Public works damian lazarus12/30/2023 ![]() I’ve got Rampa from Keinemusic on there helping me produce a song with Leon Bridges. I’m trying to make all of these records with different people that you wouldn’t otherwise expect. I have Damian on there with Jungle, who are like a rock band. I have like, TSHA on there who does an amazing wonky U.K. I think my album, if nothing else, is a language of the diversity of dance music. I had just kind of lost touch with that scene. I was so excited about what he was doing, all of these different parties and what it sounded like, I didn’t realize that we all knew each other already. Damian went and started doing this insane desert house thing. We DJ’d Fabric, we all knew Switch, we all came from this one scene of house music. Like, “What’s going on here?” I went to Damian’s party and got his number and texted him, and I literally had his number from like, 15 years ago. I went to Tulum in 2019, just as a field trip. The first album we did with Higher Ground was a Damian Lazarus album. With Higher Ground, are you working spheres of dance that you weren’t as present in before? Stuff like that, correct me if I’m wrong, feels rather new for you. Has the expansion of your Higher Ground label over the last few years created opportunities in realms of dance music that you hadn’t previously been as active in? For example, I saw you were booked at Damian Lazarus’ Day Zero in Israel, and that you played that same party in Tulum this past January. 10 straight house songs that are just like, noises to people. It might be easier to listen to as an album, vs. I wrote some of these records going like, “Change the tempo to 120, let’s make records that are danceable.” I make a record that’s 60 BPM and then flip it… So I made a bunch of records that were pop songs, and then I dressed them up as dance records. I know that I write and arrange records probably actually better than I know how to produce like, techno or something. I had a bunch of gold records that were R&B. It was a whole other lifetime ago, like 12 years ago. When I met Miguel it was with Usher, and I was an R&B producer. Playing dance records is probably the most lucrative thing in my career when I DJ, but I’ve been producing for 15 years. Obviously dance is a genre driven by singles why even group all of these songs together as an album?īecause one thing I do that no DJs do - I really understand songwriting, I think. Here, he talks about crossing musical worlds, the best set he ever played, his recent legal issues, his love for Avicii - and why, after a decade of mainstream EDM verses underground dance music, “in the end, the underground won.” Populated by undergrounds mainstays like Seth Troxler, Damian Lazarus, Amtrac, Aluna, TSHA and Jungle, the artist - as agile with the mainstream as he is with the underground - hopes the album also functions as a primer for new dance listeners to acquaint themselves with the scene’s many sounds and stars. ”) Diplo is intended to function, he says, more “like listening to a mixtape, or like listening at a nightclub.” I don’t know if that was supposed to be a secret, but that’s like, obviously why we’re doing. The artist born Thomas Wesley Pentz, 43, wasn’t making this new batch of songs with an album in mind, today saying that dance albums are simply not “that cool” because “they don’t really work conceptually.” (He also admits that “we put ‘On My Mind’ on there so that we have first week big numbers, because that song already has 200 million streams. Though the DNA of the two albums are the same by virtue of being made by the same person, using similar tools, Diplo - 14 tracks of sleek, deep, buoyant house, tech house and other sounds spanning the underground realm of the electronic scene - is as far away from Florida as Malibu is from Diplo’s native Fort Lauderdale. It’s Diplo’s first all-electronic album in 18 years, since he made the moody Massive Attack homage Florida while, he says, “I was really smoking a lot of weed and getting super high and learning how to produce music.” The occasion is Diplo, out today (March 4) via his underground-oriented Higher Ground label. Nor were promised the countless shows in far-flung reaches of the planet, the private jets, Vegas residencies, cult Instagram following or the big-ass house in Malibu where, this afternoon, Diplo gets on the phone with Billboard. Not that he’d revolutionize the sound of dance music with his dancehall outfit Major Lazer, shift the sound of mainstream pop with Justin Bieber and Skrillex, clock what were then Spotify’s biggest ever streaming numbers, win three Grammys, become a father to three boys or work with everyone from Snoop Dogg to Madonna. Not that his career would soon blow up when he met and produced for M.I.A., with their 2007 collab “Paper Planes” making them both stars. Nothing was assured for Diplo when he was making his first album, Florida, in his bedroom back in 2004.
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