Nutritious: The Alchemy Of Taste

As Solarmaxxing moves across radio, dancefloors and borders, Nutritious is not interested in treating success as validation from the industry. For him, it is proof of something much simpler: music can still find its people without asking permission. That belief reflects a broader philosophy about independence, taste, physical community and electronic music’s capacity to mean something when given enough time and space.

Solarmaxxing topped the NACC Top Electronic chart, reached global radio and became Nutritious’ third release in eight months to hit peak rotation on SiriusXM, placing his music alongside Kygo, Kaskade, TEED, Bonobo and Duke Dumont. To him, those numbers show that audiences can decide what connects, regardless of the machinery surrounding a release. That is why Liquid Culture remains independent: the music can move without anyone predetermining where it belongs or how it should be positioned. The listeners ultimately decide whether it matters.

“It’s always nice when the music resonates. It confirms something I firmly believe. Music travels through soundwaves, over the air, through the ether. Not through gatekeepers. Our audience are the tastemakers. No one else.”

That distrust of gatekeeping goes beyond frustration with the music business. Nutritious sees a broader tendency for cultural and economic power to concentrate among small groups that decide what others encounter. Art becomes compromised when artists shape their work to satisfy those above them. Liquid Culture seeks to remove that interference and preserve a direct relationship between artist and audience. Solarmaxxing’s success has strengthened that conviction.

“There’s always economic and political gravity toward concentrated power. Gatekeeping is a primal form of social hierarchy. Art should move without being designed to please people in power. Otherwise it’s something other than art. The response to Solarmaxxing is the confirmation. People found it. That’s the part that feels amazing.”

The record they found is unusually open in its energy. While much electronic music is moving toward harder tempos, heavier compression and more aggressive release, Solarmaxxing embraces warmth, pleasure and physical ease. Nutritious does not frame that choice as a rejection of harder music, because opposition was never the starting point. The album came instead from an affirmative idea about the sun, the natural world and the possibility of making something that feels good without having to apologise for that pleasure. It is music intended for serious soundsystems, its force comes from resonance rather than aggression.

“The powers that be are trying to disconnect us from our source, the sun. Solarmaxxing comes from my relationship with the sun, our elements, the world around us. The way taste brings people together. The life-giving energy the sun truly provides. I didn’t make the album as an argument against harder or faster music. I wanted to follow an affirmative idea. Wellness and pleasure without apology. Warmth and openness that massages speakers and ears. Serious soundsystems. Resonance for the soul. Harmony. That’s the record I wanted in the world now. Something as strong as starlight.”

That musical openness predates Solarmaxxing. Nutritious moves among disco, house, acid, jazz, orchestral arrangements and downtempo without treating each shift as a new identity; his term Nu-House gives those languages room to coexist. Naming his own space offers freedom from others’ categories while acknowledging the music’s history. House remains the centre, and recognising its Black American foundations is essential to his work. Nu-House is less a new genre than an open structure that keeps those influences alive and in motion.

“Nu-House comes from my name. It’s an homage. I stand on the shoulders of greats. We all do. I don’t fit a category and I don’t care to. Naming the thing I do is better than climbing into a box someone else built. That sounds like death. House is Black American music. That’s the foundation. Disco, jazz, soul, R&B, the dancefloor. Nu-House honors what’s come before me, still in motion. I love a lot of music. House most of all.”

Much of that understanding was shaped in New York, when nightlife demanded more physical commitment than opening an app and finding a record. Record shops, flyers, residencies and recurring nights created scenes because people kept showing up. Nutritious does not fully romanticise that system: geography and gatekeeping excluded talented people. Digital culture removed many of those barriers, letting records cross continents and artists reach audiences without local approval. What it has not reproduced is the intimacy created when people repeatedly share the same physical space.

“Digital culture makes it so a song can move across the world in an instant. Geography and gatekeeping used to keep talented people out. That’s gone, and it’s extraordinary. An audience can gather around a song overnight. A scene still only forms when people keep occupying the same physical space. Thank heaven.”

Even in shared spaces, full presence is no longer guaranteed. Nutritious sees people on dancefloors shifting constantly between the room and their feeds. The issue is not technology itself but the fragmented attention it creates. Club culture depends on surrender to a collective experience, which becomes harder when everyone carries a device designed to pull them elsewhere. His deliberately provocative language reflects how serious he believes that dependency is.

“Look around any event now. The space can be jumping and someone’s in their feed, even while they’re dancing. We replaced drug addiction with phone addiction. Used to be drunk, maybe rowdy people you’d look out for. Now it’s the phone. In for a moment, out again.”

That fragmentation helps explain Nutritious’ attachment to long-form DJing. A six-hour set moves beyond immediate recognition and gives the audience time to stop anticipating the next obvious moment. The first hour can focus on understanding the soundsystem, acoustics, architecture and room rather than proving something. As the night develops, information moves both ways: the DJ responds to an experience created with the audience. Accelerating that relationship fundamentally changes it.

“A long set is a soul connection with the room. A one-hour set, even at its best, is spectacle. Over six hours the room and the artist change each other. Early on I’m reading the soundsystem, the acoustics, the architecture, how people occupy the space. We communicate. We follow ideas together without knowing where it’ll go. That information doesn’t exist in the first hour. The communal nature of the room causes it to evolve. That’s why sixty minutes can’t get you there. You never reach the part where people actually ascend.”

Nutritious describes that experience more as ritual than entertainment, a view shaped by New York. He remembers when rave culture, warehouse parties and clubs were treated with suspicion, and gathering itself felt worth defending. After 9/11, fear changed the city, yet people still travelled far, arrived early and stayed on dancefloors until morning. The culture survived because they kept participating. A dancefloor gains meaning when people repeatedly choose to be together.

“We’ve become more connected online and more disconnected in person. But the dancefloor remains a haven. You can be together without explaining everything you’re carrying. Artists lead that responsibility. Share physical space. Restore connection where the world feels fractured. Create environments where people meet, leave, and build together.”

Keeping those spaces alive also means challenging nightlife’s tradition of treating self-destruction as commitment. Nutritious saw gifted people sustain intense creative lives while their health deteriorated, when few discussed wellbeing on tour. During time away from the road, he studied the issue and developed ideas that contributed to Living Well, a New York Times bestseller, and joined DoubleBlind’s founding team. He later consulted with labels, artists, leaders and brands, but the lesson remains simple: longevity means preserving enough of yourself to stay emotionally and creatively present while performing.

“For a long time nightlife treated exhaustion like proof of commitment. I unlearned that. Performance needs more than stamina. It needs your metaphysical energy, concentration, and emotional availability. After all the study and work, much can be reduced to a simple approach: daily time in nature cannot be skipped. And we’re back to Solarmaxxing.”

Independence creates tension between protecting a vision and shutting out collaboration. Liquid Culture gives Nutritious control over the music, artwork, language, sequencing and release environment, but independence does not mean isolation. The artist must retain the central intention; otherwise, others’ priorities reshape the work. Strong collaborators can still challenge and expand ideas. Stewardship differs from control in whether the vision is strong enough to let others contribute.

“What I won’t surrender is the work’s central intention. What it is. Why it exists. How people first encounter it. With Liquid Culture the music, artwork, language, sequencing, and release environment are parts of the same world. That can’t be done alone. That’s why we have a creative community. I keep the decisions that define the work close, then trust in people whose judgement can expand it. Protecting the vision is stewardship. Control is when you don’t allow others to climb aboard.”

These ideas ultimately converge around taste. We have more music than any previous generation, but unlimited access does not guarantee independent judgement, especially when algorithms return versions of what someone already likes. For Nutritious, taste is discernment: knowing what deserves attention, understanding context and refusing convenience when it damages the experience. It is both personal and collective, drawing people into shared spaces where culture can form. Liquid Culture embodies that principle as a gathering point for people who recognise the same frequencies, not as an algorithmic category.

“Taste is everything. Discernment. Knowing not to play an mp3 on a million-dollar rig because it’s convenient. Keeping cheese out of the crates to begin with. We have more of everything. Better listeners. Worse listeners. Access isn’t taste. The algorithms keep returning what you already chose. You still have to decide what deserves attention. Taste is what brings people together. Similar taste draws a crowd. Culture forms from that. That’s why we’re Liquid Culture.”

As Solarmaxxing attracts more attention, Nutritious will receive more invitations from people wanting a part of what he has built. Yet greater visibility has only clarified his criteria for saying yes: everything about the album, Liquid Culture and his approach to the dancefloor returns to connection. The music must remain recognisable to its maker, and the audience relationship cannot become secondary to the next opportunity. Success creates possibilities, and more chances to forget why the work existed.

“It all comes down to making art with respect to our divinity, and reverence to the divine. Everything else is noise. Attention just multiplies the invitations that aren’t that. My dedication is to myself and the fans. I’ll refuse anything that breaks our soul connection.”