Jessica Smurphy (a.k.a. DJ Smurphy, Professor Jessica, Upgrayedd Smurphy and Upgrayedd Jessica) is an electronic music producer originally from Mexico City, currently based in Los Angeles. At the age of 20, Smurphy teamed up with producer Bona (aka Dr. Dude) to form high-decibel electro punk group Post Pastel. The duo reconfigured their collaboration in 2010 for Supermad, an acid house project for which Smurphy wrote lyrics and sang. She was a member of Mexico City's NAAFI crew
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Jessica Smurphy (a.k.a. DJ Smurphy, Professor Jessica, Upgrayedd Smurphy and Upgrayedd Jessica) is an electronic music producer originally from Mexico City, currently based in Los Angeles. At the age of 20, Smurphy teamed up with producer Bona (aka Dr. Dude) to form high-decibel electro punk group Post Pastel. The duo reconfigured their collaboration in 2010 for Supermad, an acid house project for which Smurphy wrote lyrics and sang. She was a member of Mexico City's NAAFI crew, which made its name by putting an idiosyncratic spin on jagged, avowedly marginal styles, from moombahton to tribal guarachero to Jersey-inspired club. Smurphy first came to international attention with her 2015 debut album "A Shapeless Pool of Lovely Pale Colours Suspended in the Darkness", which was released on MatthewDavid's Leaving Records. She left the NAAFI crew in late 2015 when she moved to Los Angeles. Since then she has been releasing material under the monikers Professor Jessica and Upgrayedd Smurphy on her own R-CH-V label. As Upgrayedd Smurphy she released her 2nd album Hypnosys in 2017. There are two main facets to her music: hazy ambient and machinelike footwork. The rhythms, played out on high-pitched electronic toms and leathery hand-drum samples, move so fast that they seem almost to stand still. And the haze, meanwhile, works in the opposite way: as a nearly static, gelatinous mass that gradually yields a wealth of detail, the longer you look at it. It all seems simple, lo-fi, even a little bit crude, but it turns out to be wildly complex, and impossible to take in all at once: Every time one thing is revealed, something else is hidden. It's the mountaineer's dilemma: you can focus on the sparkling mineral in the rock face or the overwhelming bulk of the mountain itself, but you can't appreciate both at once. The title of her debut album came from a sentence that she stumbled across in J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan: "If you shut your eyes and are a lucky one, you may see at times a shapeless pool of lovely pale colors suspended in the darkness." That description, which sounds a bit like a compositional prompt Yoko Ono or John Cage might have come up with, happened to correspond with her image of love. But not just romantic love, and definitely not Hallmark Cards' definition—more like love as a cosmic thing, boundless and electric; love as the connective tissue of the universe. "Love is not only pink ribbons and sugar, it is a living thing, it is sudden, it is insane," she says. https://r-ch-v.bandcamp.com
