Cutting Contest

What’s your personal favorite thing you’ve done with Shadow?

My favorite project was The Hard Sell. It really expanded what we’ve already done in the past and brought something new to the table, musically and technically. More records, more genres, more turntables, and loop pedals. Not to mention the visuals for the tour were very carefully crafted to the concept. An amazing team to work with.

Let’s talk about some recent things you’ve been part of. Talk about that Apple commercial?

I think it was all positive. That commercial was played in every country all day for a long time. I even saw it on the side of a building in Las Vegas. Crazy!

Once and for all: how did the role in Juno happen?

Director Jason Reitman is a fan and approached me to do some music for some short films. His plans changed when he landed the script for Juno and thought it would be a fun idea to give [me] a cameo as a chemistry teacher. We have since become friends. He himself is a DJ and I have to say comes up with some pretty cool mash-ups with his DJ group, Bad Meaning Bad.

Let’s go in reverse and cover some history. Tell people about the U.N.I.T.Y. Committee and how that developed your career.

U.N.I.T.Y. Committee started in 1987; I was fourteen years old. It developed me as a producer. I never thought I would make music until groups like the Jungle Brothers came out. After we met Rebels of Rhythm and created Jurassic 5, I had already produced numerous songs for U.N.I.T.Y. Committee over a course of seven years. It was great practice for arranging loops and samples for the future.

How did “Lesson 6” come about?

“Lesson 6” was my opus at the time. I’d been doing research on different time signatures and trying to apply it to a DJ solo song. Everyone that heard it at the time thought I was crazy. I was and am still very proud of it. I also wanted to illustrate by sampled dialogue what it meant to be a DJ and its role as a crowd pleaser and conceptual thinker. I think it coined my style to be the “dialogue record guy.” It’s still pretty hard to shake that, but I don’t mind.

How have Shortkut and those Future Primitive Sound Session cats struck you as DJs and affected your career?

That mix CD got around. It’s still probably one of the more famous works with my name on it. Future Primitive was a great concept with a great execution, pairing hip-hop DJs with non-hip-hop DJs at first. I think Shortkut and I were the first pairing to be both hip-hop. It was completely improvised. Shortkut being a Skratch Pikl, he could handle anything I threw at him. He was like a jazz musician with great chops.

What other DJs are you fans of?

DJ Shadow, Kid Koala, Qbert, D-Styles, Gaslamp Killer, Flying Lotus, and Z-Trip, just to name a few.

Tell folks about the Good Life: what it does, what it’s become, and what your efforts towards it were.

The Good Life was a health food store that had an open mic night on Thursdays here in L.A. from 1989 to 1995. Groups like Freestyle Fellowship, U.N.I.T.Y. Committee, OMD, Volume 10, Abstract Rude, and [Abstract] Tribe Unique were frequent performers. There is a documentary about it called This Is the Life. This helped start the careers of all these groups and others. Being the producer for U.N.I.T.Y. Committee, I was there all the time backing my crew up. I’ll never forget those days.

How did “What’s the Altitude” come about?

Kind of by accident. Hymnal and I were playing around with some serious spoken word songs for my album. In the middle of it all, he said, “Well, I also have this,” kind of jokingly. I had just sampled the Curtis Knight song, but hadn’t made it into a beat yet. I told him to try rapping the lyrics over the sample and I thought it worked. It was simple, with an indie sound yet utilizing hip-hop origins by using an old Zulu Nation tape. It was an odd blend of cultures that made perfect sense to us.

When I spoke with Shadow, he said Brainfreeze affected the whole DJ mixtape/collecting culture, and that things reached a boiling point after that. What are your thoughts?

I think this was the first time you had turntablism meet deep collecting. So those that were into one and not the other got into both. You had more people digging for 45s than ever before. It made it more mainstream than it had ever been.

How did your role in Up in the Air happen? Anymore acting beyond cameos?

Once again, Jason Reitman thought it would be fun to put me in the movie as a DJ. Of course I said yes. It didn’t take too much method acting to nail that role.

If your career were to end tomorrow, what would you like to be remembered for?

“Lesson 6” and The Audience’s Listening.