profile events and festivals such as Movement in Detroit, MUTEK in Montreal, CRSSD Festival in San Diego, two Dirtybird shows (BBQ in 2018 and Campout in 2019), and a live studio session for KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic. 

On the final track of the album, “All I Need Is You,” listeners can get a taste of one of Wajatta’s most unique concerts. The fully improvised song was part of a spontaneously created 90-minute performance for Club Something at The Sweat Spot, an L.A. dance studio run by choreographer Ryan Heffington. It’s a six-minute snapshot of the improvisational brilliance that lies at the heart of everything Wajatta does — an approach summed up in Watts’ off-the-cuff one-liner near the track’s end: “We’re making everything here for you from scratch — just to ensure maximum freshness.”

ABOUT:

WAJATTA –

Wajatta began in the most fitting of places: an underground warehouse party in late 2016, where Tejada was playing an after-hoursDJ set and Watts, a long-time fan of his propulsive techno productions, was in the audience. From there a friendship blossomed, formed over strong coffee, similar backgrounds and shared interests: ‘80s sci-fi films, old-school hip-hop.

Watts can currently be seen nightly as the bandleader for CBS’s The Late Late Show With James Corden. He first burst into the American audience’s lives as the co-host of IFC’s groundbreaking variety series Comedy Bang! Bang! Over his 15-year career as a solo performer, he’s honed a unique style that blurs the lines between music and comedy, as is evident in his 9-minute TED Talk in 2012, as well as multiple comedy specials for both Comedy Central and Netflix, and at the invitation of Jack White, the record Reggie Watts Live at Third Man Records. Everything he does is 100% improvised — most notably, the multi-layered music tracks he builds on the fly, looping his beat-boxed rhythms and soulful vocals into spontaneous musical inventions that are funky, hypnotic and often hilarious. See updates at https://www.instagram.com/reggiewatts.

In Wajatta, Watts infuses those same techniques into Tejada’s sinuous sounds, creating a refreshingly playful take on electronic music — one in which it’s often hard to separate the machines from the human voice. “There’s a lot of stuff happening that you may not realize is Reggie,” Tejada explains. Though he’s a big fan of Watts’ uncanny beat-boxing skills, Tejada prefers to disguise those effects among the pulses and patters of his analog synths and vintage drum machines. “It’s cool for it to be like, ‘I didn’t know that was his voice.’”

Tejada, for his part, has been at the vanguard of West Coast techno since 1994, releasing a succession of acclaimed albums, singles and EPs for such prestigious labels as Kompakt, Poker Flat, Cocoon, Plug Research and his own long-running imprint, Palette Recordings (est. 1996). Among his best-known tracks are the moody, mesmeric “Farther and Fainter” (from his 2011 Kompakt full-length Parabolas) and the 2005 underground banger, “Sweat (On the Walls)” — now a staple of Wajatta’s high-energy live shows, where Watts delivers witty, freestyle riffs on the track’s original spoken-word vocals. See updates at https://www.instagram.com/johntejadaofficial.

With influences ranging from Detroit techno to Chicago house, Marvin Gaye to Mantronix, Wajatta’s sound is both familiar and wholly original — and, like all great dance music, ultimately life-affirming, as Watts vocalizes, sometimes without words, the joyful energy of his and Tejada’s funky, shape-shifting productions. “That’s the great thing about working with John,” Watts says with an infectious grin. “He’s so steeped in the history of this music. I just pick up on that and run with it.”

BRAINFEEDER – 

Founded by Flying Lotus in 2008, Brainfeeder is a Los Angeles-based record label that since its inception has, in the words of music journalist Jeff Weiss, “re-organized the DNA of hip-hop and house, jazz and ambient, techno and soul, funk and footwork and every other strain of beat music that eludes compartmentalization.” Through its distribution partnerships with Alpha Pup (U.S.) and Ninja Tune (worldwide), Brainfeeder has spread the sounds of such future-focused artists as Kamasi Washington, Thundercat, Daedelus, Tokimonsta, Taylor McFerrin, Georgia Anne Muldrow, Louis Cole, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Lapalux and Ross From Friends.

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For more information, photos, to schedule an interview or request audio files, please contact Green Galactic’s Lynn Tejada at 213-840-1201 or lynn@greengalactic.com.