“T
he idea of watching a DJ pretend to be a band, you know, get on stage and prance around and simulate performing so that people who grew up with rock bands can watch it and not be confused or bored, that whole idea just fucking bores me to tears…. I’d far rather go to a darkened club, and not even be aware of the person behind the booth, just hear
music and dance to it.” Chrissy Murderbot knows his mind. The DJ, producer and curator has an encyclopaedic knowledge of rave culture, with passion to spare. Whether he’s producing fatbacked disco bombs or re-contextualizing nervy footwork hybrids, his music pulses with an abiding love of America’s 30 plus years of underground dance culture. So it’s no surprise that elements of the sudden, much hyped boom in mainstream EDM have got him smelling a rat. “Deadmau5? He doesn’t get it. He doesn’t understand DJ culture. He’s not a DJ, he’s a guy who gets up on stage in a costume and performs for people who want to see a person on a stage moving around while music plays. I guess my whole ideology of what this culture should be is very different to his. I think as DJs, we should reject that shit– we shouldn’t get up on stage and pretend to do a live PA because our agent says, ‘oh you’ll get a lot more money if you have live PA after your name.’ I think it’s much more important to stick to your guns and say, ‘I’m a DJ, so let’s focus on booking me in places where I can go and DJ.” “The whole industry is structured so that you get booked to DJ based on the strength of your production work, and there’s a lot of producers who are very good producers but maybe aren’t very good DJs, but still get booked. It’s difficult. I know that there are DJs who decide to branch out into doing a live show because then they can charge more money, and it’s an experience that crosses over more readily to people who are used to a rock music construct of watching someone on stage. But what’s more important to me is dance music culture, and being in a club with a DJ where you’re not watching the DJ, you’re dancing. I think we should be trying to move back towards where you buy good records because they’re good records, and you go see good DJs because they’re good DJs, and not fusing the two as much as we do right now.” Fact is, in Chrissy’s case he’s got DJing and producing on lock. The man who once spent every week of a year coming up with a new definitive genre mixtape (as catalogued on his wildly successful ‘My Year in Mixtapes’ blog), has just put the finishing touches to his new mini album ‘Greatest Hits *****’ - a collection of seven originals and seven remixes that tears through juke, jungle and footwork in a whirlwind of scattergun samples, chest rattling bass and frantic percussion. Unlike his warmer disco work as Chris E. Pants, ‘Greatest Hits *****’ is fast and nasty, alien as a stranger in Roswell, and resolutely not for the uninitiated. It’s the bastard spawn of Chrissy’s musical loves, stretching right back to his days of being one of the only kids in Chicago buying English jungle records in ’94, no mean feat, as he recalls, “It was really difficult – there were two DJ shops in town and they both specialized in house music –and if you really pestered them you could get them to import the new 12” from Suburban Base or Tearing Vinyl, and then you just fuckin’ hoped you
liked it! It was about ten dollars, and for a 14 year old kid that’s a lot of fucking money for two songs!” As he grew older, absorbing the sounds of Chi Town’s 4/4s as well as European breakbeat science, the hyper tempos and Chicago references of footwork made perfect sense: “I grew up really being into jungle, with crazy forward thinking drum patterns and rhythm programming. At the same time, growing up in the Mid West I was really into house music, Detroit techno, ghetto house, booty house, ghetto tech, all that kind of stuff, and so footwork always seemed to accidentally have a lot of common ground between those groups of genres.” With EDM at an all time peak in popularity, it’s shocking (read refreshing) to hear dance music that still sounds as bizarre as footwork does. Like all the freshest rave music, it hurtles headlong towards the future, its staccato shuffle smacking down any conventions dumb enough to get in the way. However, as Chrissy is keen to acknowledge, ‘Greatest Hits *****’ is never mere awkward experimentalism, with everything from soulful vocals to glorious technicolor pop hooks blooming between the Spartan rhythmic assaults. “There’s two sides to the scene that interest me – one is that boundary pushing side of the dance music scene, which is like a pop music test lab where ideas are worked out; you’re kinda seeing what pop will sound like in two years, or a kind of a raw, unfinished, more interesting form of it. I think that probably, for the predictable future, the motor pushing pop music ideas forward will exist in some nook of the dance music world. I’ve been lucky enough to be involved in that part of the scene for a while, but I think that’s just coincidence. What drives me isn’t being experimental, I just happen to like some things that happen to have been forward thinking and relevant for the last couple of years… The other side of the scene that interests me is people who aren’t really concerned with experimentation, they just want to write really good pop music. So, like, the deep house scene is amazing right now. They’re not really doing anything mind- blowingly new, there’s not this whole deep house manifesto that’s completely upending what house music is or what music is in general, but the people are just writing great songs! “I want a song to be a little bit of both, if you’re going to be completely experimental with no catchiness or pop to it, then you better have the most mind blowing idea to keep my attention, or if you’re gonna be completely pop with no experimentation to it, then you better be writing an amazing pop song. Like, George Michael can get away with not being experimental ‘cos he writes amazing pop songs. He’s amazing! I worry for the guy, but he’s phenomenal. If I could collaborate with anyone at all, then George Michael would be at the top of the list.”
Huh? Whut? Honestly, this wasn’t what DJ Mag USA was expecting to hear, but it turns out Murderbot’s not playing. “OK, well, Sylvester would be at the top of the list but he’s dead. So I’d love to collaborate with George. There’s a track called ‘A Ray of Sunshine’ on the first Wham! album that was never a single but it’s really catchy. I could see me covering something along those lines. It’s a deep cut.” And on that bombshell, let the George Michael revival commence…
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