Interview DJDS
The LA-based production duo talk tech and A-list collaborations
Picture the scene. You’ve spent three or four long years working on your music. You’re based in LA, but you’ve eschewed the city’s glamour and glitz in favour of warehouse raves and cheap beer from Costco. Your debut album has had great reviews, but it’s a million miles away from the musical mainstream. In fact, some might argue that the sound was defiantly underground… full of kinked, quirky songs that draw on the sample-heavy legacy of oldschool house and techno.
Out of the blue, you receive an email. It’s from rap royalty. A man whose last six albums topped worldwide charts and boasted sales of almost 20 million. Oh, and he’s married to one of the most photographed women on the planet. Together, they’re so famous that even their choice of footwear makes headlines. The email says, “Would you like to come and work on my new album?”
“It really did happen like that,” laughs Jerome Potter, one half of the LA-based duo DJDS, aka DJ Dodger Stadium. “We got an email from Kanye West [the aforementioned rap superstar] saying that he’d been listening to some of our stuff. He wanted to know if we’d like to come over to the studio. We stopped to think about that for, like, a microsecond… and then we said, ‘Yeah!’”
The album that West was working on at the time was TheLifeofPablo. Potter and his partner, Sam Griesemer, came away with several writing and production credits, not to mention a
Grammy nomination for the album’s opener, UltralightBeam.
“We also came away with a whole load of studio experience and a hunger for experimentation. Working with Kanye, you soon learn that breaking the rules is OK.”
That’s certainly what Potter and Griesemer have tried to do with their new album, BigWave
MoreFire. Brazen, inventive, addictively hypnotic and endlessly shifting, it feels like – and this may sound weird – a poppy, American version of Underworld. While Karl Hyde and Rick Smith find inspiration in the grit, grime and faded glories of Essex and London’s East End, DJDS take the twinkling lights of an LA sunset and turn them upside down, revealing all the sadness and heartache that hides underneath the American Dream.
Potter and Griesemer were over in the UK during the summer, which gave us the perfect opportunity to grill them about Los Angeles, the album and, of course, their Grammy-nominated production adventures with Kim Kardashian’s husband himself!
Computer Music: Sam, you’re originally from New York, several thousand miles from LA. How did you two end up meeting? Sam Griesemer:
“Yeah, I was born in New York, but my family moved to New Hampshire. I guess I moved over to the West Coast for the music. To start with, I had a year in Seattle, and that’s where I got my first DJ gig: a Monday night residency at this small, out-of-the-way club.
It held about 50 people, but there were usually a lot less than that! The great thing was that it allowed me to work on my chops… to learn how to be a DJ.
“Me and Jerome got together after I moved down to LA. I’d been posting a few tracks online and, somehow, he’d come across my stuff and liked what he heard. Musically, I guess LA has got a reputation for mainstream dance music… y’know, celebrity and Hollywood. But LA is a big city; so big that you can move around and find a lot of different music. A lot of underground music. Just a few people doing their own thing.
“Jerome actually came down to see me DJ and it was a really quiet night. There were only a handful of people there, but Jerome hung around after the show and we just started talking about music. We weren’t talking about production or making music, we were just shouting out bands that we’d listened to when we were growing up.
“I spent my teenage years in a small town in New Hampshire, and that’s about as far as you can get from any kind of ‘cool scene’. I didn’t care if it was indie or rap or metal. I was just playing music because I liked it. I would get really obsessed with albums… buying multiple copies and then playing them until they would start skipping.”
Jerome Potter: “I totally identified with that. My parents had the craziest taste in music. I was hearing stuff like [jazz fusion guitarist] Al Di Meola and Oingo Boingo [80s new wave funksters, led by soundtrack A-lister Danny Elfman], alongside Dr Dre. Thinking back on it, I was probably way too young to be listening to Dr Dre.”
: You were the only seven-year-old who was complaining about the muthaf***in’ school dinners?
JP: “Yeah, my teachers were not happy about that! Ha ha! When you’re a kid, you soak up music subconsciously, and you soak it up without prejudice. If you like something, you like it… doesn’t matter what genre it is. And, initially, that was the meeting point for Jerome and me.
“It was only after we got all that stuff out of the way that we started talking about making music. Sam was working with Logic at the time, but I’d grown up with FruityLoops and Cool Edit. As a kid, I played in various local indie bands, but for me, the computer had always been as much of an instrument as the guitar or the drums. In fact, I soon worked out it could be better than a real drummer. With a computer, I could play far more interesting drum parts.
“Slowly, I began to realise that I didn’t really need a band at all. I could do everything in my room with the computer. That was the start for me… the realisation that the computer gave me complete freedom with my music.
“I had no idea how to write a song or produce it, but that lack of ‘expertise’ became something of an advantage. I’d just click around in FruityLoops and see what happened. Put an effect on here. ‘Wow, that sounds very strange. Yeah, but it sounds kinda cool.’ I was just following what my ears told me.
“And, to a certain extent, that’s still the same way I produce now. There are rules and there is a science to music production, but don’t be afraid to fiddle with the rules and mess with the science. If art only ever followed the rules, it would get pretty boring. History is made by the people who are brave enough to try something slightly different.”
SG: “Take a band like Outkast. I went through a period of listening to lot of East Coast rap – Wu-Tang, Notorious BIG, Mobb Deep. Then, one day, I heard Outkast. It was rap, but it was also a very definite turning point. They were taking all the same ingredients and pointing them in a completely different direction. It opened up a whole new world of sound… and songwriting. Things didn’t have to fit into this neat little box. They could be messy and bent out of shape, but still be beautiful and powerful.”
: Without Outkast, 2018’s charts would probably sound quite different.
SG: “I think you’re right. And the funny thing is that they made music simpler. In the studio, they stripped it right down. Here we are, 20 years later, and you can still hear the effect they had. From Outkast, you get Justin Vernon, Frank Ocean and, yeah, Kanye West.”
: What was it like… that first day, sitting in the control room with a man who’s sold nearly 20 million albums and he wants you to help him sell some more!
JP: “Daunting, of course. But, right from the off, he told us that he’d been listening to our stuff and liked what he’d heard. When he’s working on an album, he looks around for people who will help him actualise his vision. We were lucky enough to be on the list.
“Being asked to come up with the goods by Kanye West is gonna make anyone nervous, but we were in the studio with him for five or six days every week and, after a while, things settle down. Our job was to help finish projects, so there was a lot of listening. Swapping ideas… things flowing this way and that.
“Probably the biggest challenge for us was that, up until that point, we had mostly worked in the box. Suddenly, we’re sitting in a room with every bit of equipment that you could dream of. Luckily, just before we started working with Kanye, we had spent time in a few different studios and we were starting to become familiar with the hardware way of working.”
“Up till then, we had mostly worked in the box. Suddenly, we’re sitting in a room with every bit of equipment that you could dream of”
SG: “What really helped was that, when we first got in the studio, we spent a long time just chatting about music. What we’d both been listening to… swapping ideas. Listening to the tracks he’d been working on and gently feeling our way forward.
“Eventually, we kinda worked out that he knew why we were in the studio with him way before we had any idea. He liked how we used samples. Coming from one of the most innovative users of samples in contemporary music, that felt pretty good. He was also interested in the sound we got in the studio… raw and almost unfinished. He didn’t want everything all shiny and polished.
“So much of what he does in the studio is about reduction… stripping back until you’re only left with the elements that really, really matter. Do we need it? Does the song need it? He was asking that question all the time.
“We even had situations where there was an element of the song that seemed absolutely central at the start of the session and by the time we’d finished, it was gone. All that you’re left with are the most vital elements. If you’ve got one instrument doing this, why do you need anything else. His whole philosophy in the studio is ‘one sound at a time’. Pull the song apart and look at each sound individually. What does it actually add to the song? It’s a harsh way of working, but you end up with a song that is made of the strongest elements. And that makes a stronger song.”
: Is it a philosophy that you used while you were working on your own album?
SG: “I guess we used it in a different way, but, yes, we were always aware of the need to keep things basic. Working in the box gives every producer the opportunity to add and add… to mix and remix an infinite number of times. But the more you add to a song, the harder it is to ‘move’ that song. It gets so dense with sound that you have no chance to shape it or nudge it in a different direction. You’re narrowing down your options.
“Lose the bits that don’t matter and you’ll give yourself a whole lot more freedom.”
JP: “And we also learned to slow down in the studio. You don’t have to do everything at a million miles an hour. Give the song time to present itself. The bits that matter will make themselves known.”
“Kanye’s whole philosophy in the studio is ‘one sound at a time’. Pull the song apart”
: You mentioned FruityLoops and Logic earlier on. What are your main studio tools these days?
JP: “The main DAW is probably Ableton Live. Maybe Ableton and Logic. But we also use Pro Tools and FL Studio, too. We like to take the best bits from each one.”
SG: “It’s amazing just how much of the world’s best music is being made with FL Studio at the moment. I have to admit that I had been with Logic for many years. Like everybody else, I felt most comfortable with something that I knew inside out.
“But we started experimenting with the FL Studio Beta version for Mac and it immediately made a real difference. Now it’s actually legit, it’s even better!
“I’d heard people talk about the ‘bottom end’ of FL Studio. Saying that, it does its own special sort of compression with the subs. It can make an 808 sound incredible. It’s a sound that you can’t get anywhere else. I never really believed it until I heard it. It gives the bottom end a very specific, modern quality. There’s so much feeling to it!”
: Producers are often worried about changing platforms. Weeks of re-learning stuff that’s been second nature for years… potential glitches and hiccups. The ancient, discontinued plugin that you use on every track no longer works with your swanky new DAW…
JP: “Is it really that difficult? All you have to do is learn some different shortcuts. I guess I’m lucky enough to have been around computers for most of my life. They don’t worry me. I’m not scared of throwing a curveball every once in a while. What’s the worst that can happen? You waste a couple of weeks trying to get something to work. Let’s turn the question around. What could you gain by switching platforms? You get pulled out of your old habits… you learn new ways of working. You try different effects. Isn’t it worth the risk? Art and music mean different things to different people. But, personally, I think that the most exciting aspect of being an artist or a musician is getting the chance to try something different.
“If you carry on working in the same way, year after year, you could be missing out on a whole load of really interesting stuff. Why not give yourself the chance to explore different ways of being a producer? Who knows where you’ll end up!” The album Big Wave More Fire is out now on Loma Vista Recordings