Then-nascent festivals like EDC Las Vegas and Ultra Music Festival in Miami were booking the genres, but Kelsey says most festival stages for this music were “1,000-capacity with no production, in the mud, on the side, just a complete afterthought.

“It was another epiphany of wanting to bring that music to the U.S.”Īt that time in the United States, the house and techno scene mainly existed at warehouse parties and smaller clubs in cities like New York and Los Angeles. (He also opened a Liaison office in Berlin from 2007-2009.) The experience in Europe “just changed my life,” he says. It Won’t Be EasyĪround that time, Kelsey spent a summer traveling to festivals throughout Europe, then did a five-month stint in Berlin, where he was converted to the religion of techno. Liaison officially launched in 2004, with Kelsey signing his first big artist, Claude VonStroke, in 2006.Įveryone Wants to Reach Superfans. He made inroads by seeking out the music he liked and persuading a few artists that, with his “absolute dedication to working hard and just making it succeed,” he could represent them. When his boss at Om told him no, Kelsey “quit on the spot and started an agency with no experience,” he says. This led to a four-year run doing distribution at Om Records, where - after observing the label’s in-house booking agent - he decided he wanted to be one, too. (“I just had a moment of like, ‘This is miserable,’” he now says of the experience.”) In San Francisco, he found a thriving electronic music culture and knew he had to be a part of it.īut with minimal experience, there was no clear “in.” Eventually, Kelsey hustled his way into an internship at URB magazine, a job for which he would “bomb the city with materials” like CDs, posters and show flyers. He arrived with one bag from his native Buffalo, N.Y., where he had booked clubs while earning a criminal justice degree and interning at the courthouse. There was no machine to speak of when Kelsey moved to San Francisco in 1998. Beyond the agents, Liaison employes four accountants and several coordinators who, Kelsey says, “make the machine run.”

The staff now includes eight agents, including Kelsey and his partner, Mariesa Stevens, who joined the agency in 2008 after meeting Kelsey through the Bay Area nightlife world.įollowing the pandemic, veteran agents Emma Hoser and Meryl Luzzi joined the team, bringing in clients including house titan Jamie Jones, techno pioneers Adam Beyer and Nicole Moudaber, and artists from the revered Anjunabeats and Anjunadeep labels. The company doubled in size just before the pandemic, then doubled again when live shows returned. A Complete Guide to Every 2024 Coachella Party & Event (Updating)Īs tastes have shifted toward the style of music Liaison has always championed, the agency has grown in tandem.

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