What does a house-music DJ play at the Minnesota Zoo?
This is not a trick question or the start of a riddle. The zoo regularly books bands and DJs. Including Alexis Rose, the 29-year-old house DJ and visual artist who's built up a following at her regular gig at Modist Brewery on Saturday afternoons, as well as assorted warehouse and club-night one-offs.
“I play the same music that I would play,” Rose explains over coffee in Uptown on a mid-July afternoon. She just has to pay attention to volume, like in any other venue. Well, maybe not like any other venue.
“Last year we had a stage at Wild Nights set up too close to the moose enclosure,” she says. “They had to close down that stage when the moose got very anxious. This year, I’m glad it wasn’t me who made them anxious. They had the Gully Boys—I love them, but they were playing, and that’s a lot for a moose to handle.”
Instead of scaring the largest land mammals in the state, Rose played to the birds. “Last year, I was in the atrium by the lakeside,” she says. “They have me out on the treetop trails, which I wasn't expecting at all. But I love it. I was so excited. When I DJ, I honestly prefer to be more secluded from being visible from everyone. So, it was nice to be off the ground. I prefer that intimate, tucked-away environment. I don't want people looking at me—I just want you to listen to the music.”
What you’re listening to, whether Alexis Rose (or Astrolex, her longtime previous DJ alias) plays a club or the zoo, is soulful house music, classicist in approach and rooted in R&B and disco, shot through with a distinctly post-social media sense of twee. Rose plays it so smoothly I took her to be a lifelong adept. Not quite—she’s only been a house-head a few years now. She is, she notes, a quick adaptor.
Her bright sensibility is also evident in her work as a graphic designer. This summer, she designed the flyers for Communion, the Sunday-evening outdoor party that began the season in the alley of the Pourhouse in downtown Minneapolis and finished on the patio of the newly refurbished Cabooze, twice with Rose on the decks. She also made the cover art for Popsikal Vol. 1, a recently issued compilation of heavily electronic Twin Cities pop spearheaded by the dynamic local singer-producer SYM1.
And oh yeah—Rose also won a local game jam, for interactive VR games (not the tabletop type Racket recently profiled). Back in February, she was part of the winning team for Scream TV, the 15th iteration of Scream Zone, a regularly scheduled horror-game contest that began in 2018.
But Rose’s increased visibility has been accompanied by an ongoing period of relative seclusion. Rose, who lives downtown with her longtime partner Dom, also an artist, used to be out constantly. These days she calls herself a “homebody,” staying in more frequently—partly to work on her many projects, partly because the enforcements of lockdown grew more habitual, and partly to resist temptation following a long partying phase.
Some of this sounds rather familiar, and apologetically, I ask Rose if she has social anxiety. “Yes, very much,” she says. COVID helped exacerbate it. “I spend a lot of time in my head,” she adds. “It’s very hard to escape that. Just getting myself to have courage to go out is the hard part. Especially since I stopped drinking last year—that’s been really helpful, but also a double-edged sword. Being, I think, fully aware and sober when I’m out, socializing, especially in nightlife, has made it more intimidating than it has been in the past.”
That nagging self-criticism also drives the many creative projects she takes on. “I like to start one new concept or new project every week,” she says. “I try to create a new conceptual poster every week. I have pretty frequent commissions, like graphic design. And that’s fine. I don’t typically struggle with those too much. But sometimes I run out of juice, and I need to go do something else to rejuvenate. I’ve been a lot harder on myself in what I’m producing. I’m hypercritical of myself now.”
You wouldn’t necessarily guess it from the self-possessed figure sitting at Spyhouse. Rose laughs easily while mixing in an occasional acidic aside. It’s easy to see her as a team player. Take the Scream TV contest, which came as a last-minute surprise.
It began last winter when Rose ran into her friend and local programmer Solomon Lambert at Beast Barbecue during its Friday-night party, House Proud. Lambert was assembling a team for the game jam, and Rose joined with only two weeks before showtime.
“We needed art assets,” Lambert says. “She mentioned she had been working with Blender a lot recently and wanted to get her skills up. I replied jokingly, ‘Wanna work every day for an entire week with no pay and no reward other than making something cool?’ And then a few days later I was over at her place teaching her Version Control.”
“It’s a psychological horror game,” Rose explains. “You are working for the agency, and you have to interview all these different entities. In a way, it was unnatural, because I’ve never done it, but the creative process felt natural.”
Competing against 60 other teams, Lambert and Rose’s team sailed to an easy win.
“She's an amazing artist in all aspects,” Lambert says. “Not just with her skillset, but also the drive and passion that allows her to take on these new challenges. I had an absolute blast working with her and I'm hoping we can get a crew together for the next one this fall.”
That adaptability came early. Rose moved a lot while growing up in smaller Minnesota towns—Rochester, Stewartville, Plymouth—before her mother, a nurse, came to Minneapolis for a job at Mayo. Aside from a year of school in Winona, Rose has been in Minneapolis since. “I was a good kid, goody two-shoes, until I turned 18 and went to college,” Rose says. “I went nuts.”
Her friends began taking her to parties, beginning with the Floozies at First Avenue. “Then, I went to my first dubstep show at the Loft at Skyway, which might be everybody’s first dubstep show,” Rose says with a laugh. “I was hanging out with people, being a rave brat in the afterhours, and watching the DJs, like: ‘This is so cool. How do you guys do this?’ I was so fascinated. Eventually, someone let me push buttons. And then I totally became addicted to it.”
At one afterparty, Rose first heard what she calls “bass house”—low-end heavy and tweaky like dubstep, but tied to the beats and tempos of house. She responded to the way this music was “way more fun and positive, but still kind of a grimy feeling. I just kept following that feeling, and I eventually ended up playing only house and really only wanting to listen to house.”
By 2017, Rose was playing gigs at the Skyway and Loft, before joining forces with Babyghost and Patrish as a trio called Techno Girls. Soon they had a residency together at Icehouse, where they’d oversee a teeming, rambunctious floor for a year before COVID kicked everyone out.
Techno Girls, Rose says, didn’t discuss their playlists ahead of time. “[I’d play] a lot of bass-heavy tech house,” she says. “Patrish would play a lot more up, almost like electro-sounding. We each had our own lane of sound. I’ve always been attracted to a deep feeling when I listen to music. Earlier on, it was more like party-esque deep feelings. Whereas now, I like flowy deep feelings, but still energetic at the same time.”
Back then, Rose was DJing under the moniker Astrolex. Then, in 2022, she switched to her birth name. “Once I stopped going out and partying and doing drugs, I was like, ‘Astrolex does not feel aligned to me anymore,’” she says. Deciding to do so took a “very long time—probably the last two, three years,” she says.
But Rose is learning to be a little easier on herself, she says. She’s beginning to release music—her first official remix, an icy, techno-flecked version of the local live techno duo Mutual Identities’ track “The Hand You Were Dealt,” came out in late summer.
“We've been pretty close with her since the start of her production career,” Mutual Identities members Ethan Sanders and Nathan Graff DM’ed Racket. “When we handed the stems to Alexis, we gave her very little direction. If we had to pick out one element of the track that surprised us, it would probably be her brilliant rework of our break loops. She gave the whole track a super funky vibe.”
By contrast, Rose’s work on the Popsikal Vol. 1 compilation was entirely internet-based. SYM1, a.k.a. Symone Wilson, the point person behind the eleven-artist collaboration, had discovered Rose’s work on Instagram and knew of her through numerous mutuals, but it wasn’t until after the Popsikal cover was turned in that they had their first in-person encounter.
“We met by accident,” Wilson says. “I didn’t even know she was going to go to Communion that day. We both totally have a respect and admiration for each other—it’s funny that it’s taken us this long.”
Rose has already been floating new tracks on her SoundCloud account—three so far this year. “I really wanted to work the muscles just when it feels good to share it and stop being a perfectionist about it,” she says.
“Dom has been making music for over ten years with Ableton, so he helped me transition over [to producing],” she notes. “But for the most part, I love just trying stuff out and not knowing how to do anything. If I really couldn’t figure it out, I’d ask. But I like not understanding how to do stuff. It’s more rewarding when I do figure out how to do it.”
Unbothered Halloween
With: AYEEYO, Alexis Rose, Tekk Nikk, and Yasmeenah
Where: The Artery, 2718 E. 27th St., Minneapolis
When: 11 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 26
Tickets: $15-$20; more info here
