Las Vegas Weekly

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If you’re over 21 and you ride a bicycle, you might know Jeffrey Madlambayan and Gabriel Allred as the guys who brought bike prom to Downtown Las Vegas. These days, the local beatmasters—known together as Totescity—can be found serving up skilled mashups of hip-hop, disco, electro and indie-pop inside Artifice every Friday or at Savile Row’s Cut Wednesdays. What you won’t find at either place: Skrillex and Swedish House Mafia. And Totescity would like to keep it that way.

I know Jeff played in worldbeat band Pan De Sal, and Gabriel comes from the ’90s rave scene. Tell us more about your backgrounds.

Jeffrey Madlambayan: I come from a hip-hop background, doing smaller clubs in LA at a very young age … then funk and soul got me back into DJing.

Gabriel Allred: I started playing desert raves with trance music and a little bit of techno and house, eventually getting into the indie dance stuff and electro.

What does a typical Totescity set sound like?

JM: There isn’t one. We’re pretty blessed with the fact that we can play anything and everything, anytime. We’re not stuck by any genre. We’re pretty good at just getting down and feeling how the vibe is, and just going off that.

GA: It depends on where we’re at, too. If you catch us at Savile, it’s all indie or nu disco. If you catch us at First Friday we play a lot of old-school hip-hop.

You’ve played with some big indie names like Local Natives and Vampire Weekend’s Chris Baio, and Las Vegas isn’t always very responsive to that stuff. What gives?

GA: We see videos of these guys online and they play these huge festivals. These are guys that in New York or LA would be playing the big clubs, but then they come to Vegas and they’re just not big on the Vegas radar.

What direction do you see Totescity going in?

GA: We’re working on a live act. There’s a glass ceiling of DJing, and we’d like to break out of it through production.

First Fridays are a big night for you guys. What can people expect when they see you at Artifice?

GA: Artifice is eclectic. You get a lot of different foot traffic in there … and it has the biggest Downtown dancefloor. If you want to dance and you don’t want to hear funk, come to Artifice on First Friday.