How Alison Wonderland & Kaskade Teamed Up For A Surprise B2B Set At Miami Music Week

Alison Wonderland comments in awe of Kaskade’s music studio. “Look at all his records!” the Australian-born artist (real name Alex Sholler) recently told Pollstar, pointing to his massive wall that stretches larger than a decently sized Brooklyn apartment and is filled to the brim with thousands of vinyls. “Look at his whiteboards!” she says as Kaskade, real name Ryan Raddon, flips a door to show the tracklist and his progress for each track on his latest Christmas and Redux EPs.

The two DJ/producers are, secretly, hard at work. Their surprise joint set at Brownies & Lemonade’s Miami Music Week showcase at Mana Wynwood is a little over a week away, and they’re in the studio creating a new song to premiere at the event. 

Initially, neither one of them planned on going back-to-back together. Both were presented the opportunity to do so by their agents, with Sholler’s team telling Brownies & Lemonade they would be interested in playing, but they wanted to do something to shake things up. Neither of Sholler’s projects, Alison Wonderland or Whyte Fang, were going to play at Ultra, so they wanted to make her set special. 

“I had told [Kushan Fernando, who runs Brownies & Lemonade], ‘I don’t think it’s worth going out and doing just an afterparty by herself. But, we’d be down to head over there if we could do something different,’” Sholler’s manager, Garth Crane of FRNDS MGMT, says. 

Fernando sent along a list of artists he was talking with for the show, asking Sholler and her team if there were any names of interest. Her agent, Steve Goodgold at Wasserman Music, collected some other names and sent them back. Brownies & Lemonade then passed the list along to BLNK CNVS, who were also promoting the event, in order to figure out who might be interested in playing with her.

“Kaskade actually wasn’t on the list,” BLNK CNVS’ Paul Reed says. “And we reached out anyway thinking ‘Oh, is Kaskade an option?’ And then we went back to the agent and I said ‘Hey, Kaskade wants to play back-to-back with Alison.’ And the agent was like, ‘Well, that wasn’t on the list but let me run it by.’ And it turned out they were both into it.” 

At the event on Friday, March 22, fans came in from Ultra soaking wet. Festival organizers had to abruptly cancel the first day due to severe weather. Despite the flooding, tornado warning and thunder, the show at Mana still went on. The floor was soaking wet from all the dripping fans coming inside; the air hot and humid. Alison Wonderland and Kaskade made it on stage for the 2 a.m. set, ready to give fans something unique.

In the week leading up to the show, Sholler started teasing on her socials that she was in the studio with Kaskade. She wouldn’t confirm whether or not he was who she was going back-to-back with, but she did hint that the two of them were working on techno. While planning their set, they both felt they needed to step out of their usual zones, as they couldn’t figure out how to make Alison Wonderland and Kaskade work together if they played their usual stuff. Both were gravitating towards techno, a genre they felt would be too different to play as their usual aliases.

“It’s hard to do it in our own projects. So, he mentioned it on the phone to me and I went, ‘Oh my god, this is all I want to play. But, it doesn’t really make sense in my sets. Why don’t we just do a whole different thing?” 

Raddon adds how freaky it was they were both so aligned. He had been making techno on the side, but knew it wouldn’t fit into his current projects. Both of them returned from their first meeting describing the experience like they had gone on a musical blind date. 

“It’s easy,” Raddon says. “We’re on the same page musically right now. This is a very natural, easy process. And that makes it a lot of fun. We’re having a lot of fun.” 

Raddon says he’s not usually one to sign on to go back-to-back, noting that it’s only been a trend in more recent years (most notably with his Kx5 project alongside deadmau5). He admits he likely wouldn’t have considered something like this even just a few years ago.

“I was so focused on Kaskade and writing my next album and what the next show is going to look like,” Raddon says. “Now I want to do different stuff.” 

They haven’t yet determined whether or not they’ll do this again. Goodgold remains elusive, simply saying, “There may or may not be other back-to-back scenarios. But this is a fun one. Kaskade’s a great artist. In terms of some master plan, there really isn’t one at the moment. Maybe there’s one after Miami, I don’t know. There’s a few little things being discussed, but nothing too wild.” 

Sholler, on the other hand, says she intends to try and make it work. While she hadn’t initially listed Kaskade as an option for the back-to-back, it was only because she felt he was untouchable. 

“He’s someone I really admire,” Sholler says. “So, yes, Kaskade and I are doing some stuff and maybe some other stuff in other places. Who knows?”

For a full hour at the Miami Music Week showcase, the two artists went through vibrating techno tracks, mixing in elements of house but largely sticking to what they had promised. Neither one of them spoke during the performance, save for Sholler grabbing the mic at the end to say, “The fact I get to make music with you and play techno with you is the craziest dream of my life.”