REALLY SO STRANGE Damian Lazarus likes his beats with a side of weird.
Photo: Rob Low
It’s been a little more than three years since we spoke with Damian Lazarus, and things have changed in the dance-music underground—big time. The former Dazed & Confused magazine editor, current head honcho of Crosstown Rebels and perpetual seeker of new underground music makes a pretty good lens for looking at global dance music. He notices the details, but he’s also a big-picture, magazine-headline kind of guy. So when we got him on the phone in his new home base of Los Angeles, we had to check in on this curator of cool.
Has he seen the decline in dance-music culture turn around? For sure. “That kind of untouchable, cool, X-factor thing has suddenly become quite normal in the dance world,” he enthuses. Records that would have been too strange for the big rooms three years ago are now hits. Folks like Radio Slave and Claude VonStroke are considered big names—dance music has its mojo back.
The top ten underground tracks now circle the globe at an alarming rate—making the hard-to-find cool just a Beatport purchase away. “It only takes a couple people to say a record’s hot—and for it to be played at a couple of choice parties—for it to suddenly blow up, like, out of nowhere,” notes Lazarus, citing Sis’s “Trompeta” on the SED label as an example of this month’s out-of-the-blue heater in the minimal-house world. Released by an unknown, the house track with a Balkan horn sample was soon picked up by über-DJs such as Erick Morillo and Steve Lawler. And boom. This all makes Lazarus’s job—being the guy out on the fringe—quite a bit trickier. He has to dig deeper.
Lazarus remains guided by a sincere interest in weird, twisted dance tracks with a kick to them. His latest mix disc, for the Sci-Fi Lo-Fi series, is an intoxicating statement with dubstep, vintage electro-funk and odd atmospheric techno all figuring in—Lazarus has no fear of the beatless bit of ether or an upfront vocal.
In this new environment, he’s been loosened up to do bold things. His popular Lazpod DJ installments are nothing like his DJ sets—more like representations of after-hours parties where he might play the Shangri-Las, Vampire Weekend and spy soundtracks: “Sometimes I think I don’t want to hear another ten hours of techno.”
Lazarus, the artist, enters the underground singles fray in December on a tune in which he sings lead alongside Swedish twins. His debut album will follow sometime in 2009.
His boldest move of all is from London to Los Angeles, where Lazarus will be among the residents at Hollywood megaclub Avalon. His European DJ pals on Ibiza think he’s nuts, but Lazarus contends the U.S. is absolutely where it’s at. He thinks we are coming up on an underground boom. “I couldn’t have come here if the scene is as dead as people think it is. There is some cool shit happening, and not everyone sees it yet. I want to be here to see it build.”
Damian Lazarus spins Friday 24 at Spy Bar.