Daily Shred Offers A Fan Friendly Winter Music Experience

It’s 22 degrees, and the wind is whipping at the base of Copper Mountain in Colorado, but Denver-based twin duo MZG are setting the crowd aflame during their sunset performance at the inaugural, sold-out Daily Shred winter music experience. Zach and Charles Weinert (MZG is shorthand for “monozygotic,” the scientific term for identical twins) bounce across the decks in voltaic unison and draw hundreds of revelers out of their hangovers with rip-roaring bass and hip-hop selections. The pair fires off original heaters like “Wind It” and “Phase Bound” alongside early 2000s hip-hop samples, sending the swelling, shivering audience into a rap-along frenzy. 

MZG’s boisterous, chameleonic set underscores the vision that electro-soul purveyor Daily Bread conceived for his Daily Shred brainchild - a playful weekend on the mountain soundtracked by free-flowing musical experimentation that circumvents genre categorization. It’s a dream come true for the Atlanta-based artist, who for the last nine years has blended elements of hip-hop, bass, funk, jazz, soul, and electronica into his signature Daily Bread sound.

"I really enjoy editing samples together that normally wouldn’t go well,” Rhett Whatley, aka Daily Bread, explains. “It can be tedious, but it’s fun digging around and drawing from different genres and time periods."

Daily Shred put a music festival spin on the apres ski experience. Attendees spent their days hitting the slopes and grooving to daytime sets in Copper Mountain’s village before hopping over to 10 Mile Music Hall in the neighboring town of Frisco each night for Daily Bread’s headlining shows. 

The concert hall double-header marked the first time Whatley carved out dedicated sonic landscapes for his bass-laden events. Wearing both his DJ and curator hats, Whatley booked a melodic, funk-fueled Friday lineup of support acts like anonymous artist Tripp St. and Michal Menert-collaborator Mux Mool, and a heavy, speaker-rattling roster of openers for Saturday like Bay Area-based dubstep duo Smoakland and Liquid Stranger-championed Redrum. 

Whatley’s dedicated, tight-knit fan community has allowed him this unrestrained creative license to produce, DJ, and curate a wide swath of sounds, as evidenced by the debut edition of Daily Shred selling out in a matter of days. Fans gobbled up tickets to the intimate affair before a lineup had even dropped, putting their full trust in the boundary-breaking experimentalist to produce a marathon weekend of bracingly original beats. 

Daily Bread’s devotees have been likened to Pretty Lights’ cult-like fan following, and for good reason. Attendees came decked out in artist merch, both official and homemade. Unlike other artists who send cease and desists to admirers who print unofficial merch, Whiteley encourages this type of creative fandom. 

Supporters donned the usual DJ-branded garb - hats, pins, jackets - but also turned up with actual baguettes that doubled as cup holders. Saturday night’s set break ignited a friendly food fight between fans on the dance floor and their counterparts on the upper tier balcony, tossing crumbs and smiles in every direction. 

Internet friends from the 6,000-person ‘Daily Bread Family’ private Facebook group celebrated meeting face-to-face. Fans linked during Whatley’s 2021 Hulaween Festival were reunited in warm embrace, and strangers huddled up to identify their favorite unreleased tracks.

Whatley anchored both evenings at 10 Mile Music Hall, the highest year-round music venue in the United States, with left-of-center Daily Bread blowouts that aligned with each night’s aural theme. Friday ushered in a kaleidoscopic, textural mosaic of catalog favorites like “In the Darkest Hour (Trouble On My Mind)” and closed out with Daily Bread dropping his rarely-performed edit of Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams.”

Saturday delivered a Daily Bread bass dissertation brimming with gritty womps and wobbles, including “Moreland Ave Blues,” which weighs in as the artist’s top Spotify song with 6.3 million streams. The set reached a fever pitch when Whatley dropped his unreleased banger “4 am (Waffle House),” a syrupy, low-end anthem about America’s most ubiquitous, 24-hour roadside establishment. In true Daily Bread fashion, the track was inspired by fans who added the artist’s moniker to the restaurant’s logo to make their own merch, which a plethora of attendees sported.

"What made Daily Shred extra special for me was the energy in the room and the fans themselves,” Whatley says. “Bread was flying out in the crowd!”

From his humble beginnings in 2014 as a bedroom producer armed with an MPC, a massive record collection, and a background in jazz guitar to producing, headlining, curating, and selling out his own mini-festival, Daily Bread has charted a course for non-stop growth by going against the grain. It’s no wonder that Daily Bread is the toast of the bass community. But this loaf-ty achievement is only the beginning for Whatley, who feels the propulsive knead to foster more avant-garde musical experiences for his beloved fans as he leaves no scone unturned.  

You can call him the next Pretty Lights, but his authentic verve and exploratory sonic palette put him in a league all his own. We cannot wait to see what he is baking up next.