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Z-Trip, Kraddy

What:

Z-Trip and Kraddy celebrate the Second Anniversary of Nocturnum, Saturday, April 2, 9 p.m.

On the cell with Z-Trip:

Z-Trip is not the easiest guy to get on the phone. He’s a jet setter bouncing between his home in L.A. and club dates in Las Vegas, Miami, New York and elsewhere. I caught up with him last Friday just after he went through TSA screening on his way home from Miami. This weekend, he jets up to Humboldt for a Saturday show with Kraddy to help celebrate the 2nd anniversary of Nocturnum.

So, you’re on your way home. Do you have the usual gig in Vegas tomorrow night?

No, the Vegas residency is done. I did little over a year at Rain, and it was great, I had a really good time, but I started working on a new record and with all the other gigs, I had to cut something out.

Are you still working on the record?

Slowly but surely, but there’s all these other things that popped up. It’s crazy. Eventually the record will come out, but there’s nobody barking at me, there’s no label I’m committed to, so I can really do it at my own pace. Sometimes that takes a bit longer but I always feel better about the process when it’s done the way I want to versus putting something out because I have to meet someone’s deadline or something. It’ll happen.

Considering the shift in the ways recording are distributed, what do you mean when you say you’re making a record?

It’s kind of the old fashioned way, making original productions, writing music ultimately. Also collaborating with certain people to make it a little more interesting, that’s all part of the old way of doing things. But at the same time all the stuff that surrounds it will be more futuristic. I’ll probably do an entire Mixtape with remixes of everything, and I’d like to get some of that out before I actually launch the record because that way you can hit people in different ways.

Multi-platform…

Exactly. In this day and age you have to do that.

So you’ll have a CD, downloads, double vinyl and so forth?

Yeah, the whole deal, maybe some 10-inches too I’m not sure.

You came up in the age of vinyl, two turntables, scratching and whatever. When you tour around the country, I’m assuming you don’t haul records. Do you have a laptop and ask to have a Serato rig waiting for you?

Yeah, although I still roll with a huge amount of my own gear, but for the most part it’s not alike the old days. And that’s good. In the old days I’d be carrying a few crates of records, paying overages for everything and generally being in less better health when I came home from lugging things, exhaustion, the whole deal. Now it’s jut a backpack, some outboard gear and you’re kinda done.

Records are heavy.

It’s true. I’ll tell you the overages I had to pay were just gnarly. You go to Australia, there’s like six major cities you want to hit and they’re all far away from each other. You can’t drive; you have to fly and when you’re flying with four crates of records and they only allow a backpack for carryon, you have to pay for everything extra. I paid something like $5,000 in overages for that week-long tour. That was like one show’s worth of money, just gone. It was brutal. Now I’m happy to be able to travel lighter. Also the technology allows me to do more. It’s like I have 500 crates of records at my disposal.

You have all this music in iTunes or something like that? How many tracks?

I think I have like 54,000 tunes in my iTunes library, that was last time I checked.         

You play all sorts of different venues with different crowds in different scenes. How does the mix change? And what do you bring to Humboldt?

One of the things I love is the ability to jump into different markets with different things; the changing variables keep me on my toes musically. The things I play in Vegas would not work in Humboldt and vice versa. People in Humboldt County are more in touch with what’s going on on the raw underground cutting edge versus the Vegas crowd where the majority just want to party Vegas-style to familiar tunes. I’m really looking forward to the show up there because I get to stretch out and go down different paths. Dubstep is huge there, and I know the dubstep I’ll drop there will be huge — my arsenal has gotten bigger in that department, bigger and heavier. The extra added bonus is Kraddy, who’s opening the show, a guy who used to be with Glitch Mob. He and I have been noodling around with stuff so it will be fun to play with him and have some improv interaction as well.    

(Our conversation drifted through a few more topics than came around to the state of the music biz.)

Technology has opened things up in the music world in more ways than one. As the record companies fall, the limits once set by record company executives seem to be gone too.

I think that’s the best part about it. Walls are being broken down left and right, and I’m all for that. I wield a huge sledgehammer in that department - that’s my whole goal, to break down the barriers people or record labels have put up, in particular the idea of putting things into categories. I’ve never subscribed to that and I don’t think most people do, but if you’re someone who markets music, you need that so they set up these circumstances for people and put them in boxes. Now you’re seeing more and more people hurdling over that and that’s a good thing.

You have these people making music in unconventional ways and awkward artists popping up. The underground is finding its legs and finding its audience, just coming back around in a major way.

To take it a step further, and get into some social commentary, I really feel like a popular artist can be popular and have a song that’s a big hit, but it’s changing. Take rap as an example: The stuff rappers have been rapping about is very much about excess; it’s very ego-driven, all about me, me, me, and about how much money I have and all these extravagant things. That set the tone for the music. But in this day and age, the real people who listen to real music and pay attention to what’s going on, you can’t really be a rapper talking about burning money in some club. Now if someone’s talking about burning money in a club, it’s bullshit because nobody has any money. Everybody lost their 401ks, everybody’s trying to figure out how to get over the next hump.

Call it what you will, but we’re in a recession, and when that happens, social commentary gets turned to 11 because people are pissed, they’re upset and they need an outlet. I think that’s why the music is starting to get so creative and interesting. People are not doing the conventional thing and going into a huge recording studio with a big budget from some record label. Dudes are out there creating amazing records on laptops at home, for no money, and are saying things that are really interesting.

Look at groups like Odd Future; these guys did it completely on their own and they’re completely independent — the world came to them. They created something and the world came to them, vs. some machine trying to shove the next big thing down someone’s throat. To me, that’s the next level, kids out there doing it on their own, and they have the tools and technology.

It’s going to be crazy to see what comes out of that: some really raw social commentary with interesting music behind it. And, on the flipside, the potential to become the next big thing, something all the other artists rap themselves around because this is what’s selling. We’re in interesting times.

Interesting indeed. Hey, anything else we need to know?

I wanted to mention I case people missed it; there was a big milestone that happened for me recently. I was at South by Southwest and I had LL Cool-Jay come on and perform with me at the end of my set. There’s footage online; we’re doing Carson Daly tonight.

How did that come about?

We met and started talking and realized that we clicked musically. I invited him to come out to hear my set at SxSW; the lineup was me, Q-Bert, Jazzy Jeff and De La Soul with me last. So I brought out LL for the last three songs. The crowd went crazy. That’s the kind of stuff you live for, unpredictable collaborations, some something really different.

Old school and new school getting together - sounds like DJ heaven…

It really is, to be able to work with people whose records you not only spun, but wore out coming up because they were so influential. It was really great.

~ Bob Doran

http://www.myspace.com/nocturnumlive

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