Smalltown DJS back where they belong
Back in their natural habitat.
That’s how Pete Emes is looking at the current crossCanada tour that he and his partner in beats Mike Grimes have embarked upon.
Following a season of spinning and mixing in the sun, the Smalltown DJs are inside and in the dark, and that’s where they belong.
“After the summer where we were playing bigger shows and outdoor shows it’s fun to get back in the clubs. It’s a different type of show and it can be a bit grimier and the subtleties of the music can come through,” says the veteran Calgary DJ and producer. “At some of the big outdoor shows you kind of bash them over the head a bit, which is fun, just different.”
It says a great deal that Smalltown DJs are able to headline their own national tour, which brings them to Mount Royal University tonight for a hometown Halloween gig.
So, too, does it show the heights the pair have managed to climb in the world of electronic music, that much of their summer was spent hopping between their local, weekly, Thursday night Hai Karate gigs — a staple on the city’s ever-changing dance scene for a dozen years — and larger festivals and shows all over the world. This year, that included SXSW in Austin and big-time national events such as the Shambhala Music Festival in B.C. and, a highlight Emes says, the Mad Decent Block Party, which shuts down “the Times Square of Toronto” of Yonge and Dundas with dozens of DJs and tens of thousands of revellers.
But the live element to Emes’ and Grimes’ busy 2012 is only part of the story of how far the duo have climbed since they hooked up a decade and a half ago, and now sees them overseeing an electronic kingdom that includes co-ownership in venues the HiFi Club — Hai Karate’s current home — and Commonwealth Bar & Stage, which celebrates its oneyear anniversary in two weeks.
The rest can be told in the handful of original singles they’ve released over the course of the year, including the appropriately titled Wicked, which came out earlier this month on Germany’s No Brainer Records and the forthcoming Good People, which drops on New York’s T&A Records at the end of November.
“We blocked off a few weeks earlier in the year for studio time to make some tunes and now a lot of those are starting to come out. That’s always the best for me is when we have music coming out,” says Emes.
It all helps, he says, further establish Smalltown in the producer realm, which is something that he finds gratifying, knowing not only that you’re making the dance floor move but you’re doing it with your own tunes — those that they not only recognize as yours but are coming to hear.
They made great headway with the success they had with their collaboration Smalltown Romeo with fellow Calgary producer Wax Romeo (Mandeep Ubhi) on a song called Boom Ha, which was featured in the Jonah Hill film The Sitter and the HBO series Girls, and they are hoping to keep the momentum going.
“It what we’ve always wanted to do — all of our favourite acts that are DJs but have parlayed it into production careers is the template for what we’re doing,” he says, pointing to artists such as the Chemical Brothers.
“You get shows where people want to hear your originals. A lot of the time in the DJ world, that line can get blurred and people want to hear the latest tunes. But it’s great when you can play shows that are more artist shows — they want to hear the music that you’re putting out. … That part of it is the best: when you sit down and write music and people know it and want to hear it at your shows. Somebody in a band would take that for granted; for me it’s pretty amazing.”
It is, Emes says, also part of the evolution of the DJ role over the course of the past 20 years and led to the current, welcoming climate for electronic music, which has gone further into the mainstream thanks to the music’s popularity and the appearance of more and more DJ/producer pop stars, such as Skrillex and Deadmau5.
While those acts are few and far between, Emes feels what they accomplish can’t help but funnel down to those on the Smalltown level.
“Some of these bigger acts that are getting paid crazy money, that are really shining a light on electronic music are great, in my opinion, for the rest of the scene. Someone who was struggling, making weird left field beats, is now able to maybe make a living doing what they’re doing and maybe getting more attention and credibility. … That’s created a really healthy scene,” he says. “Granted, there’s going to be the massive (acts) like Skrillex — the equivalent of the U2 or Coldplay of dance music — but because of that there’s all of these genres and niches, that haven’t popped big, but they’re getting more attention.
“At the end of the day, things like that are beneficial to what we do and what people in our business are doing. It shines the light on electronic music. Not everyone’s trying to get commercial success, but it just makes for a healthier environment when there’s attention and money available to some of these producers and DJs who before might have not been able to get their music out there.”
He admits he and Grimes will likely never get to that massive level because they’re not consciously trying to be a pop act and their original music, while accessible, doesn’t have that dubstep buzz that’s made someone like Skrillex a household name.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t elements of that electro-fad in the tracks that Smalltown DJs produce, just that it’s so deep into what they do that they’re certainly not defined by it, preferring a style that is more an amalgamation and something, he says, that’s becoming more the norm.
“Our stuff leans toward a garage bass type of house,” Emes says, allowing that there has been mainstream success with artists who do what they do, most notably Duck Sauce, the duo of fellow Canuck A-Trak and Yank Armand Van Helden, whose song Barbra Streisand became something of a hit, even being used on Glee and as the Flames’ goal celebration song in the Dome.
“That’s not too far off from what we’re doing. … But these days in electronic music, the genre definitions are really looser than they’ve ever been because there’s so much crossover in styles.”