D
esigner Drugs are the founders of a sex cult that wants to peddle digital narcotics to your children. It started out as musical experimentation in the late nineties, leading to them making drum and bass with their friends. Then they founded Sex Cult Records
and started recruiting other producers like Alvin Risk, Cyberpunkers, Monolith and PLS DNT STP, releasing studio album ‘Hardcore/Softcore’ on Ultra Music in 2011. Since that they have been touring cities across North America and beyond, where they play to packed crowds of young EDM fans, while next up is their second album in May.
Michael Vincent Patrick II and Theodore Paul Nelson grew up in central Pennsylvania towns that were within driving distance of each other. “We both kind of grew up rural,” says Nelson when DJ Mag USA delves into the roots of the partnership. “He’s from Shamokin, which is a coal mining town, and I’m from Middleton, which is kind of like Amish. They used to make Chef Boyardee there.” They were both born in the early eighties, took piano lessons, and had shitty bands at age 16. So they ran with the same circle of friends growing up, before moving to Philadelphia and New York.
The two shared a common interest in music and recreational drug use. So when they met each other at a rave, it was only a matter of time before they started making beautiful music together. “I was always into music,” says Patrick. “And then I went to a rave, which was a good combination of drugs and music, two things I really liked. I was like, ‘Alright cool. I’ll just try making this type of music, this is fun’.” The DJ duo has unofficially been together for about 15 years but started touring extensively as Designer Drugs about five years ago. The name of their act was a product of their misspent youth and the nu-rave scene.
How did you come up with the name ‘Designer Drugs’? Patrick:“It was the nu-rave scene in London, where there was a resurgence of dance music. Dance music became really cool and all these kids that were normally in punk bands or indie bands were taking drugs. There was this cool fashion and music scene called ‘nu-rave’. I thought Designer Drugs seemed like a fitting name. But then it expanded from nu-rave to real rave. Like full blown. Now it’s almost commercial. It really was an interesting trip for us to start doing underground parties, and now we’re playing festivals. It went from one end of the spectrum to the other.” Nelson: “At least from our perspective, blog house was really big. You know, MySpace was peaking at the time. We kind of used both to our advance. That’s how we put our music out initially. It was tons of blogs, and emails and MySpace and stuff.” Patrick: “We got a lot of coverage on blogs. That’s how we got all of our recognition, really. It was cool at the time, because most record labels I didn’t think were putting out good music. And then the blogs were like, ‘Fuck that. There’s all this good music. We’re going to release it’. And then all of that stuff became popular because the record labels were sleeping on contemporary music. Then when that got popular, the record labels jumped on the whole style of music that was on blogs. It went from being underground — you couldn’t sell it to save your life — to being everyone is trying to buy it.”
With the name Designer Drugs, do you take a lot of drugs? Nelson: “Sometimes.” Patrick:“I don’t anymore. We used to though, when we were younger.” Nelson:“We have our moments once in a while. But nothing like we did when we were in high school or college.” Patrick: “We’re too busy running two businesses. We have all these people always asking us for stuff and people working for us. We kind of...”
Nelson:“Switched to alcohol.” Patrick:“We’re more responsible. We have to be responsible and take care of business.”
Are you talking about Sex Cult Records? Patrick:“Yeah, our label. That and just the Designer Drugs thing too. We have like three different booking agents for different parts of the world. We’ve got digital marketing managers. We’ve got PR people that we need to work with. Label people that we need to work with at Ultra Records.” Nelson:“Every day we get hundreds of emails. And if I was doing Special K for a few days, I’d be behind on like
Nelson chimes in: “For some people, it’s kind of electro house. But more electro, less booty. It’s a hybrid. It’s like electro you grind to.”
“It’s tough to define that booty grinding, you know?” Patrick adds. Whatever it is, Designer Drugs’ style of electro house has a bass element that really appeals to fans of dubstep and grime. Their new album, tentatively titled either ‘Space Bass’ or ‘Drugs Are In Control’, will be released by Ultra Records. Each month until then, they’ll precede it with a single, a music video and a remix pack — in that order. They recently shot a music video in Thailand for their first single off the album, ‘Drugs Are In Control’ — a music video with kick-boxing, prostitutes, cobras, monkeys, guns and drugs. “I get to be in the video,” enthuses Patrick. “It’s just a little cameo. Watching how huge the production was, it was fucking amazing.”
NSPECIAL K elson has come a long way since his teenage days, when
he once stole money from his parents to make a run to Tijuana for hundreds of bottles of Special K with a girl he met in a Yahoo electronica chat room. “It was so bad,” he says. “I was doing a bunch of it, like two bottles a day. My parents threw me out of the house. I ended up joining the Navy for four years to straighten out my life.”
He was in the Navy from 2000 to 2004, before getting a BS in Chemistry from the University Of Pittsburgh and graduating from West Virginia School of Osteopathic Medicine with an MD last year. He still has to complete a residency to practice, but it is close enough to call him Dr Nelson. We ask, but he is not going into pharmaceutical engineering any time soon. “I decided that since I’m not going to be young forever, do music now and maybe later if I decide to get married or whatever, then I’ll do the doctor stuff. For now, I’m gonna try music out and see how it goes. I haven’t been doing any of these projects full time. I’ve actually been in school for the last ten years at the same time. So it’s been tough for me to focus. I’m trying to get back into it now full time.”
DHOLLYWOOD r Nelson lives outside of Philly and Mr Patrick II has a
home in New York. The two both express plans to move to Los Angeles this March, though, after they finish the album. Not a permanent move, but they will be renting apartments so that they have homes on both coasts. Nelson says, “Most of the other guys in the industry that we’re in have all recently moved or currently live in LA, or are moving to LA. It’s like the Hollywood of electronic music, at least in the United States.”
5,000 emails. And everything would get fucked up, so we just have to stay on our toes. But Sex Cult is our label and we’re actually doing a lot of stuff for that this year.”
When did you found Sex Cult Records?
Patrick: “It’s like two years old. I really don’t know. We originally did it because we were looking for an outlet to release our stuff and some of our friends’ stuff. But now we get submissions almost every day from kids that really want to be on the label. That inspires us to push the label more.”
When asked to define their style, which they call ‘grindhouse’, Patrick replies: “We just made that up because I thought it sounded cool. Because it’s dancey, but it’s really grungy. I thought it seemed fitting.”
Patrick agrees and Nelson continues, “We’re going to go check it out and see what it’s all about, for at least a few months. Especially during the album release, because we feel like a lot of the electronic music guys are based out of LA. So we’re going to go out there and mingle. See what happens. Because we’re primarily East Coast people. Sometimes it’s tough for us to move over to the Dark Side.”
After the album comes out, it will be time to focus on a world tour and collaborating more extensively with other artists. “We’re kind of loners,” says Nelson. “We do our own thing. Recently we contacted Ultra to try to find a vocalist so that we could get some vocals on one of our new tracks. But we haven’t really been working with them that extensively in terms of meeting other artists and collaborating. We’ll probably get more into it after we get this album behind us and we have some time off.”
“For a while we’ve been doing our own thing,” Patrick follows up. “Just putting music out. Whatever. You know, it worked pretty well for us so far. We just found out the other day that Tiësto was playing one of our tracks and we had no idea. We don’t talk to him.”
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