Beats from the Heavens
Deepsky Make Otherworldly Dance Music

>> J. Scott G. (l) & Jason Blum are Deepsky. >>

>> If electronic music is becoming "rich people's background music," as J. Scott G. of the LA-based duo Deepsky asserts, then maybe it'll finally get the respect in America that it deserves.  Few American DJs or true 'electronic artists' have really broken through at home.  For the most part, American electronica has enjoyed a much warmer reception in Europe than it has here, though maybe the recent trend to include electronic music in films, commercials and, well, on rich people's mix CDs will push the artists into the limelight as well.  Money has a way of doing that.

Deepsky, the partnership of J. Scott G. and Jason Blum, may be best poised to lead electronic music to the front of American consciousness.  By combining intensely beautiful, mesmerizing music with intelligence and a keen understanding of the business side of things, the duo have what it takes to do what B.T. and Deep Dish (please don't confuse them with Deepsky) have been unable to do - achieve in American what Sasha & Digweed and Paul Oakenfold have achieved in Europe.

With their first major release, In Silico, Deepsky offer up a glimpse of American electronic music's full potential.  More than just mood music for the wealthy, In Silico has the ability to appeal to the casual listener while earning full marks from the discerning sucker-toting club kid as well.  More than just two guys spinning other people's records, Deepsky is about creating, pushing the envelope and assembling the other-worldly aural visions that In Silico is filled with.  Close your eyes, open up your mind and let it just happen - it'll be quite the journey.

We caught up with the shaven-headed duo over coffee in LA to get a feel for how Deepsky objects come into being…

VOX: Tell us about the genesis of Deepsky…
J. Scott G.: Well, we were both in college. I was living in the dorms…with a ski thief.   Was it a ski thief I was living with?

Jason Blum: Yeah, a ski thief.  Scott was living in the dorms.  An old band member of mine was living there as well and they met.  Scott wanted to do some parties, had some money…

JSG: College money!  I thought I knew how to do sound.  We thought we were decent DJs and we, we all got together and said let's do it.  We threw some of the first parties in Albuquerque.  As we got to know each other more, we realized that we were both in bands and had the same taste in music.

VOX: What were you doing in the bands?

JB: I was doing mostly bass.

JSG: I’ve always done keyboards/programmer stuff.  He was in an industrial band; I was in a synth-pop band.   I don’t know how we ended up in a band together!

VOX: So you were like the Nick Rhodes of the group?
JSG: Nah, I was like a Chris Lowe, of the Pet Shop Boys. Those guys are my heroes.

VOX: Why 'Deepsky?'
JB: The hardest thing to do is name your band.  It’s like naming your child.  It’s like when you name your kid in a drug-induced stupor, 20 years later you end up with a name like 'Moon Unit.'  "What the fuck was I thinking?"  You’re stuck with it.  It’s like naming a song…

JSG: You have to live with it a long, long time, so it has to be good.

JB: It’s got to be catchy and has to have some meaning.

JSG: So when we were looking for a name, we went to Jason’s house and checked out his books.  He had a bunch of Dungeons and Dragons books, a bunch of astronomy books...so it happens to be an astronomy term – any object existing outside of the solar system, is called a deep sky object, and we thought that was cool.

JB: As time has progressed, it’s taken on a bunch of subsidiary meanings like, ‘The sky is deep in New Mexico, you can see forever.'  That wasn’t the original intention but it fits.

VOX: How do your tracks come together?  What's your process for structuring the song?
JSG: It’s always different. It could be around drums, one particular sound, a riff.  It always changes, could be a vocal…

JB: I know how, the way I usually work with ideas is like I’ll get kinda of an idea, then I’ll lay something down, then twist that idea around a little bit and it grows from there.  It really depends.   There’s not any formula to writing the music.

VOX: What made you decide to shave your heads?
JB: A stroke of genius, and the fact I can’t grow any hair!

JSG: For me it was convenience. I used to have bangs to my chin…

JB: [Chuckles] So did I.

JSG: I started shaving with a guard, a razor…it’s been a gradual progression.

VOX: At least you don’t have fucked up heads.
JB: We’re lucky.

JSG: We have nice heads.

VOX: What was your last day job?
JB: We were both computer guys. I was a network engineer for an online horse racing company.  He was in network admin…

JSG: Working for a credit card transaction company.  They are the middleman between some site that’s selling and the bank.

JB: I think that everyone in this type of music was a computer nerd at one point in their life.

JSG: Either they are really hard-core techie or really not, one or the other.

VOX: After DJ-ing for nearly ten years, what made you release In Silico?
JSG: We've always wanted to release a full-length album.  We’ve never been in a position as far as the label we have been on to promote one correctly.  The last label, Fragrant, we were on was kinda of a small Los Angeles startup.  We were going to do an album with them but we started to outgrow them.   We felt like we’d hold back putting an album out until we had a label that had proper marketing, like a machine that could get our music to a wider market

JB: Fragrant’s run for CDs would be 4-5000.  Whereas someone like Kinetic, with backing from BMG is 15-20 thousand.  Beyond that they have a proper distribution network and marketing money.  We could have released this on Fragrant but it would have done what the Stargazer EP did.  Sat on the shelf, no one would know it’s there.  With BMG it got regional campaigns, radio, a staff that does just that. They have the infrastructure to promote an album correctly.

VOX: Do you see dance music becoming more mainstream?
JSG: I would say right now, dance music is rich people's background music.  A lot of people, who have money, it’s what they listen to to be hip.  It’s infiltrating certain social groups, for people who have lots of money it seems to be there, it’s their soundtrack.  More 'grownups' like it.

JB: It’s filtering through mainstream consciousness through commercials and movie soundtracks.  There are not a lot of people that go to clubs really.  It’s a subset of a subset.  There’s a certain demographic. Most people sit around at home watch TV, go to the movies, that’s their only exposure to it.  Even 5-6 years ago, people that were doing music for commercials were still putting on early 80's rock music.  Now people like us, we are all out of college now, making our way up the ranks of the corporate world.  So I’m going to get the music I like in these commercials

VOX: What’s changed in the scene in the last ten years?
JSG: The rave scene is dead.  Pretty much.  Beyond burning itself down, kids overdosing, the government has shut it down.  You can’t do parties anymore.  It’s all about the club scene so that’s a major change.  The music is different, fragmented.

JB: When we first starting doing this, it was just techno, when you went to a party, you didn’t have a drum 'n' bass room, house room, progressive…

JSG: It was techno.

JB: You had some DJs that played one style of music.  Cities like Los Angeles, you pick what you want to hear and you go there.  You go to a drum 'n' bass club, progressive club, house, that’s what you get.  DJs used to have more of a sense of programming a way to go from point a to b.  You now go to a party at 9 and leave at 6 and you felt like you got somewhere in the process.  But now every DJ wants to be the star - whether they are the opening DJ or the closing DJ or somewhere in the middle, they are going to pull the best records.  You might hear the same record two or three, or four times in an evening.

JSG: It’s not an underground scene anymore.  It’s not a guy with a track who scrapes up a grand and puts out 500 copes of a record.  It’s major corporations who've snatched up all of these independent labels and are putting serious marketing dollars and really building brands out of it.  Everyone knows who Paul Oakenfold, Sasha and Digweed are, they’re major players.  Everyone knows who they are around the world.  It’s no longer some cool guys with a could of records, it’s “Sasha and Digweed.”

VOX: Why has dance music enjoyed so much more success in Europe than in America?
JB: 'Cause our youth culture is based on hip-hop.  Their culture has always been dance music.  Kids already know what they like.  Once you've got something you like, it sticks.

VOX: Dance isn’t that far away from hip hop, no?
JSG: In a sense.

VOX: Some of the same elements are there…
JB: It’s electronic, but the cultures are different.

JSG: They do share elements, but some of the hip hop tracks...   They definitely are – I don’t want to say complimentary - the similarity is there.  The reason that it hasn't taken off in so fast in the US, there's the West Coast, south, the east, the northeast, then the Midwest.  Very distinct South Florida, Florida breaks, everyone knows that. The West Coast has the reputation for doing trance. You don’t get that in England. I think that’s one of the reasons, it takes awhile to cross over the entire country.

VOX: Your web site has a UK address, but you live in LA.   Why LA?
JB: 'Cause it was close, our label was here, friends…at first we were saying Denver or Phoenix, but it’s LA or New York to make it in music at the level we wanted.  New York was too expensive at the time.  It’s still expensive!

JSG: LA is really cool.  While we were in Albuquerque we’d be going out to a bar drinking with friends.  Here we are out, drinking with friends, drinking, but maybe also with someone who happens to be a music supervisor for movies or something like that.

VOX: Are you satisfied with In Silico?
JSG: I think we wanted to a: give people who has supported us in the past five years something that they could appreciate.  It's progressive trance, that kind of music, at the same time we also wanted to show people that we are more than just be a rave act, that we could do other things, vocal tracks, drum n bass, a little more down tempo, on the house tip, we wanted to get into some breaks. I think we have done a pretty good job at that on this record.

VOX: But are you satisfied?
JB: Any record, after you’ve listened to it for something like two years, I can’t stand hearing it anymore but I still like it as a record.

VOX: "Jareth's Church" is the first single from In Silico.  What's the meaning behind the title?
JSG: It’s a tongue twister.

JB: Back in Albuquerque, a long time ago, we couldn’t always afford equipment. And, we just learned about the 909 drum machine – I mean this is years and years ago.

JSG: We are talking about like 9 or ten years ago.

JB: It was one of those machines that made those sounds that everyone was using, those great drum sounds.  We wanted to buy one but didn’t have the money.  One of our friends at the time was a punk rocker.  He was the kinda guy who cuts himself with a razor, cutting words into his skin

JSG: He was the kinda guy that would hang a six-pack off his nipples.

JB: His name was Church.  Church was a good friend of ours.  He was always a big fan of our stuff.  He said ‘I’ll buy it for you guys and pay me back.’  Ok, all right he got us this drum machine. It was great!  We got the money and paid him back.  He asked us for a favor, to name a track after him.  So we kinda separated, went our separate ways for awhile, he saw our website and emailed us,  “How’s it going now?  I have a kid now, I’m married,” and his son is name Jareth.  So when we were working on the album, talking to this guy, we one-upped it.  Instead of naming after him we named it after him and his son.   So it was Jareth’s church, to kinda of pay homage.

VOX: How did that track develop?
JB: Actually the track started as a remix for somebody else.   We were commissioned to do a remix.  I was working on that song and I’m like ‘this is too cool to give up to someone else as a remix.’  We kept it for ourselves.  Of course we added to it later and made it what it is.  The beginning of that song was a remix for someone else.  I did another remix instead, that song was too cool, to give up just for a remix.

VOX: Which artist was the remix for?
JSG: I won’t say!  The person knows.  The remix we did we still cool.

VOX:  Who have you done remixes for?
JSG: Carl Cox, B.T., Energy 52, Deee-lite, Depeche…well a bootleg of them…

VOX: Which Depeche track?
JSG: “I Feel Loved,” on our website in our secret MP3 area. We are doing a remix for an upcoming Curve track.

VOX: Who else?
JSG: Thirty or 40, those are the biggest names.

VOX: What tour plans are coming up?
JSG: We are doing some prelim dates, May and June.   July we’ll be out [in support of] this record, just us playing records.