Murdertronics has been playing Chief shows/parties for as long as we can remember. Whenever we have a dirty, loud-as-fuck, ass-shakin, bass heavy, sex in the corner of the dance floor, dance party with the likes of Mr. Andersonic and DJ Dirtyfinger, you can be sure that Murdertronics is also on the bill. Mr. Zipco even went as far as to pay for their hotel room at SXSW last year because they had promised to play our Chief SXSW Showcase. and they were almost brave/stupid enough to follow through on their word… (Editor’s Note: You fucking PUSSIES with your expensive equipment that cant get destroyed…) Mind you, the Chief Records Showcase was where we BLEW UP THAT FUCKING CAR! (see the photo above! Cover image all day, Seelie!)
Anyhow, these guys are scummy and brilliant and they’ll get your lil sister pregnant. Them’s the facts, jack.
Ok, so, for transcription purposes. Who are you and what are your names?
My name is John we’re Murdertronics.
Chris: And what do you do John?
I play a drum machine and use a computer. Music for Booty-shaking, pussy poppin, all that shit… That’s what I do.
Chris, Murdertronics. I play using a drum machine synthesizer and run samples.
So for those who don’t know out there, how’d you guys get together and how’d you get your name.
J: We got the name the beginning of last summer. We just got pretty much drunk all the time and we found a concept we liked while working together actually at this place Potato Café. We realized that making booty bass and Baltimore club was a pretty easy yet effective thing to do, and we threw our dirty bass lines on it, and that’s how we formed our group, Murdertronics. The name deriving from Murdertron, Chris’s alter ego of sorts.
C: Cuz we weren’t creative enough to come up with another name.
Sounds pretty robotic, any influences on Murdertron?
C; Uhhh.. Nothing so much, actually the name Murdertron kind of stems from Killbot, which was the initial name, but then I found out that Murder by Death had a song Killbot 2000, which I guess I had taken from subconsciencely, so I realized it was time to switch it over, wanted to keep this whole kind of murder aesthetic thing going… but I guess, at the same time, switch it up to some small extent.
So you guys have been playing together for about a year, playing out for about a year?
C: Yeah, we’ve actually known each other for about 9 years, though. This guy actually taught me how to use my first drum machine over in Geneva Switzerland, some time ago. While we’ve kind of been separate, and haven’t necessarily been collaborating as much as we have been recently, we’ve at least been making music kind of alongside one other for a good nine years or so.
OK. How did you guys first pick up, like instead of conventional instruments, a drum machines and a MIDI machine, and computers? How’d you pick up electronic instruments?
J: Electronic music? How’d I pick it up? I was probably like 15 and my older brother bought a drum machine called the MC303 by Roland and it just looked pretty attractive to me, cuz to be honest I hate DJing, trying to spin two vinyls together was a major pain in the ass for me, this is pre serrato, traktor, abelton, etc… So when he bought that he showed me how to do the tsss tsss tsss techno beat, that’s where it went off. I just kind of got addicted to it. And then I got the Electribe S. And that’s what I showed [Chris] how to use.
C:Very very stupidly, it must have been like 10 years ago or something, like I MC’d a little bit, really really terribly. I started making my own really terrible instrumentals with early bootlegged russian programs, most notably acid pro, frooty loops and EJ, all these really terrible programs at the time (1999-2001). So I felt the need to step it up… I’d already seen what he got to do, I played with him a little bit at school…Sold weed, copped an esx and a tascam portastudio 4 track. I guess everything akwardly stemmed from that.
That’s how the magic happened.
C:Indeed.
So I listened to your music, you guys sample a lot from Baltimore Beats and a lot of old deep beats. How are those influences? Are they just easy to pick up? How did you come to those?
J:Like in terms of making a Baltimore Beat?
Why did they influence you? What are your influences?
J:Well Baltimore, I really like the Baltimore because its got the house attachment to it. But also what’s really good about Baltimore is the hip hop influence to it. So basically you can put a lot of vocals on top of it and it makes everything sound a lot more interesting, more fun, more danceable I guess.
C: I’ve been listening to Baltimore for a while, actually I can thank Jah Jah for kind of getting me into that a little bit maybe like 5 years ago or so. It was just something that was straight forward and simple enough but at the same time so powerful in its simplicity that it kind of works. It seemed kind of like a logical progression coming from this very electronic trip hop background wanted something that would cross over and make people dance. As far as baltimore is concerned I guess I’m most into Emynd, Rod Lee, KW Griff, Tittsworth, King Tutt, Scotty B to name a few. I’m always hearing new shit that blows me away. I like to see both progression and tradition working together.
When did you realize you guys could play together and make people dance?
C: When we played together and made people dance. [Laughs]
I guess I answered my own question.
J: During the middle of the summer we figured out our live set, we recorded it, and burnt it and gave it out to friends of ours left and right, and friends of ours were kind of blown away by it, and we decided to actually do a performance to see what happens, the Southside Speakeasy, I don’t know if you know it…
C:Yeah, at the time it was the worst fucking venue ever, not bar neccessarily, but venue. It was always dead there, it was a standard spot to kick it at though. Max57 had a regular DJ spot there, and he was like all right, if you kids want to play, you can do it, and it was nice to actually to see people dance there, and I knew that things had gone well when the owner presented us with a whole bunch of special beers from his own personal cooler. Some Rougue or something.
So does your live set differ from the stuff your making in the house?
C: As far as myself, yes. I do a lot more than just this standard Baltimore club music… I just did a remake for this band Cady Wire which is almost like borderline Kraut Rock… I dunno. I make noise, I make weird electronic trip hop stuff, dub, I’m all over the place in that respect, alot of experimentation, testing the limits of technology… I guess yourself too, a little bit as well…
J: Yeah, I mean, I got trip hop, trip hop of course, just making like some weird beats, I do a lot of hardtech (sp) as well, which is like from the French rave party movement, like the guerilla scene over there… That’s how I got my live PA skills from. I like doing a lot of crunk beats as well, you know, things like that.
C: And live sets tracks tend to transition well into one another, moreso just the bulk of our work.
So you mentioned you met up Geneva first.
C: Yeah.
So how were you guys in Geneva to begin with? Taking it back it a little bit.
J: Well we were going to high school together. His Dad had a job over thereand my Dad had a job over there working for the United Nations.
C:Yeah, my Dad worked for Volvo at the time. We ended up at the same high school he ended up fooling around with one of the girls that was part of our clique so we all kind of hated on him for a while. Until his friend from New York started going to our school as well who I had a crush on, so I started talking to this kid to try to earn some brownie points. And this kid was mad into DJ Kam and DJ Shadow because that’s what people were listening to in ‘98.
J: We also smoked a shitload of weed together.
C: Oh Yeah. That too.
That brings people together.
Well it was Geneva Switzerland, so… Well, I don’t wanna get into that.
So how do you guys put together a song from start to finish? Do you guys work well together, do you play a lot?
C: It’s more… I do my bit and he does his bit. As far as like actual collaborations, yes, they’re have certainly been some. But largely, the way the sets actually work up, they’re more of a ping-pong based than, us composing full tracks and playing together at the same time. If you go to a Murdertronics event for example, you’ll see, at one time there’s usually just one of us on the drum machine, perhaps another person on the computer picking samples for something to start, but as far as actual music composition is concerned, it’s very solitary.
That brings me to another point. So what’s your position on sampling? Legally wise, I know there’s been a lot of people coming up like Girl Talk and people like that, who have been getting flack for just doing straight samples. What is your position on that?
C: If you can make it something different I feel like it’s not necessarily a bad thing, if you want to use it as a tool it can certainly be that. But I feel like, with Girl Talk, as interesting as it is and as it is cool as they are, chopping samples up… that’s very true, they are straight samples. Frankly, I could run essentially a very very quick Girl Talk thing if I was a little bit better on Ableton right now in 10 minutes. So as far as them specifically… I have kind of my own personal issue… But I mean, sampling, if you can use it to enrich your music, is definitely a positive thing. Legality is a very funny issue that we’re kind of working on a little bit right now… [laughs] We got lawyers talking about that, so we will say no more, say no more.
How is technology starting… You guys started to learn all this stuff in ‘98, with all the new sample systems and all the software. How has it changed your guys’s playing style and putting stuff together?
J: It’s made it a whole lot easier. I remember, say, in ‘97 or ‘98, I would do like my first live PA with one drum machine and with another drum machine, and I would be able to last, say, thirty minutes maximum. And at that point my head was about to explode. Now the computer, with Ableton and things like that, you’re able to kind of transition, ease what’s going on in your mind a little bit, because all you have to do is click buttons. The freedom’s still there… If I want to put my bass line in there, to a certain point, I can still do that. It’s just that it’s more visual now, instead of numerical, like I’d have to go pattern to pattern, all numerical.
Chris: I also feel like it doesn’t necessarily always facilitate matters… I was talking to him about this. Shit, before I had one drum machine with 90 seconds of sampling time, which is nothing. And now I’m using four programs, two MIDI controllers, a fucking synthesizer, a drum machine. It’s a lot more gear, and yes, your options do increase. But at the same time, actually constructing the song, at this point, takes me so much longer then it did 10 years ago. Now composing the set, at the same time, is far easier, ‘cuz as he was saying – you simply click buttons.
So if you wanted to put something in at the drop of a hat, you could.
C:Yeah.
So going back, you guys mentioned you started at Southside Speakeasy, what are the better venues you’ve played, and what are some of the worst?
C: Um, we have interesting luck at Chief parties [laughs] We got to play the Pianos show which was cool, but they had shut that down. They left us with maybe 10 minutes or so to play over there, so that was cool. Once again, Chief Anniversary party, another interesting thing – they had to shut us down in the middle of that because the cops were coming, which was fun. Um, I dunno. I really like Supreme Trading back that was open, just generally very very good vibe, I mean, obviously Bodega is always just a fun spot… I mean, any place that isn’t terribly terribly expensive where our friends can come out, with a decent sound system, which there’s more than ample.
J: Yeah, we’re not really trying to get out to the very commercialized venues, say like out in Manhattan or anything like that, we’re trying to stay away from that, just because you feel you’re away from the crowd, as opposed to things at Bodega or at more Brooklyn-based parties, you feel you’re a lot closer to the crowd, and it feels like you’re more attached to them. When you’re bringing things, when you bring out things, like say sounds, you know when to do to that. You know where to make cuts and things like that. It’s easier judge the crowd, generally, because you’re closer to them. But the best show? I dunno. Best show so far – the Sounds of Brooklyn show, that was pretty dope wasn’t it?
C: Yeah that was definitely a good time.
In Manhattan people are more interested in looking at each other than paying attention to what’s going on with the music.
J: Yeah absolutely. There’s more… “insecurities.”
[laughs]
So…You guys have any groupies yet? People who come to your shows a lot who are really into it?
J:Yeah, you should ask Nick [Cannax]? He’s the one jumping around the crowd yelling.
C: I mean, there’s a couple, maybe, big question mark, it’s tough to decide whose a groupie and whose just like a friend whose randomly around. There’s a big collective of us, we all kind of go out. So it’s tough to say whose what, but there are definitely people who come to all the shows.
So I know this was a while ago, but in comparison to being in Europe and being here, are there major differences with the crowd, with music?
C: Oh absolutely. Just given the time that’s lapsed since been there… Music has changed entirely. I mean shit when I came over here I was super into drum and bass and old school jungle and now I can’t listen to that shit at all. So, but as far as crowds, I mean it’s particularly in Geneva… People are just very very very conservative. And everyone’s so blunted over there… There is no real crowd reaction.[Laughs]
J: Yeah, Brooklyn, I would say, probably everywhere I’ve performed – even kids in Europe – I had never seen a crowd that could dance so well. Also, I’ve never really seen outside of Brooklyn different races actually really together, different styles of people actually together. I mean that in the sense that you’ll have black people, Puerto Ricans, whites, and then also punks and hip-hop kids and things like that. Altogether in one room having a good time. And that I have never seen outside of Brooklyn. In Europe, I’ve been to a thousand different things in Europe, it’s always like, ‘oh that’s a hip hop crowd and it’s only a hip hop crowd’. And if it’s going to be hip hop, you’ll know what kind of people are going to be there.
C:What about in Brooklyn comparatively to the West Coast when you were over there?
J: On the West Coast? I didn’t really go to that many shows on the West Coast. West Coast [is the] same thing; very cliquey, I didn’t see a lot of Mexican kids hanging out with like the white kids from Hollywood and shit. You don’t see a lot of kids mixing together. When I went to parties it was like, hey I’m the only white guy there, or shit, there’s like one Mexican dude in here. It’s kind of weird like that on the West Coast, I feel, but that’s towards L.A. and things like that, so I can’t really talk about the Bay area. They’re probably mixing it up more over there.
What were you doing out in the West Coast?
J: I was going to school over there. After I graduated from Geneva, I went out to France for a little bit, and then my pops called me up and was like, you wanna go to college? And I was like all right. I was kind of fed up of working in a pillow making factory… Was just, alright, whatevs, sounds like a good idea… but that was the only school that actually accepted me cuz I kind of repeated twelfth grade twice… [laughs] and my SAT scores were just like 1100, kinda like whatever, so it was like a second chance school I guess, and then I transferred to the sister school over here. Fuck LA! Fuck San Pedro [laughs]
So, on your facebook and your internet promotion, you guys have some monikers going on here. You got Murderton and, I take it, you’re Dypso, right?
J: Yeah, Dipso. Known as Dipso since my friends called me that in France.
Is there a story behind that?
J: Dipso… It’s just, I’d say, once you start drinking you have a hard time stopin’, and that’s what the European Dypso is, you start drinking at 10:00 at night and then you keep on going till 1 o’clock in the afternoon the next day, yeah, that’s a Dypso. And then you stop drinking till the next weekend… It’s not necessarily an alcoholic, just… Dypso
Intense.
C: Too much beer
J: [laughs] Much too much.
You’ve been approached to do remixes by other bands. So, how did that come around? Are you excited about that? Or is it a pain in the ass?
C: I mean, it depends on who they are. I mean there are definitely things that have been done as favors because we like people moreso then we like their music. So that’s obviously a pain in the ass sometimes. But when you get approached by someone who’s generally very talented, that’s kinda dope.
J: Yeah, like we just got approached by these cats from Team Facelift, and they wanted to use one of our instrumentals in the live set, that I actually remade, I remixed Dance My Pain Away by Rod Lee and they seemed to really like that instrumental, so I kinda remixed it so it would be more appropriate for them, and they seemed pretty happy with that. It’s not done yet, but hopefully it gets done.
So, you guys are starting with the South by Southwest tour, starting in Baltimore and going right down -?
C: Actually, our manager is doing that leg of that, and we’re just flying down there because he doesn’t have the availability to take off from school for that long, and for me, work, so we’re just going down from the 18th to the 24th.
So are you looking forward to anything specific? Is there anything you want to do?
C: Well we’re going to be strip club DJs for one night which is going to be pretty funny. Yeah, I dunno. They’re actually willing to give us the venue, which is sorta payment to let us shoot a video. Hopefully we’re planning to get the girls from Skidmarxxx Bike Club to kinda be our strippers so to speak for the evening, and yeah, we’re going to film this pretty dope video apparently. We’ll see if it actually works. So we have that which is pretty awesome. What else do we have? A show with Bun B, Dead Prez, Mistah Fab and Rick Ross.
J: I dunno.
C: Plus… I mean everything else is really crazy up in the air. We’re just kind of waiting to see… But from we’ve heard from all our friends that have gone up there, that’s just kind of is, and that’s when coolest things tend happen when everything’s not planned out.
Just take your shoes off and invert them or else you’ll get scorpions in them.
Yeah, that’s not gonna be so fun.
[laughs]
J:Not looking forward to that.
So I meant to ask you one other thing about sampling. How do you pick a sample? Do you listen to popular music, radio? Do you just listen to a song and like it?
J: Actually it’s a lot of a capellas. We find them online, and what I did for a couple songs, I’ll take the a capella from song, and I’ll mix the acapella with the a capella from another song. I guess ‘40 oz’ is an example of that?… Where in the beginning it says, ‘guzzle down a 40 oz’ a couple times and that’s by D12, and the main lyrics are from like, Easy-E?
C: I feel like as far as actual acapellas are concerned, you can go and find them online, but it’s not as easy as just finding normal music. There’s only a handful of acapello’s out there. And that’s why so many DJ’s and so many musicians are using the same ones. That’s why we started both mixing different acapella’s together and kind of modulating different vocals together of the acapellas, so we’d have something a little bit different that would set us apart from everyone else.
Speaking of acapellas and samples, what do you feel about Autotune being popular in music right now?
C: Uh, it seemed really cool for a minute, but this is getting obnoxious.
J: Autotune?
C:Uhhh… Like the vodocoder type shit…
J: Ah that shit. I mean that was cool when Daft Punk did back in ‘96…
C:I mean, I wont even hate on Lil’ Wayne for it, because he’s still got a pretty cool voice, but this is just getting stupid… I mean what was Kanye’s last track?[Laughs]
The whole thing’s Autotune.
C: It’s ridiculous. I really wish it wasn’t played out cus I actually really like those sounds and I’m just kind of now figuring out how to get them, but yeah, we’re catching on to this way, way too late.
C:Yeah, Autotune is a gift and a curse. It’s awesome and I hate it and it’s a guilty pleasure.
Sounds different. So, um, what’s the future for Murdertronics? Got a future, thought about it?
Uhhh. No hope, No future, live low. Done.
Alright. Name a time, if you could, a part where you’re really close to death, or an experience here that was really awesome that you want to share with a few more people. It can be seperate or collective.
I want to tell A kidnapping story but I need to find a way to get names out of it… Uhhh… Long story short, there was a point in time where I lived with someone who was a drug dealer. This individual had a young man working for him, small, art student, whatever. Went to go to a delivery. Standard customer, just moved into a new place. Long story short, it was a total setup. Fours guys put this guy into a car, a gun to his head, asking him where the other guy was, thinking he was some big boss motherfucker… [laughs] They end up organizing a meeting, these guys were very dumb, they were playing very loud music in their car so he was able to communicate where he was on the phone… It was pretty much like, I get a telephone call saying, Chris, go upstairs, talk to the bloods, get guns! Someone’s coming over to rob the house. [laughs] So whatever. I don’t hear anything else from anybody else, I don’t know what the hell is going on, bugging out, I’m in my house. And then I hear someone banging at my door. So I remember just coming out with a pipe… With a ski mask and a big ass pipe, and it ends up being my friend that got kidnapped who had gotten away from them. But very very close from feeling like I was going to die… An interesting story, nonetheless… The most interesting bit was I was on the phone with my ladyfriend at the time while he was banging on my door, and I kinda just said goodbye thinking I was going to go to jail or get pretty fucked up, so. But yeah, definitely an interesting… It makes you kind of re-analyze everything. I mean I got the hell outta that situation right after that. It kinda makes you think about the company you keep a little bit differently.
Yeah, definitely.
I couldn’t have paraphrased that anymore.
Close to death situation?
Or a really awesome one you wanna share with people.
I guess that, when I was probably in tenth grade, I told my mom I was going to sleep over at a friend’s house, I went 800 kilometers south out of Geneva into France, met up with my friends convoy, which was like the sound system, went all the way to the middle of Italy, disappeared for a week in a half. My parents didn’t know what happened and I had no way to tell them… Living with this convoy just being a low-life piece of shit, learning all the bad stuff you can do it, and then show up back at home… My mom was like, “Where the fuck have you been?!” I was like, “I had an awesome time!”
Oh you shoulda told the Amsterdam thing.
The tape is still rolling…
This is classic. So, we were in Geneva in 2003 I guess. The year of the G8 riots. It was a big fucking crazy mess, you never hear about it here. But over there it was absolute madness; cops running around shooting people with rubber bullets. Blah Blah Blah. I missed most of it because I was in Florence, but I came back, we met at a friend’s birthday. So we’re hanging out, we’re drinking we’re having a good time… [John] had already got to experience the fun riot stuff, but I was totally at a loss for this. We’re walking down the street, we’re drunk, we’re in a bad mood, blah blah blah, so we had the dumb idea to start throwing bottles at this big glass window at this bougie place. Really stupid idea, we were dumb kids, reckless. Not recommended. But while we’re doing this, my friends are lighting these sofas on fire outside of this squat. We didn’t think much of the whole thing, we were just thinking we need to get the hell out of here and go back to our friend’s house. Cops ran up to us, pulled guns on us, thinking we had just started this big fire – which we had not done, we had done a bunch of bad shit but not that. Long story short, they beat the shit out of both of us, get locked up solitary confinement for a very long time…
J: Fourteen hours.
C: He was a diplomat at the time so it was a total illegal arrest. They let him out in the morning, they go to let me out, but I don’t have any identification on me. So they’re not sure what the hell to do to me. Meanwhile I know I’m supposed to be going to Amsterdam that night. So I pretty much get out of jail, take a swim in the lake, have my friend pack my clothes for me, grab all my clothes, go to the airport, and go to Amsterdam, and that a special Murdertronics story.
J: He thought he was really going to die.
C: Yeah!
J: I was down in the interrogation room and I was hearing.. ‘John!!! John!!! He’s beating me up!!!!’ And I was like, ‘what the fuck is going on????’ And then the cop came down and was like, ‘Yeah you think you’re bad ass, you fucking Americans! You think you’re bad!’ And he starts like shaking me and shit, and then he throws me in a cell and kept banging on my door so I couldn’t sleep… And then he transferred us to another cell at 9:00 o’clock in the morning…
C: And the ironic thing was we were in a cell that was directly beneath the party our friend was throwing. And that is a true motherfucking story.
Interview by Amanda Scigaj.
Photos courtesty of the artist.
Murdertronics on myspace – http://www.myspace.com/murdertronics
Tags: Chief Magazine, Issue 17, Murdertronics
P-I-M-P-S!!!!!!!!!!