the handbill with black plague addedInterview from Phat Magazine
ISSUE 15. fEB /mAR 02 - 2002
by moron

ps: this is the unedited version! If you offend easily don't read it.

My first dose of the 'Plague was via a chance meeting in liquor store parking lot, refuelling for the last burst of promotion for a gabber show I was promoting. After shoving a handbill into the guy's hand, the look on his face upon reading the "gabber" byline told me something was up. From there, the vector spread itself outwards resulting in several gigs and even a tour.


topography of Black Plague

$nooty $killz, BiachD: We met because Andy was like hiding out in a basement at a house I frequented(17 for andy, 14 for Dave). My role was to drink in the gutter.

M: So how did you go from juvie to DJ?

A: it involved driving our roommate out (Cedar Hill House)

D: I had this friend who brought me over to Andy's house. Andy had the small pieces of paper...

Nice Shorts!Some of my first memories of interacting with him was when I was so wacked. I came over and he was making this album using the Commodore 64 and samples from the news, Star Trek and stuff so it was like "A vaginal gel that proved effective on tests in monkeys in The White House". Pew Pew Pew. That was how I noticed Andy was making music.

M: Did you start with turntables?

D: No, No, far away from that.

A: We ended up moving in together and doing lots of jams with guitar, bass keyboard, commodores, sampling keyboard. . .

D: Yeah, I bought this super welfare sampling keyboard from the pawnshop for $50 or whatever. We did a lot of songs where we would sample us saying something stupid and that would be the foundation of our song, like "Ewwwoo". . .

A: Or "midget"

D: ... or "Awwww" then wed be like badly played offtime instruments

A: I can still hear the beat.

D: then after that we had this crazy roommate who was an ex skinhead and a satanist and picked up dead bodies for a living. He seemed like a really cool guy when we first moved in, he found the house. But he had some serious problems, everyone in the house had a lot of problems. This was a time in our lives when we were not very successful as people let us say.

A: We were sketchies. . .

D: Yeah, we were sketchies. So there was 10 of us that lived in this house right, Anyway, there was this one girl who was like the odd hand out. She was this total bar star twinkie who lived in the other house, not our house and to drive this one roommate who brought all the problems with him out of the house we "summer is magic" and all the bar star techno, we
got a tape from her and we put it on all the time.

A: We were mixing death metal and classical and like the most hurtin bar techno you can possibly imagine, and we like pointed speakers at his walls from the sides, we pointed speakers at his floor from underneath the other floor

D: Yeah and at like 3 oclock in the morning it would be like "The Summer is Magic" and then mixed in with like George Gershwin and Megadeth.

A: And for some reason it had the opposite effect cuz we ended up liking it.

D: and we got addicted to it. The mixer was Chris's, I talked him into buying a 4 channel Realistic mixer with no VU meters and just like four faders for the microphone input. So any time were not as loud as the other channel we would just get pissed off and get more amps and each of us had a ouple of amps chained together and we had wood panelled turntables made by Zenith like with the radio in the front and to scratch you had to disengage the drive by putting it between 33 and 45.

A: A turnable with a clutch.

D: And we had a "real" DJ at one of our parties and he was so shocked and appalled at our equipment that he couldn't believe it. Not only did we only have the worst music that no techno person would want to hear except us cuz we were like estranged metal heads. We would just play it all the time.

A: We would wake up in the morning, put some coffee on and just start making a ruckus.

D: We were unemplyed and didn't really do anything other than sit around and get baked.

A: We had a plant. It wasn't a grow op, it was more of a trim-op.

D: We just got really really into it. The one day the mixer melted, smoke just came out of it – we always overdrove it so many times for so long. We didn't know abou red-lining being bad, well we sorta did but we just didn't care. There was no VU meters anyways. What mixer did we get after that?

A: We got that sampling mixer.

D: Yeah we got that sampling mixer. It was so much fun that we burned it out in 26 days. We would just sample all day long every day, whatever we could possibly sample, playing it over and over again. Fuck that was great.

A: IT didn't last very long though. I took it back to Radio Shack and they said you can't return this and I said "It says I can return it" and they said no, we will repair it and I said NO give me my money now and then I went and bought a big bag. (Laughfter) That put a damper on my career for a little while.

D: Then after that we got one radio shack mixer. We'd go to Value village and buy shitty turntables.

A: and wear them out.

D: Yup, and wear them out. We were really obnoxious. Now when I listen to tapes we made when we were first starting out it actually gives me headaches and my sinusses start acting up. Like it us such bad irritating crap that it is unpleasant to experience. You know going to 48 hours of Merzbow where you are not allowed to sleep or eat or drink. Just sooo bad it's like Arrrgh turn it off.

M: how did you migrate from metal to Hip Hop?

D: I dunno, we just got bored with what else was going on. Everything is just so saturated with 303s that its really boring.

M: Yeah there's like a lot of 303s in metal (laughter). Unless you listen to that Trance metal.

D: No, but I mean in the first music we first started out with, we could only afford stuff like Trance cuz we would only buy the cheapest on sale records and stuff. It would be the stuff that was unpopular right now.

A: Snoop Doggy Dog's favourite poems.

D: We'd go to the bargain bin and buy cheap crap that other people didn't want. We didn't care and to us it was all the same. After our house broke up that was when I started going fulltime to a communications program so I actually learned how to make advertisments for our shows. We would just go to public places like the mall and we would just leave all these super underground looking flyers and it was just an open invitation to a party where anyone could just show up. Some nights there would only be twenty people but some nights the whole house would be completely packed from end to end including the driveway, all with people we had never met. It was just like total random cross section of society would show up.

A: Mega freaky.

D: That was when we really got into it. After that you got a house on Bay Street ande we threw parties there for a long time. And we got the radio show. But we were playing a lot of 303 stuff you know like "pew pew pew", all that typical shit and we just got so bored of how pretentious and stupid everyone was. And I don't know we got on to doing the all commodore album but I think that had something to do with it.

A: It had something to do with our lifestyle.

D: Yeah. We would just get real baked and then play on the commodore. I was using the computer to record we had two computers and we would just record our jam on the commodore and the delay and stuff like that and then we would both sit side by side and edit for hours and then put together whatever we came up with.

A: Yeah, file transfer stuff back and forth.

D: On a cheap 486 local area network in our friend's basement. And we actually made a sound [on the commodre] that rebooted one of the PCs - if we could find that sound man that sound is going on every album that we ever make. "hey the new Black Plague CD is out. Bewwww. Hey what happened to my computer?" (laughter) That would be so nice.

M: So what was the most manic, fucked up house party that you guys did?

A: It actually got in the paper. 3 officers hurt as party goers brawl.

D: Yeah, the townhouse that we lived in with ten people on cedar hill. There was another townhouse besides us with these huge ass gangster rap homies. And we had a party, and our friends in the other half of the duplex had a party and these gangster rap guys had a party, like all at the same time. And it was fucking enourmous. People milling about on the
driveway. So the homies had a keg and they also had a DJ that was so loud that he blew all the rented stereo equipment so it was just like "Ahh Ahh" distorted no roll over bass lines by four in the morning. And the cops came to bust them and the dudes at the homey party were throwing bottles and rocks off the top baclony at the cops heads and shit. That was pretty
wild.

A: The police didn't actually come into my version of house but the fire department did and they opened the door to my room and there was like 15 to twenty people in my room and the smoke was like a foot off the floor. And they said everyone out of the house now! We are fire department. And they cleared out the entire house, apparently someone called them because they thought our house was on fire because there was too much smoke coming out
the window.

D: And remember when that guy vomited on the wall? We came up with a phrase after that that it isn't a party until someone throws up on the wall.

A: Good times. Good times.

D: That was amazing, that was a highlight in a sketchy debauched way.

M: So what was your quickest room clearing?

D: Um, there was this girl in my communications program who was 17 years old, she just got out of high school, the air headest twinkie of the world. And she's like "I want to hear a DJ will you play for my birthday party?" So I was like "Sure little girl, bring over all your friends from high school" (laughter) And so they all filed into our basement, there's like 40 of them or so and just absolute like they couldn't get into the bar if their life depended on it right,

A: They all could have got guest rolls on 90210 though.

D: This was when I first got Delta 9's Disco Inferno, some of the first gabber we had heard ever in our life. So we were playing that and some old school house track called "Time for Trumpton" which is like a little kids show, birth of jungle hardcore style. We were playing stuff like that. I had a nine channel portastudio and a bunch of CD players and I just made sound effects and Andy did all the main record manipulation stuff. So we were rocking
out to that and they ALL left. We also had Italian horror movies playing on Tvs all around the basement and it was all like real gross, you know like in Zombie where the girl gets the piece of wood through her eye and shit like that? We also had a lot of our old school friends who
were a little special in the head in the room so when everyone cleared out all that was left was our old school friends who were all special.

A: But that's when the second wave arrived and about 30 or 40 people and that was when the real party started.

D: During that time Andy's bedroom was called the Wombler. It was about 3 and a half feet tall and he had his mattress in there and the ceiling was all silver foil from deep sea fishing lures all over the wall and a little stereo in there and this was like in the DJ booth – the DJ booth was a room in the bottom of the basement. And under the stairs was this little crawl
space meant for storage and this was Andy's room and also the wombler. And we called it the Wombler over those water womblers.

A: It was hermetically sealed.

D: We always wanted to go into the Crystal Pool and flip over the water womblers (a big bowl that you can float around in the public swimming pool) and then swim under with a bag of pot and hot box it and then leave and some little kid would flip it over and get in trouble and so it was called hotboxin the wombler. So at that party where we drove off the kids, I
remember it was the first time in my life where I smoked over a 100 joints in one night. We had like 20, 22 people in there. Every person had a different joint. What was the point fo this story? It was fucking brutal I tell ya.

M: So who's your musical and attitude wise heroes?

A: Michael Bolton

D: I really like Iron Maiden. The look rather foolish in their pink and orange spandex but growing up I thought they were the greatest thing to ever happen to musc.

M: What attracts you to them?

I dunno, they're just cheesy. I heard them before I had any musical taste so what can you say? I like their rockin glory riffs, it's always so heroic and you can just imagine fending off the bad guys with a sword to Iron Maiden, they've got that vibe to them.

A: They are very Dungeons and Dragons

M: SO you picture yourself in chain mail while you are Djing?

D: no, leather thong with strings around my arms. (laughter) Then my friend bought Skinny Puppy's "Bite" and it was just unintelligible noise to me and that's something that has always attracted me in music. Death Metal is the same think, when I first heard Emporor I couldn't even discern the guitar notes it was just like SSSSHHHHH and I was likes yeah, Bring it On! So Skinny Puppy, Iron Maiden. . .

A: And we can't leave out Gwar.

D: Andy actually gave Gwar lyrics to his pshychairitrist, he photocopied them and gave them to him. Which I think is probably the most brilliant thing that ever could be done. Andy's doctor was the guy from Michelle remembers, so Andy gave the guy from Michelle Remember's GWAR lyrics.

And we can't forget Cold Cut. They started Ninja Tune. Ninja Tune was very avante garde at one time.

A: They were severe cutting edge mixing. ... Things like Bits and Pieces, that was like a triumphant song for a long period in my life.

M: So how did you score the radio gig?

D: Just through the communications program. I was doing the show with this other guy who was like (speaks in that college radio monotone voice that plagues campuses across Canada) and had no personality, my personality is like really fucking loud so I just took over and it was just too damn bad for him and I justsodomized the whole affair. Then I got Andy in on it. We'd ride up there with our backpacks full of turntables and records. At one point I had this marble turntable and we had to ride on BMX bikes from Bay Street downtown to Camosun College which is all up hill with a marble turntable in my backpack. It was pretty fucking brutal but we loved it, it was like our greatest thrill. The radio show opened up our
eyes so much because people would send us music.

A: All of a sudden "Hey I have never heard of this band, their name is in like 14 different languages and then that would be our favourite band for the week.

D: We would get like 30 Cds to review. 99% of techno sucks shit. There is an overwhelming majority of techno that is abysmal pap where someone just turned on their drum machine, left it running and then sold twenty albums of it. And that sucks.

A: That's no good.

D: The highlight of our radio show was when the program director of the U-Vic radio station called us up and said that we were the most interesting thing he had ever heard on Camosun College radio. That was definitely a highlight of our career, we're like Who Bad.

M: So what's the fascination with the C64?

A: I found that if you use the PC to make a sound and you try to change the parameters too much, the PC will say "I can't do that" and it has safe guards against making noises that will affect the computer but on the Commodore, all you do is tell it to do things but if it doesn't know how it tries anyway. It will make the most attrocious noise but that is its interpretation of what you are trying to get it to do. It's not making music anymore it's making fax machine noises, talking in binary while it tries to make music.

D: SIDplayer never crashes, I don't remember it ever crashing once.

A: It can't, it doesn't have the memory to crash.

D: Even with the earliest FM mono sound blasters, they produced a real clean even sounding waveform in contrast to the C64, it's got a tapered attack and decay, it isn't noisy and butt rude. Where the C64 is just so primitive. . .

A: It's primal. .

D: Yeah, it's raw, visceral most introductary waveform you can have

A: It's pretty much an analog computer.

D: That's what we like about it is just so raw. When I hear crazy waveform modulation it just speaks to my soul. It's like Yeah, there it is (screeching noises from Dave).

M: SO who has the better decks?

D: He does (points at Andy).

M: No argument?

A: Nope, what can you do.

D: Mine our less expensive but have a broader range of pitch control. But the Technics are the industry standard so he wins the snooty factor.

A: I hold my nose up high.

M: Is the snooty factor justified?

D: Yeah.

A: No.

D: What's better about the 12's is the drive itself. Underneath the platter of the 1200s is a circle of magnets where as mine (Geminis) are just two fangs that sit in a dish that turns so his is more of a direct direct drive where is mine is more of an indirect direct drive.

A: More of skewed drive.

D: Yeah, in my head. (laughter) The part that the motor rides on is more prone to breaking down.

M: So I hear you have a problem with Vestax?

D: Not really. My only problem with Vestax is that they are sensitive to red lining.

A: That's not a problem with Vestax.

D: Yeah, that's a problem with me (laughter). I don't know whether it's that or not I had a TNT beer in my backpack and one of the faders on my mixer opened it with a little pinhole and it sprayed half a TNT into my mixer before I noticed and being me, I was like "It's dried out, it will be fine" and I used it anyway and then it went all funky. So I don't know if
it was from consistent redlining every single day or if it was the beer.

A: I think it was the beer.

D: With the Radio Shack mixers that we have, we still have the same Radio Shack Mixers that we started Djing with like 5 years ago. We redlined them so bad that even when the channel didn't have any sound on 'em, the hum from our shit would be redlining. They would peak down to plus 3 when there was no signal on and they still work. Radio Shack, people may diss it but those Genexa mixers for whatever year we got them must have been made by
Hughes Aerospace Technology or something as fuck are they ever solid.

M: So is there any gear or specific vinyl that you are totally fucking jonesing for that's like the holy grail if you come across it?

A: My attention span is too short to think that far ahead.

D: Yeah, I want to get more death metal on vinyl. It's really really hard to get good old school death metal on vinyl. . .

A: And I already have Lionel Ritchie.

M: Scrape in Vancouver is the place to get metal on vinyl man.

D: Yeah, that's an awesome store. I would like to be able to afford more records. I'm poor and I'm using the same records all the time and I wouldn't if I had more money.

A: I'd like to go and camp in Record Land [record store in Calgary with a massive vinyl collection]

D: Also I would like to get our records cut more than anything else, what I would like more than anything would a be record with one side nothing but C64 and the other side of us just singing stupid funny shit and then just do like battle with whatever. We got a track on our new album called "I got gang tattoos on my scratching finger". Gang talk about how our
scratching fingers are so tough.

A: Someone tried to do a drive by the other day and I deflected all the bullits with my scratching finger.

D: Yeah, exactly.

M: So what's your secret weapon that you pull from your stacks, the record you pull out when you need maximum slaying power?

A: Gotta be "The kids must know".

D: Yeah, we got this record about not letting pedophiles touch you. And it actually says in it " There are lots of peoplewho touch us but they shouldn't touch our private parts". That is my favourite battle record of all time. There is no like you are playing your grandmother's birthday or you are playing the Hanekuh party, bust that shit out and 10 out of 10 you
are slaying. Also "Inside", this sleazy house track but definitely the Pedo breaks. We actually had a whole tape called "Pedo Rave". That's the GWAR influence right there, man. There's no other DJ's that didn't listen to GWAR who would ever do pedo breaks where as we hear one pedo break and and we are crying we are laughing so hard. We are the market for that.

A: Perhaps politically incorrect Djing would be our style.

M: What's your most preposterous mix that you put together?

D: All the ones we did when we didn't know how to DJ.

M: Is there anything that is too sacred to use as Black Plague source material?

A: Yes. We try to avoid using any of the other battle Djs records cuz if you hear a really killer scratch on our album we want it to be us and not somebody else's record.

D: Yeah, when we play songs on our album we try to make sure that every scratch on every track is 100% us. If we use records that have wicked beats but have scratching we won't release that as album tracks. It's cheating to use someone else's wicked scratching. If we went out and bought the Beat Junkies and we just played the beat junkies for the whole
background of our CD and then we scratched over top of it no matter how cool our scratching was, that's the the Beat Junkies to us. The Beat Junkies are so god like in stature that we aim to compete 2004 World Technics DJ Championships and we're gonna beat them.

A: One way or another. Either with our skillz or our clubs.

D: (laughter) Andy had a great idea, he said we are really gonna have to break some fingers before 2004. Go in there, hey Q-bert, c'mere. "smash".

A: Ow, my scratching finger!

D: Then we'll see who has the gang tattoos.

M: So why 2004?

D: Cuz then we have more time to practice.

M: What's the longest set you have ever played?

D: Oh fuck who even knows. All night.

A: like 10 hours.

D: Yeah when we were young we would start at like 6 O'Clock and go until the joints ran out. We drank a lot of moonshine in those days, Nightstar 40oz, Mccaw 151 proof. We were gutter.

M: So what's the deal with french rap?

D: It's rad.

A: And it's not as bad when we screw up because we don't know what it is saying anyways.

D: Not only that... I like it more cause it doesn't sound so stupid like so many rappers are so ignorant. They are always rapping "like my bitchez are many you know" or like "my gatz in the hood". Rap stuff in general is basically pretty contemptable. I mean there's some rappers that do a really good job of stating who they are and what their mission statement is
or whatever but when every fucking song is like "I got this many gold chains on my dick" it's like, shut up you idiot. Where as with French rap it's cool cuz they still got the rhythm and inate sort of harmony but it's not just like "I'm so cool and your not" and all that shit cause you can't understand it.

A: And you kind of gotta wonder about gangster rappers when they are like talking about how many hoes they've pimped and how many people they have capped, why haven't they been arrested yet? I mean they are publishing this and telling everyone about it. Isn't that enough?

M: They get to play your record in court. . .

D: Exactly, as evidence. (laughter)

M: so what's your recording process and setup?

D: We have a 20 year old Akai tape deck, it's called the "invertomatic", the first auto reverse tapedeck ever made. It actually has a little metal arm which comes out and grabs the tape, pushes it out, turns it backwards and then pushes it back against the head.

A: If it worked.

D: Yeah itdoesn't work any more but it's got glass ferrite - Xtal head which is probably the best composition for cheap magnetic tape.

A: You can take a tape that someone has used like 300 times and it will still wipe the tape right clean.

D: We have never cleaned the head and we always redline it. It has some built in limiter system so it will not saturate the tape. It has, but very rarely -we've been fucking loud into that thing and it doesn't saturate too much. That's like our prize piece of stereo equipment. I bought it at a police auction 4 years ago for 8 bucks and it's always done a good job since. It's like indispensable.

As far as recording goes we just get together and smoke a lot of pot and drink a lot of beer and we just jam, bust out whatever. Scratch and sample, whether it's Lionel Ritchie or Michael Jackson or Infernal Majesty or you know whatever.

M: What's the first album all about?

D: The first album pew pew pew my pants. . .like it sounds "Pewww".

A: More than anything it is just the commodore, when it tries so hard it sounds so mournful it's like "peeww". It just cries to my soul. (Dave wipes a tear from his eye)

D:The Commodore is as far as I am concerned the ultimate source for bizzarre fucked up noise. I have never heard anything that made more fucked up sounds than that.

A: My next goal is to look more into fractal music.

D: "Pew Pew Pew my pants"'s album cover idea originally was a church pew covered with a very large pair of pants. The pants inference comes in because all the fancy pants Djs that we would have come to our house, they'd have like the 800 dollar designer pants and they would think they were the shit.

A: Small communites living under each pant leg.

D: Yeah the bigger and more elaborate their pants were the cooler they thought they were so the Pew was their music and the pants were what their sense of identity was and we completely rejected that with our music. It was the ultimate critical analysis and subsequent rejection of their world. The Commodore is the ugliest and most fucked up thing that they could never understand. They could not find the disharmonic chaos appealing in any way
and that's sort of its magic.

M: What's the new album all about?

D: The new album I guess, is based on our utter contempt and ridicule for what society holds sacred.

A: And mad skillz.

D: Yeah, and you take those two and put em in a blender and it's called needle exchange. And yeah, the idea is basically that not only is it a disturbing and off-colour joke to call your album Needle Exchange, but that's also fundamentally what our music is, cuz we're using needles to pick up the sound and we're picking up needles behind the Holiday Court
(laughter). Oh yeah.

M: So you got the needle belt?

D: Oh yeah, totally. And yeah, it's, we've got a couple of tracks done on it so far,

A: Yeah, about 20 minutes worth already.

D: yeah, and we're really inspired with the direction it's going. We're finding that we're able to churn out more consistently understandable material. That's the cool thing about coming from the absolute level of abstraction and bringing it to the level of conventional music that other people can listen to, is [that] our music is completely chaotic and off the wall, but now we've had so much practice at being so chaotic that we can form it into chunks.

A: It's more in time.

D: And that's where the hiphop really comes in, right, cuz it's just the fundamental grass roots of a drum beat. (makes drum beat sounds) And then over that you can build anything.

A: That was break beat, man.

D: But it's easy to understand for other people, so where before like if it was just crazy fucked up noise, they couldn't get into it. but with a tempo that everyone can sort of identify with on a sort of puppy, alarm-clock kind of level, that makes it more acessible for everyone.

A: I don't identify with puppies.

D: No, like puppies, when you get a puppy you put an alarm clock in its bed so it thinks it's the rhythm of its mother's heart, that's why people like music that's around the same bpm as heart rate.

A: Do you know how disgusting a puppy would taste with an alarm clock in it? That's totally wrong.

D: Our, last album which is going to be available in stores soon, we're just putting the finishing touches on the graphics right now, is

A: Scratchin Where We Pew.

D: Yeah, Scratchin Where We Pew, and that's totally in the realm of hip hop. All of the beats are either sort of fat drum & bass or hip hop beats, and then we just sort of go on our own esoteric tangents from there, but I think it's very accessible, like it's something you could play it to normal people who like normal techno and they would appreciate it as much as say, Merzbow. (laughter) But I don't know, I mean that's a pretty pretentious claim, but it's, I thinks it's our most broad market potential album, out of anything we've ever produced.

M: So you're saying it's coming to a car commercial near you soon?

D: Oh yeah, yeah. No, beer. Beer.

A: We can hope. Naw, we gotta go for the hard alcohol.

M: Tampax?

D: Tampax! Yeah, the hard alcohol commercial, that'd be amazing.

A: The hard alcohol and tampax, a crossover.

D: Yeah.

M: They bottle them together, they tie the tampon around the top

M: So what's theconnection between hop and video games?

D: Is there one?

M: Well with you guys you are just as likely to be blaring the gansta rap as like the Castlevania soundtrack.

D: Yeah, that's true.

A: video game soundtracks are dope.

D: We identify with it because of the primitivness sort of sound of it. The whole reason that techno saturated the world was because of stuff like Nintendo. It pre-emptively attacked the minds of the youth of yesterday and got them hooked on "bleep bleep bloop" and from there it was just a matter of time before someone said "hey, I can adapt that with a big phat
drum beat and then we've got a puppy with an alarm clock and a Nintendo all in the same song. And that's acid or house music. I think that now you could pretty well plug in an Ninetdo and play that and use it as an instrument.

M: So what's the attraction to gabber?

A: It's heavy. It's our death metal roots shining through. It's the Cannibal Corpse of techno. It's still screaming and they are still angry and so are we.

D: We love music that's really aggressive. I think that for me that music that's really aggressive is like a catharsis. I find that a lot of the things that I hear and see in the outside world are so pathetically contemptable and at the same time so horrifying and to have brutal brutal music vents that in a healthy natural way. Instead of going out and beating on people that I think are stupid with a big club with spikes in it I can just go home and put on gabber or death metal. Nasenbluten. Props to Nasenbluten making some of the most brutal gabber that's really good that's out there. Like anything it's a matter of how many edits did they
put into it. If they just turned on the drum machine it doesn't matter what tempo it is it still sucks but if they really went in and tweaked out each note and put lots of samples in and there is a lot of care and personality done. . .it could be anything, I don't really like trance but there is even trance that has that. Where it is just edited to the nines. If they cared enough to tweak it out then it is good.

A: Put more of themselves into it as opposed to just putting on their 303 and saying hey, all these stock drumbeats, I could use them to make music.

D: House 4, uh uh uh uh – I did it!

M: So why all the gang signs?

D: Cuz we're cheeky. We really hold the tough gangsta phenomena in a great deal of ontempt but we also find it very amusing so we make a lot of jokes about pretneding like we are tough and stuff. We do gothic rap and french rap and catholic rap.

I think that the whole phenomena has blown so far out of proportion in our little delicate wafer thin slice of North America. You know there is no real gang activity in Victoria, that's fucking retarded. Victoria is like an isolated community full of senior citizens, it's just like 15 year old white kids in their mom's minivan driving around booming Ice T or whatever.

A: Shooting sling shots at cars and stuff. Drive By ! (twhapping noise)

D: That's about as gang as grandmothers combing their hair in the morning for fuck's sake. And that's what we are really mocking. Actual people in actual gangs, if that's your thing. . .

A: We're OK with them

D: Whatever, as long as you don't come and kill us for saying this. It's just a contemptable thing in Victoria where it's such an isolated community.

A: Maybe once in a while in a severe storm a gang member will wash up on the beach.

M: So if you guys had to pick a side are you more thrift store or techno record store? Cuz you ain't gonna be finding the dope beats at a thrift store but you aren't going to be find pedo breaks . . .

A: Actually I spend about the same amount of money at both stores but I get like 20 records at the thrift store and one at the record store.

D: The thing that is cool too is that a lot of the records that we would lke are not necessarily the first thing that is gonna sell, especially gabber. If you go into every record store in Victoria at this very minute there might be two or three gabber records in total.

A: In a good month.

D: Yeah, like there's none.

A: and if I go back there in six months they will still be there.

D: But you can get generic hip hop beats from anywhere really, They're generic hop hop beats man, that's what you do with them. But when you are talking about really esoteric music then you have to really have to go out to the nines. So it's not even thrift store or record shop, it's like you gotta go to places where other people wouldn't necessarily look. Anywhere from garage sales to "normal" record stores that are catering the adult
jazz market. They might have accidentally got in some sound effects records and that's where the real candy is. That's for me what it is all about.

M: so what is it exactly that gets you guys so wet over vinyl?

D: It's easy to manipulate.

A: If you are playing a CD, like a modern Djs use the CD mixer, if one of your Cds starts to skip you cannot open the CD player up and tweak it a little bit with your finger so it avoids that burr on the CD you have to just either go fast forward or rewind and hope itdoesn't happen again. But with vinyl I can just look at it funny and it will go to the next track in
the groove.

D: For me you can just see everything exactly where it is on the record. That's the ultimate reason to use vinyl. You just hold it up to the light and you can see every bass note, like not that specifically but you can see a pattern in the record that shows you where all the samples are cuz the different colour on the vinyl indicates where the bass is or whatever. I
just look at my records and I know exactly where to drop it where there is gonna be whatever kind of sound that I am looking for. Even on a sample record, if you want heavy industrail machine sounds you look for the darkest tracks and if you want talking or cats meowing you look for light coloured tracks. And it's instantly accessible there's no delay time except for the time it takes you to look at it. Where as with a CD mixer you have
to go " I need to shuffle to 16:42 and 36 frames" you can't just pick it up and put it there.

A: And vinyl mixing is a more hands on experience. It more like playing a guitar than playing on a computer by comparison. With CD mixers you are pressing a button and the CD mixer is doing the stuff for you where as we don't have any buttons, we actually have to go and do it.

D: Yeah, to make crazy tweaked out shit there's nothing that beats having the most absolute hands on experience that's possible. The digital equivalent would be having a ribbon controller where you can tweak on it and have it do whatever you want, it will turn that into math on a graph but records are always like that, evey record is like that. Any record
you could ever get you can put the sound anywhere on the record right away and then just go from there.

M: so how much time do you spend in the average week on the decks?

D: 10 to 12 hours.

A: 10 minimum, cause we do two mixing sets a week.

D: Two or three.

A: But some weeks we go way out - if my roomate is away we get more time to jam cuz we don't offend him so much.

D: I jam in my room a lot too at night. I get all inspired and I just do goofy breaks at home for the fun of it. Sometimes I just get up in the morning and have a cup of coffee and just go of for half an hour or whatever. It's a total impulse thing, like the soundwaves on the records
themselves. A lot of time. Maybe 20 hours would be realistic. There's 12 of us practicing together and then other fucking around time when we get off work or just wake up or just feel like scratching.

M: any final words?

D: A big fuck you to music that gets on TV and that's super popular and that everyone likes. Much Music. We are not big fans of over produced stuff that sells too well because they paid someone else to be their talent. The people who deserve the most respect are people who are listening to things like the beat junkies and just try to do it, just making their own
crazy abstract style of breaking and scratching and battle.

A: The Internet changes music so much because you find stuff by people that aren't on labels. People can become popular and not have to sell out to do it.

D: Rather than writing music with the intent to make money we write our music because it is just a natural part of who we are, it just came out of us. We didn't mean to be DJs any more than we meant to be metal heads or meant to be whatever genre, that's who we are.

A: Sketchy weirdos. (laughter)