For electronic producers and DJs, a name can offer a new identity or a veil to hide behind. Daft Punk, Zomby, and DJ Stingray keep their faces physically obscured, while Aphex Twin and Burial maintain airs of mystery. The Queens, New York-based DJ/producer Brian Piñeyro takes a different approach, releasing music under a fleet of different names: DJ Wey, DJ Python, Deejay Xanax, and Luis. “I feel like most of the musicians that blow up now have a very strong brand, and that’s fine, but I don’t care about that,” Piñeyro tells Pitchfork. “I have different monikers because I don’t want to forcefully be anonymous, but I also don’t want to forcefully fit into one cool package. I don’t find it useful for me.”
Piñeyro worked on music throughout college as DJ Wey before adopting multiple aliases in 2016. Between July and December of last year, Piñeyro put out four impressively diverse EPs across the spectrum of dance music, each record attributed to a different name and distributed through a different label. As DJ Python, he made slithering, subdued mutations of reggaeton for his housemate Anthony Naples’ imprint Proibito. As Deejay Xanax, he spun rough and paranoid jungle for Exotic Dance, a label run by Piñeyro’s other housemates, J. Albert and Person of Interest. As Luis, he offered airy, contemplative headphone IDM on 1080p. And for his second record as DJ Wey, he put out the gorgeous Song for Masahiro, a meditative trio of deep house tracks with hypnotic techno throb, for Bank. So it’s not surprising when Piñeyro insists that his music can’t be pinned down to one single idea. “I feel lots of different ways and I feel different expressions of myself. There’s the depressed, anxious me, there’s the confident me, the creative and intelligent me, and the dumbass me. I think it’s worthy of having outlets of expression for all of that.”
Piñeyro recently sat down with Pitchfork to share a primer on his different aliases, his influences, and his obsession with slithery snakes.
DJ Wey - “Song for Masahiro”
His initial alias dates back to his college days in Chicago. In 2007, he rented a room next to a Mexican family, and the slang du jour was “wey” (meaning “homie” or “dude”). Piñeyro brought it with him to New York, where he moved in with the DIY techno maven Aurora Halal and grew close to her boyfriend Ital (aka Pitchfork contributor Daniel Martin-McCormick), who helped Piñeyro put out his first EP in 2015 on McCormick’s label, Lover’s Rock. That release, Introduccion, is a primer on Piñeyro’s taste for the raw club music that he makes as DJ Wey, and its Spanish title is a reference to his Ecuadorian/Argentinean heritage. DJ Wey remains the closest thing Piñeyro has to a catch-all identity: he DJs most frequently with this name, and most of his fans know him primarily through the alias. “DJ Wey is for when I want to sit and make tracks, and not think too much—when I just have a need to make music.” he says.
In 2016, Piñeyro wrote the anthemic “Song for Masahiro,” a blissful, barely-there love song dedicated to his friend Masahiro. Over 10 minutes, a melancholic melody loops over an ingenious use of reverb and delay that keep things hazy and out of focus. Each instrument finds its own groove, but once they gel together, “Song for Masahiro” bears an understated beauty that glows with emotion. “[Masahiro] moved back to Japan. I wrote that track for him because he left,” recalls Piñeyro. “That’s what that song is about, just missing my boy.”
DJ Python - “Tranquila”
The DJ Python project is inspired by the beaches of Miami, where Piñeyro lived from 2003 to 2007, absorbing the propulsive lurch of reggaeton’s “dembow” riddim that seemed to blast from every car stereo and boombox. “I heard it, and what I knew was that I wanted to make music like this and recontextualize it,” he says. As DJ Python, Piñeyro writes tracks with such chopped-up riddims, slathering beats with subdued synths.
Using a sampler, Piñeyro lifts tropes from the reggaeton canon and fuses them with his own flavor of smudged deep house atmospheres. It’s a chance for him to work outside of the 4/4 grid of the dance floor. Plus snakes are a perfect metaphor for this kind of music: “I want it to be sexier, usually. I love snakes–they’re slithery, which is very sexy to me,” he says. “I like DJ Python being one thing, slithering around, letting itself be known eventually.”
Luis - “Kirgaly”
Piñeyro’s late grandfather, Luis, is the inspiration behind this alias. Last year with it, Piñeyro released Dreamt Takes, which melded wistful melodies with gently gliding breakbeats. It’s a largely atmospheric take on dance music, suitable for softer moments in the club or headphone listening. Luis tracks come from a place of longing and displacement. “I wanted to make music as an homage to [my grandfather]. I was missing him a lot,” says Piñeyro. “I was also dating a girl really far away, in Budapest. She was living there when a lot of the Syrian refugees started coming into that city. All of these people missing their homes and their families—I just didn’t feel like I was where I was supposed to be.”
Piñeyro considers Luis his most personal project, down to the record’s cover, which features a picture of Piñeyro’s mother. “Talk Me Down” features dub effects from his old friend and neighbor DJ Forest, and “HV’s Sequence” was written for a friend Piñeyro met on Discogs. “[Luis is] about feeling like where you’re at isn’t the right place, and thinking about where the right place might be” he says, “or who you might think is the right person to make you feel better.”
Deejay Xanax - “[Gone ( Mix)]”
Deejay Xanax tunes are what Piñeyro makes to distract himself. “I can’t get out of the house sometimes, don’t trust my friends,” he says. “My whole world gets warped. Anxiety is a part of me, but I don’t think it’s actually who I am.” Rather than completely hiding from the world, Piñeyro makes hard-edged and aggressive breakbeat techno with an industrial edge and an alien coldness. “It’s like I crash-land on this anxiety-ridden planet, and I feel insane and I’m trying to find out where to go,” he admits.
Deejay Xanax tracks can be ominous and paranoid, but there’s a warm and welcoming core at their center. On “Somewhere’s Home,” underneath the murky rhythm and whizzing particles of space junk, there’s an ambient backbone that glimmers with the hope of serenity. “It’s like taking a character that is part of me but letting that part go, and letting me be more functional in my day-to-day life afterwards,” he says. As with all of Piñeyro’s projects, there’s a thread of deep introspection—another lifeline he offers to likeminded souls.