Alexandra Sholler is amazing.
His words—not mine. When I caught up with Sholler, whose fans know him as a superstar DJ and singer-songwriter Alison Wonderland, one word emerged above the rest: “strange.” On a bright day in Los Angeles, we jokingly talked Why Fanghis secret nom de plume under which he wrote the darkest music of his career.
Superior but lost, Whyte Fang is always covered under another skin. Making woozy beats that would be the soundtrack to a fever dream from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, he preceded Alison Wonderland and he subconsciously influenced the chart-topping artist all these years. But he was a different person.
They look exactly the same. After all, who are we if not doppelgängers of ourselves from years past?
“There’s a weird part of me that I want to put more forward,” Sholler said. EDM.com of his mysterious alter ego. “And Whyte Fang is this.”
Suddenly his side became the center of attention in Los Angeles, a city that takes the weird from people like bone marrow. He performed his first ever headline gig as Whyte Fang at the famous Roxy Theater on Sunset Boulevard.
The scene at the venue looked like some kind of phantasmagoric BDSM show. Filled with excited spectators, the dark club grew silent as a curtain fell to reveal a giant cage. Standing in the middle is Sholler, whose silhouette eerily glows inside the hexahedron as it refracts the lights from all sides.
Whyte Fang’s digitized, dreamlike voice focused and told us we were “safe here.” It’s more comforting than evil. We all know that we are about to be controlled by others, but this is a peaceful moment of silence, like the five peaceful seconds after an anesthetic needle before it all goes black.
That moment didn’t last long. He dives headfirst into “333,” a slow banger that drops us down a rabbit hole. The bass wasn’t just bleeding—it was bleeding.
Fortune favors the brave in the madcap world of electronic dance music, where an artist can move into a cube and mutate themselves.
But the hours leading up to Whyte Fang’s long-awaited cocoon-burst were marred by panic and uncertainty. Due to technical issues with the LED cage concept, his team said they would probably have to cancel the show, leading to a frantic phone call that ended with Sholler in tears.
The devil is in the details. And so it is with Sholler, who is getting ready to rock a demonic DIY ensemble complete with ghoulish neon eyelids that he painted on with UV glow crayons.
The look of death is part of a complex outfit with blacklight tactics and months of painstaking design work. Her manager, Garth Crane, even styles her hair and paints the intricate patterns on her clothes by hand. When I saw him on the show, his arms looked like they were made of marble.
It’s a microcosm of his team’s commitment to the Whyte Fang project, which he says is now “really starting to feel like something.” With Crane, lighting operator and stage designer David No Justice and visual designer Tyler Lampe have played important roles in Whyte Fang’s development throughout time. Sholler was effusive in his praise of this formidable group, which overcame a stress test to return to the LA show.
Sholler said what we got to see that night was “a much more exaggerated version” of what went down. That’s a scary thought considering the shocking spectacle of the show.
“I wanted to do something that surrounds me and I wanted to make it visually- and light-centric,” he explained. “For me, when I’m making beats, I like that my music dances a lot with the visuals and lights for this project. All my clothes for Whyte Fang are black-light. So in when I was lit in the cage, because it was transparent, you could only see parts of my black light moving.”
“It’s kind of what I’ve always dreamed of doing with Whyte Fang,” he continued. “I want to keep it separate from Alison. Nobody touches this project. It’s just me.”
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There is a debilitating sense of cognitive dissonance among musicians today. Many of them deftly walk the plank of a life in the public eye despite a desire to focus on their art and protect themselves from the dangers of the music industry, which will intensify in a minute. as social media sinks its claws into their mental health. It’s one of the harshest dichotomies they’ve had to navigate on the winding road to musical success.
But therein lies the beauty of Whyte Fang’s cage concept. When she camouflaged the trippy visual display shown on the cube, she forced fans to turn down the music and forget about Alison Wonderland—if only for a moment.
Hidden in plain sight, Sholler connects with his fans in a new way, sharing his art without the need to create the vulnerability that often causes emotional drain. For him, Whyte Fang was an escapist nirvana.
“With Alison, it really tells my personal story. And it’s a really big thing for me emotionally and physically,” he explained. “While with Whyte Fang, I just want to escape and do the craziest thing I can, and make people feel like they’ve escaped reality.”
“I really wanted to focus on the music,” Sholler continued. “I’m very good with Alison and I love it, but I really want to [Whyte Fang] to become an art piece. I didn’t want it to be about me… I’m just trying to let the art speak for itself without me being its frontwoman. Because I don’t sing, there are no lyrics. It’s about whatever the hell comes out of my brain. Pure beats. It’s very primal.”
Sholler launched Whyte Fang in 2008, long before the arrival of his beloved Alison Wonderland project. At one point, he even teamed up with an unknown beatmaker named Flume (yes, that Flume) after they participated in a music production competition in Australia. They both lost.
Whyte Fang was actually the original moniker under which Sholler made all his music before he signed his first record deal, a 2011 deal with EMI Australia. At the time, he refused to sign his contract with EMI unless Whyte Fang was removed from it. He knew that one day he would have to resurrect his shadowy sidekick to make the wonky, occult music he had loved since discovering The Knife some 15 years earlier.
Without the amazing beats Whyte Fang, he would not have discovered himself from the Alison Wonderland project—and hunger for the creative freedom needed to inspire it. The antithesis of his profoundly straightforward approach to songwriting, they reveal a visceral duality that makes him whole.
“With Alison, I put every part of my soul and private life there,” he explained. “And it’s a lot. So for me to disconnect from that and just focus on having a state of flow and making beats like I’m on vacation from doing that. And I think that they’re both just as deep for me. .”
One of Whyte Fang’s first releases was a remix EP for a punk band, The Grates, called The Version Suicides. Sholler is very proud of the project.
“It’s kind of trippy to hear all my old Whyte Fang stuff because it was early Alison, before anyone was paying attention to me,” he said.
The Whyte Fang sound today is a far cry from the cyberpunkian indie flair of the 2011 record. Take, for example, “TIDES,” a twisted banger that would flush your serotonin if not for its dystopian pain.
Sholler says that every spellbinding track he released as Whyte Fang was started and finished in just one day. If a beat takes more than 24 hours to produce, it will never escape the tiny circuit board inside the walls of his hard drive. There is no silver bullet to unlocking creativity, but for Whyte Fang, a perfect descent into a stream of consciousness is the key to the skull.
So what’s next for Whyte Fang?
“I started my own record label called Fuck Me Up Records,” Sholler explained. “I have some crazy releases coming out soon. But I released Whyte Fang on Fuck Me Up Records and stayed completely independent, and I feel very free to do this project. The only person I I’m the one to blame, and nobody can do it. Tell me what to do. It’s so punk.”
“I’m not here to get anything,” he added. “I’m here to give a platform to someone else. I don’t need to get anything out of it. And that’s what I’m going to do with Fuck Me Up Records.”
Whyte Fang also revealed his debut album, which is set to be released on March 31st, 2023 via FMU Records. You can listen to the label’s inaugural release, a single by Jon Casey and Dabow called “I Surrender,” HERE.