Nicholas Olivieri was working construction in Jacksonville, having grown up upstate New York without much interest in electronic music at all, when he quit the job to produce as WonkyWilla full time — every spare hour before and after work, for about a year, before it actually paid off.
"Orgasmic," his 2022 breakout track, is the record that started turning that gamble into a real career, and the ringmaster persona and tall top hat he performs in have become as recognizable as the music — a genre-blurring, dubstep-rooted sound built for exactly that kind of theatrical live show.
He was playing renegade sets hidden in festival campsites as recently as a year ago; the Wonking On Sunshine Tour, spanning more than 30 cities across North America, is the clearest measure of how fast that changed.