When he first started his own agency, Andrew Kelsey he worked in a tiny, windowless office in the mission district of San Francisco. He had no experience as an agent, but he had a passion for underground electronic music and an ambition to book artists who made it.
Twenty years later, Kelsey has a staff of 18, offices in San Francisco and Brooklyn—both with natural lighting—and a roster of more than 140 house, techno, and indie electronic artists whose underground sound has, over the past two decades, it has become the dominant style of commercial electronic music in the United States.
Kelsey's agency, the independent and operating Liaison Artists, now books 5,000 shows a year, including major festivals like EDC Las Vegas, Ultra Music Festival and Coachella, where this weekend, Liaison artists Carlita, Folamour, Honey Dijon , Bicep, ANOTR, Eli & Fur, Âme and Innellea are all scheduled to perform.
“I thought it was going to be big,” Kelsey says Advertising sign over Zoom, “but not as big.”
As tastes have shifted towards the style of music Liaison has always championed, the agency has grown alongside. The company doubled in size just before the pandemic and then doubled again when live broadcasts returned. The staff now includes eight agents, including Kelsey and his partner, Marisa Stevenswho joined the agency in 2008 after meeting Kelsey through the Bay Area nightlife scene.
After the pandemic, veteran agents Emma Hoser and Meryl Lucci joined the team, bringing in clients including house titan Jamie Jones, techno pioneers Adam Beyer and Nicole Moudaber, and artists from respected labels Anjunabeats and Anjunadeep. In addition to agents, Liaison employs four accountants and several coordinators who, Kelsey says, “make the machine run.”
There was no machine to speak of when Kelsey moved to San Francisco in 1998. He arrived with a bag from his hometown of Buffalo, New York, where he'd booked clubs while earning a criminal justice degree and interning at the courthouse. (“I just had a moment where I was like, 'This sucks,'” he says now of the experience.”) In San Francisco, he found a thriving electronic music culture and knew he had to be a part of it.
But with little experience, there was no clear “in”. Eventually, Kelsey quickly moved on to an internship at URB magazine, a job for which he “bombarded the city with materials” such as CDs, posters and exhibition brochures. This led to a four-year distribution stint at Om Records, where – after noticing the label's in-house booking agent – he decided he wanted to be one too.
When his boss at Om said no, Kelsey “quit on the spot and started an agency with no experience,” he says. He made inroads in search of the music he liked and convinced a few artists that, with his “absolute dedication to working hard and making it work”, he could represent them. Liaison officially began in 2004, with Kelsey signing his first major artist, Claude VonStroke, in 2006.
At the time, Kelsey spent a summer traveling to festivals across Europe and then did a five-month stint in Berlin, where he converted to the religion of techno. (He also opened a liaison office in Berlin from 2007-2009.) The experience in Europe “just changed my life,” he says. “It was another surface of wanting to bring this music to the U.S.”
At that time in the United States, the house and techno scene mainly existed in warehouse parties and smaller clubs in cities such as New York and Los Angeles. Back then festivals like EDC Las Vegas and the 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 full thought. There wasn't even any hospitality on the stage, just some warm beers in a dirty fridge.”
Then everything changed. The EDM boom in the early to mid-2010s brought electronic music into the mainstream consciousness in the United States, where it became a major economic force. When boom's bombastic mainstage sound cooled off, it was replaced in popularity by house, techno, and the many subgenres that exist within these two styles. That's when things changed for Liaison.
“I would say in 2015, it really started to move,” says Kelsey. Suddenly, artists who previously played 500-capacity clubs were being booked on much larger stages. San Diego's CRSSD Festival started in 2014 to cater to sound, and Coachella launched the club-style Yuma Stage in 2013, with that venue growing from 1,500 to 7,000 people over the past 11 years. Anjunadeep showcases a maximum of 500 people. now they're happening at Colorado's 10,000-capacity Red Rocks Amphitheater.
Andrew Kelsey and Mariesa Stevens
Crescent Carasso
Chicago's ARC Music Festival, which exclusively features house and techno, kicked off in 2021, with longtime client Liaison Honey Dijon headlining in 2022. This weekend, the artist (who won a 2023 Grammy for her work in the dance by Beyoncé Renaissance) will also play Coachella's new Quasar Stage, which will host three to four extended dance sets.
“I remember watching the festival change, with [Coachella co-founder] Paul [Tollett] and company that puts on underground dance music artists [the festival’s massive] Sahara stage, which was the next organic step for this music,” says Kelsey. “I feel like all the big promoters were at a loss… We did 200 capacity shows together and we all grew up with this music.”
With that growth came revenue — and competition. In days past, Stevens said a $40,000 fee for a bigger-name underground artist “was often the ceiling.” These artists were usually relegated to 2,000 capacity halls and smaller side stages at major festivals.
Now “the whole game has changed,” Stevens continues. “Underground artists sell out Madison Square Garden and 25,000-capacity stadiums” and headline festivals to tens of thousands of people. He says, “Artist fees have certainly followed suit.”
Of course, major agencies have expanded their catalogs to include these formerly niche sounds.
“I'd be lying if I said it wasn't very competitive,” says Stevens. “For many years, the majors were less of a concern for us, but there has been a major shift recently where the music association has grown from our foundation and become extremely popular and things have changed.”
While some of Liaison's artists “left for greener pastures,” he continues, “they were few and far between and most of our core artists were very loyal to us.” (With Liaison specializing in North and South America, all of its artists have different agencies in Europe and the rest of the world that Liaison works with.)
Kelsey says it's Liaison's authenticity and passion, commitment and knowledge of this kind of music that inspires artists to stay.
“Liaison embodies the perfect combination of underground authenticity and mainstream appeal,” he says Dominic Ceylon, managing partner of Temporary Secretary, a German artist management group with clients including Dixon and Âme, who are represented by Liaison in North America. “If you're passionate about music and see your booking agency as an integral part of an ecosystem dedicated to nurturing artists and helping them thrive, Liaison is your best partner.”
Currently, the agency is particularly focused on developing artist brands, with Dixon's Transmoderna and Bicep's Chroma – both featuring custom media experiences – giving Liaison the opportunity to “bring an artist's vision to life in a very 360-degree way,” he says . Stevens. As one of the few black agents in electronic music, she is also particularly excited about the growth of Francis Mercier's Deep Root Records family of artists. “Going to parties full of black and brown faces [is] deeply inspiring to me,” he says.
Both Stevens and Kelsey agree that the market for the music they specialize in seems to be growing, with her name at this point only being used for lack of a better word.
“Really,” says Kelsey, “there's not a lot of underground for it.”
