It was a long road to stardom for DJ duo Anden. Then Diplo called.
When Sen. Robert F. Kennedy spoke the following words in response to the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., he expected them to be heard around the world: “In this difficult day, in this difficult time … it is perhaps well to ask … what direction we want to move in.”
What Kennedy perhaps did not expect was for those words to also be heard through a pair of headphones, in the year 2022, sampled in a song by the DJ duo Anden. They’re woven throughout “Escalus,” the second track on the EP Flicker/Escalus. “We feel that Robert F. Kennedy’s words are especially relevant to many of the challenges people face today,” the pair told Electronic Groove following its release. “We actually wrote the instrumental for that track last year, but it wasn’t until we came across the audio recording of RFK’s speech and pieced it into the track that we felt it fully came together.”
Anden, formed nearly a decade ago by Tom Cuppernull ’11 and his brother, Pete, was a labor of love until it was noticed by one of the top artists/producers in the music industry.
Enter Diplo. The Grammy Award–winning DJ played Anden’s songs during sets and radio shows, launching the project into the spotlight. “Whenever you have these large A-list DJs playing your music, that’s usually a good springboard to helping elevate your act,” Cuppernull says. Larger acts began enlisting Anden as the support act for worldwide tours, which grew their fan base. The duo worked with Diplo’s label, Higher Ground, and remixed his song “Hold You Tight.” And finally, Anden recorded their first full-length album, Youth Is Wasted on the Young (2021), complete with a North American headline tour. “If I had told my Colgate self that, 11 years from now, you’re not only still going to be doing it, but you’ll be touring with the artists you’re fans of, or that you’re going to have millions of streams, it would’ve definitely been a ‘pinch me’ moment.”
Cuppernull got a crash course in the genre of music that would become a large part of his life during the 2009 Australia Study Group. One of the guys living on his dorm floor at the University of Wollongong moonlighted as a DJ in the city: “He started bringing me out to his shows and would have me DJ with him, and because the parties he was playing were mostly people interested in dance music, I started playing it and I just fell in love with it,” he says. He brought the genre back to campus, introducing it to his friends before it became big in the United States. “It was me definitely forcing it on people a little bit … these iconic, almost top-40, radio-friendly dance records that started coming out a couple years after I got back from Australia.”
Now, Cuppernull works 100-plus hours a week. But not all of that time is spent on the tour bus.
Having been a biology and environmental science major at Colgate, he’s now head of product for the climate technology start-up Benchmark Labs. There, he uses machine learning to create microclimate forecasts for his clients, such as the Nature Conservancy. Those forecasts allow landowners to make informed decisions about the variable parts of their work, like water usage and labor scheduling. “That has become more and more important over the years as wildfires have been raging, as weather has become more and more unpredictable,” Cuppernull, who’s based in Portland, Ore., says.
How does he do it all? Thankfully, Wi-Fi is available on most flights, so even when he’s touring with Anden, Cuppernull can still plug into his work with Benchmark. “Balance is something that I’m still working on,” he acknowledges.
Cuppernull stays connected with Professor Frank Frey, who led the study group in Australia, where Cuppernull became interested in dance music. “Frank was a mentor to me, both on the science side of things, but also on music,” Cuppernull says. He and Frey even performed on stage together — Frey’s band, Danger Boy, would play Colgate parties, and Cuppernull would DJ.