It’s 4pm in Los Angeles, and Alex Scholler is excitedly waving a box of Vegemite Shapes in front of the camera. “This is one of my cravings,” she explains, plucking a couple out before setting the box to the side. “I had them shipped over from Australia. I’ve been eating these my entire pregnancy.”
It’s been a big couple of months for the producer better known as Alison Wonderland. In mid-March, Scholler announced she was expecting her first child with her partner Ti, and just a few days later, confirmed that she’d be releasing a new album called ‘Genesis’ under the alias Whyte Fang. Alongside all of this, Scholler was frantically working to construct the Whyte Fang live show, which she’ll bring to Coachella this Friday – the same day her album drops.
Whyte Fang will be a new moniker for a lot of her audience, but the project isn’t young by any stretch. In fact, it predates Alison Wonderland. Scholler – a trained cellist who was drawn to dance music by the clanging electro-pop of acts like The Knife – created the alias around 2010, as she was beginning to learn the ropes of production. “Whyte Fang was basically me learning how to produce,” she says. “Even though I didn’t even realise that’s what I was doing at the time.”
She began quietly uploading tracks to SoundCloud, including one called ‘Thy New Sound’, which caught the attention of BBC Radio 1 and Sydney’s FBi. Such was the secrecy around the project that her close friend and manager Garth Crane didn’t even realise Scholler had released anything Whyte Fang-related before he heard it on the radio. “He was like, ‘Oh, this kind of sounds like you’. I said, ‘Surprise, it is’,” Scholler recalls with a smile.
In what seems like a sliding doors moment, Whyte Fang missed out on winning FBi’s Northern Lights competition in 2011 (the station would fly the winners to Iceland’s Airwaves festival to perform), losing to Rainbow Chan and Oliver Tank. Scholler wasn’t the only one to miss out – one of the other runners-up was a little known artist called Flume. The two young producers became friends after the competition, and Scholler laughs as she reveals the two still talk about how much that loss stung.
“It’s a lot to be so personal all the time, and sing and do everything. I just wanted to step back and use a different part of my creative brain”
Whyte Fang continued to purr along in the shadows, but Scholler’s other project, Alison Wonderland, was beginning to take flight. A regular at clubs around Sydney – including the infamous Candy’s Apartment, where she also worked as the doorwoman – Scholler caught the eye of EMI Records, who signed her in 2011. The deal didn’t include Whyte Fang.
“Whyte Fang didn’t have a face,” Scholler says. “With Alison, I was DJing everywhere and playing a lot of festivals so people knew who I was. Obviously, [Alison Wonderland] was more appealing than to sign someone with no face. So I moved my stuff over to EMI and the rest is history.”
As Alison Wonderland, Scholler swiftly rose to become one of Australia’s most successful dance exports, a fixture on the main stages of festivals around the world. The debut Wonderland album ‘Run’ arrived in 2015 off the back of the acclaimed title track and single, and Scholler followed it up with 2018’s exploratory and introspective ‘Awake’, which addressed her battle with low mental health and experience with emotional abuse. The most recent Wonderland album, ‘Loner’, arrived last year.
But Scholler never abandoned Whyte Fang – she always knew the time would be right one day. And after three albums with Alison Wonderland consistently spent mining her most personal and intimate thoughts, Scholler decided it was time. “It’s a lot to be so personal all the time, and sing and do everything,” she reflects. “I just wanted to step back and use a different part of my creative brain, and make tracks that wouldn’t necessarily be highlighted if I had put them out under Alison. I wanted a really strong home for these tracks.
“So I said, ‘Fuck it’, I’m gonna do Whyte Fang. It felt like the right time.”
Where Alison Wonderland is a bright, frenetic clash of future bass and trap, Whyte Fang lives in the darkness. The early touchstones of The Knife and The Bloody Beetroots are still there, but as Whyte Fang Scholler spreads her wings much further into a cavernous expanse of industrial, drum’n’bass, and even techno (see: the middle section of the charged ‘333’ or recent single ‘Genesis’). Scholler didn’t dive back into old Whyte Fang uploads for ‘Genesis’ – nearly every track was crafted in the last year.
Initially, Scholler hadn’t thought of releasing a full album as Whyte Fang, but then Coachella came knocking and offered her a slot. “I thought, ‘OK, if I’m gonna play this show, I’m gonna go hard and use it like every opportunity I’ve ever gotten’. So if I made an album, and then had something to play properly at the Coachella show, it would be a very satisfying moment.”
“Someone in my old crew said to me, ‘I hope you never get pregnant, it’ll ruin your career’. It’s fine – it just made me want to work harder”
It isn’t lost on Scholler that she has been embarking on the journey of ‘Genesis’ during her first pregnancy. “It was so funny because people were telling me, ‘you’re not gonna feel creative’,” she says. “But honestly, there were some tracks that I was like ‘Where the fuck did this come from in my head?’ The baby would be kicking to certain things and that would steer me in certain ways. I felt so creative.”
The dance scene has not historically been welcoming towards mothers, but there has been swift change over the last few years, thanks in great part to the visibility of fellow Australian producers like Anna Lunoe and KLP. “I did speak to Anna,” Scholler says. “She’s been so supportive and really the one person that I feel that gets what’s going on.”
Scholler says she has an incredibly supportive team around her, and she’ll take a break from touring after playing EDC to rest and be with the new baby (who doesn’t have a name yet, she says, sounding slightly panicked). But the road wasn’t completely smooth: Scholler reveals that she fired someone in her team for making an offensive remark about pregnancy. “Someone in my old crew said to me, ‘I hope you never get pregnant, it’ll ruin your career’,” she says after a pause.
Scholler brushes off this interaction now. “It’s fine,” she says. “It just made me want to work harder.”
The producer’s upcoming Coachella set has been meticulously planned – Scholler says she’s been working 12 hours a day alongside her visuals producer to get it right. She won’t be very visible throughout the show, only lit up by blacklight strips on her clothing, as she excitedly demonstrates to NME. “[The performance] isn’t about the artist, if that makes sense,” she says. “It’s about the show… it’s a whole art installation.”
Scholler actually intended to title her new album ‘Whyte Fang’, right up until the very moment she handed in the record. But then “I titled a track ‘Genesis’, and I just thought, ‘That’s it’,” she says. “Because it just sums up everything right now. It’s the beginning of something new.”
Whyte Fang’s debut album ‘Genesis’ is out April 14 via FMU Records. Whyte Fang plays Coachella April 14 and 21