With his new six-track mini-album ‘Solarmaxxing’ out now on his Liquid Culture label, Nutritious is celebrating the sun, the dancefloor, and the transformative power of music. Spanning golden mornings, late-night clubs, warehouses and endless summer energy, the record captures a deeply personal approach to sound shaped by decades spent in the New York underground and beyond.
From his early days behind the decks and at the Palladium to all-night sets during New York’s cabaret crackdown, Nutritious has built a career rooted in community, individuality and connection. We caught up with him to talk ‘Solarmaxxing,’ Liquid Culture, his journey through the NYC scene, and why, as he puts it, the dancefloor can be a sanctuary.
WWD: You’ve just released a stunning new mini-album, ‘Solarmaxxing,’ on your Liquid Culture label. How does it feel getting these six songs out into the world?
Thank you. It feels like handing people sunshine. Solarmaxxing is about making the most of our relationship to the sun, an often disregarded source of life and wellness on this planet. Six songs, each a day in a summer life: the ocean, the beach, the city night at the club, the warehouse at dawn, the waterside party, the endless summer. Squeezing the electricity of a juicy day and keeping it flowing past dark. Sugar for the soul.
WWD: Did you start writing these songs with the album project in mind, or did the music build over time and the connecting threads start showing that linked them?
Project in mind from the start. I wanted to write about our relationship to the sun, that expansiveness, what it does to the body and the spirit. Every ancient culture organized life around this source of existence, and it’s one of at least two hundred billion suns in this galaxy alone. Two hundred billion. With roughly two trillion galaxies beyond it. Just look up at night. We’re swimming in solar energies and we’ve mostly forgotten.
Each song became its own scene in that world. I visualize music in scenes, so once I had the theme, the record sequenced itself: golden dawn to neon sunset and back around again.
WWD: ‘Solarmaxxing’ is a larger body of work, notably like your ‘Blurs’ album on Paper Recordings, Amber, and Divinity, which launched Liquid Culture. What emotions does that stir up, and how does the experience differ releasing on your own label?
Cathartic, absolutely. I wrote “Endless Summer” for my mother, who loved the sun and passed away while I was making it. That song holds the heart of the whole record.
Paper Recordings is celebrating thirty years this year. Born out of Manchester’s Hacienda scene, two thousand recordings, five hundred artists across fifty countries. Three decades of shaping the scene. When labels with that history say yes, that’s signal worth amplifying. They are amazing. I just love them and deeply value our relationship.
We built Liquid Culture intentionally as a platform, because it needed to exist, both to preserve the psychedelic experience and to provide meaningful infrastructure for artists truly devoted to the craft.
Having both my own label and others like Paper supporting means the music always lands exactly where it belongs. More to come.
WWD: You now play shows across the world inc. Mark Farina’s Mushroom Jazz, Pikes Ibiza, Art Basel, Zey Zey Miami, Cielo NYC, Mighty SF, Pacha NYC, The Whitney Museum, NY fashion week.. Let’s wind the clock back and look at the journey that led you here. First record deal at 16, promoter at the Palladium at 17… When you were working those early roles, is this the trajectory you saw coming? Did it feel written in the stars?
I started so young it’s genuinely all I’ve ever known. My brother put me behind a drum kit before I could walk, and by eleven we were improvising for hours: rock, funk, soul, disco, no lessons, just play. He gave me everything. He’s gone now. So the path never felt written in the stars. Instead, we’re writing with the stars, all of us, every day we choose to create.
Dancing at the Palladium was a revelation. Deep house and techno on that audio and visual system changed me on a cellular level. I was a producer and community builder in my teens, full-on entrepreneur by 18, and I couldn’t have predicted a single step. I just knew I was never going to do anything else.
WWD: You also held a residency at the former Save the Robots space, playing all night long sets at the height of Giuliani’s cabaret crackdown. You played a vital role in the New York scene at a pivotal time, can you tell us a little about that time? (pls note younger readers will be unaware about the crackdown so maybe give some context, think its a super interesting angle!)
New York had a Prohibition-era law from 1926 that made dancing illegal in any venue without a cabaret license, and almost nobody had one. It sat mostly dormant until mayor Giuliani resurrected it in the late nineties and started padlocking clubs for the crime of people moving to music. It wasn’t repealed until 2017, on Halloween of all nights, and the last zoning hurdles tied to those legacy rules were only cleared in 2024. The culture was always outlaw, underground.
I held down all-night, all-vinyl Saturdays in the East Village at the space that had been Save The Robots, a NY party institution, the next iteration of that room. Always lines around the block past 2AM to get in, the dance-floor a sea of people. When it got too packed, people danced on the bar, in the stairwells. Security was primarily for keeping out Giuliani’s raids. Then 9/11 happened and the city’s nervous system was shot. Lower Manhattan was a war zone. Everyone was carrying something heavy.
We’d party open to close with no guarantee life outside would survive the week, and that made the dancefloor a sanctuary, because it literally was one. Nobody was there to be seen. People were there to commune and release. They were there to unite cultures despite unspeakable horrors attempting to do otherwise. That era taught me what this music is actually for, and I’ve never played a set since without that understanding in the room.
WWD: Circling back to now, with so many accolades under your belt , shows, releases, your own label, what do you think are the most important lessons you’ve learned? (feel free to share a couple!)
Two big ones. Be patient with the process. Some of my most fulfilling projects have taken years, and rushing has never once improved anything I’ve made. And individuality is the superpower. It’s the only thing that can’t be replicated. Trends are borrowed. Taste is yours.
WWD: You’ll be playing alongside Mark Farina at Mushroom Jazz for Halloween on October 31st. What’s your relationship like with Mushroom Jazz, and what can we expect?
It runs deep. In my early rave days, friends from San Francisco took me to see Mark spin at Soma, a tiny basement club in Boulder. Maybe twenty of us on a floor built for seventy-five, and that was the whole point: the night was about grooving to Mark Farina. The Mushroom Jazz 2 albums had made their way across the Rockies, this sound of the future paying homage to the roots of music, hip-hop, trip-hop, the earth and the stars. That shaped my musicianship for life.
Years later, after a decade of New York residencies and a 100-plus episode radio show out of Brooklyn, my agent called with my first of several opportunities to open Mushroom Jazz for Mark in San Francisco. I hopped a flight to fulfill a dream. One of those nights landed on the exact seven-year anniversary of my brother’s death, and the best things my brother taught me about improvisational music, he learned jamming and partying in Haight-Ashbury, home to the counterculture, acid tests. These types of rooms hold everything for me: alchemizing grief into joy, pouring it into sweat, so even the heavens can dance.
Halloween is the best night of the year for Mushroom Jazz. Everyone arrives already transformed, inhibitions down, free, down for wherever the music goes. Expect it to be waavvy.
WWD: Anything else you’d like to share with us?
Just gratitude, to everyone who danced with us this summer and everyone about to. Find me @djnutritious, djnutritious.com, liquidculturerecords.com, and the We Are Liquid Culture playlist on Spotify. See me on tour. Miami, we’ll see you on Halloween. Come dance. It’s legal!
WWD: We definitely will! Thanks for the chat 🙂
Nutritious six-track mini LP ‘Solarmaxxing’ is available here on Liquid Culture Records.
Key upcoming shows:
Sept 19th – Liquid Culture pres. Solarmaxxing Release Party – Danger Danger Brooklyn
Oct 31st – Mark Farina’s Mushroom Jazz X Halloween – ZeyZey, Miami
Nov 5th – Phoenix Rising, Psychedelic Speakeasy, Analog @ Hutton Hotel, Nashville