Metro Area are Morgan Geist and Darshan Jesrani, and they're the absolute masters of modern disco influenced house music. They've kindly given us a mix which should warm everyone up nicely for their excellent new Fabric mix CD, and Darshan gave us a lot of his time for an interview with Bodytonic's Conor L...

C: What were your earliest musical influences?

DJ: Earliest influences would probably be, like my various influences would probably be Woodstock era rock, rock things like folk rock, like Santana and The Beatles. My parents had this music program, I think it was aimed at kids, called Free to be you and me, and I listened to that (Laughs). That was some of the very first things I would hear, mostly just because my dad had a record collection of that kind of stuff.

C: Quite a departure from where you are now.

DJ: Yeah definitely you know. That was it then followed by more like pop and rock stuff on the radio and eventually R’n’B, but yeah my earliest stuff was rock and roll LPs and Beatles and stuff like that.

C: Would you ever drop stuff like that in when you are playing?

DJ: No, not really, I haven’t really found that much in the danceable rock direction, I know a lot of people kind of even specialise in it so I know there’s a lot of material out there, but I think since I got really into dance, I haven’t really revisited trying to play that kind of thing in clubs although I still really have a soft spot for it, I really like to listen to it. I figured [the Beatles] didn’t need any more exposure!

C: Which came first, DJing or production?

DJ: Definitely production. I started to, well the whole reason I gravitated towards dance stuff anyways was because I was intrigued with synthesisers, so when I first started to hear synthesisers used in rock and R’n’B music I really was attached to those kind of sounds & instruments so when I was a teenager I got one and started to kind of program it and use a sequencer but that definitely came before I learned how to mix records in a club situation.

C: It’s quite rare actually to hear that, with most people it’s the other way around and production is usually a necessity to progress on the business side.

DJ: Yeah I kind of noticed that. I think both Morgan and I share that we were both sort of a little different because I didn’t actually realise that club music or the electronic music realm was so DJ driven, I didn’t actually get that until later.

C: Well the downside to that is that you get a lot of DJs making records that just don’t actually have the talent or musical ability to do it and you get a lot of poor records as a result.

DJ: Yeah I would agree with that, just even as a record buyer.

C: Personally I find that part funny, because if you were to think about it on the level of say 25 years ago in New York, the idea of asking Patrick Adams to go DJ in a club because you like his records is just nuts!

DJ: Yeah it’s ridiculous (Laughs)

C: You know and people would have laughed at you back then yet...

DJ: "You want me do what!" (Laughs)

C: Yet nowadays its commonplace.

DJ: Yeah sort of the interchangeability of the two is totally a modern thing and it’s a little bit funny.

C: Which do you prefer?

DJ: I love both but I think I would have to say if I had to pick one, I would have to say I like working in the studio and making stuff. I love to DJ, I really do, especially since I’ve kind of developed a feel for it in the past 5/6 years but there’s something about getting an idea out and making it from scratch that if I don’t do it for a while I really, really miss it you know, so I’d have to say that is my favourite.

C: What is your opinion on the current state of nightlife in NY?

DJ: Oh, it’s kind of bleak man. We don’t have enough venues and the people that are doing clubs; it feels like they aren’t really focused on it. There are one or two venues that are thriving and have a distinct program and consistency about them, but I think that a lot of venues are hazardously jumping from trend to trend and not really knowing if they want to be a bottle service place or a fancy place or a dance place and it’s not too good now and the economics of the city have not helped that situation because it puts a lot of pressure on a venue owner to try to figure out a business model that really works so in peoples desperation to pay the high rent and a bunch of stuff, it doesn’t really make for a very focused program.

C: It’s sad to hear that considering the legacy of the city and what has come before.

DJ: Yeah I know, we are still coasting on what we did 25/30 years ago and I feel like we have the raw material here in terms of people, like it’s still a great mix and a great musical history, but the economics have been hard and we are lacking spaces and the mayor is a little bit like I can’t tell what his attitude is. On one hand I feel like he could really be for it and be supportive of nightlife but he hasn’t really addressed it specifically, where as Giuliani, who kind of kicked off the current era in NY, he was definitely decidedly anti – nightlife.

C: Yeah, he shut down a lot of places.

DJ: Yeah, he shut down a lot of places and he really cracked down on the whole quality of life, I don’t know if you heard about that?, like just paying attention to peoples noise complaints and that kind of thing, so it’s been a difficult ten years in New York but I’m hoping to see some changes.

C: Yeah we are having similar issues over here in Ireland and there was a protest in July over the government knocking the hours back to half 2. There are some really talented people but I think it really needs to be going later for that develop the way it needs to.

DJ: Yeah I agree with you. There’s nothing wrong with that though, other cities thrive on that. Like you know if you go out in Spain, they don’t even get to the club until 3!

C: Yeah I love that side of things, but over here people go out late and just go out for 2 hours and go nuts for those 2 hours, you know...

DJ: Yeah totally! (Laughs) It’s funny though, you can kind of feel that people want a little change in the nightlife but the municipalities have to play ball.

C: How much of an influence does older music like disco and Hi-NRG etc have on your productions and taste and why?

DJ: Quite a lot in terms of like trying to get back to some of the original sounds we like in records. Well like sounds and song structure because I feel like in the post Chicago era of club music, people have been into making tracky stuff and I guess the part of wanting to go back to disco was just the desire to get back to just a little more song structure in a piece of dance music. Both sonically and also in terms of song structure, I think disco and pre house club music really influences us a lot. There are so many forms of that too, even danceable new wave records, proto house stuff and disco itself

C: Yeah I think that’s what makes you guys stand out so much is that is isn’t about making 3 note basslines because you can’t play music. There is a good degree of musicality to the stuff you guys produce. I’m not formally musically trained, but I can definitely appreciate good complex string arrangements as opposed to some sample over and over again with a beat under it.

DJ: Thanks. Actually part of our first stuff was almost reacting against what was going on in the market, which was like the late 90s. There were a lot of records being made especially in Chicago, where they would take a really, really nice classic disco track and then loop up the best part of it and then put a stomping kick drum over it. That gave us a lot to rebel against. (Laughs) We don’t want to make anything like that!

C: Which producers, old or new, influence and motivate you?

DJ : On the classic or older side, definitely Patrick Adams, Giorgio Moroder. Kraftwerk I know is really big for Morgan in terms of their aesthetic and like almost making you pay attention to a limited palette of sounds; I know Kraftwerk are huge for that. Song writing wise, I know Leroy Burgess for sure. On the modern side, I guess a lot of the early Detroit and Chicago stuff, like Virgo, Derrick May and even stuff sort of on the European side, a little bit of Basic Channel being into the texture of things

C: I’m actually surprised you didn’t mention Patrick Cowley or Celso Valli because I would have thought those guys would have been a big influence?

DJ: Yeah, I guess they kind of factor in a bit. Morgan might mention them, he plays more Patrick Cowley things than I do but yeah that’s definitely in the mix there.

C: Yeah certainly when I would playing a lot of your records, they would be kind of comparable with that kind of feel.

DJ: Who is it Patrick Cowley and?

C: Celso Valli, the guy who produced Tantra

DJ: Oh yeah. Actually Morgan just started playing this Celso Valli thing that we recently found and it’s a really great record but we didn’t know it when we were producing the first stuff.

C: What was the main influence for the Fabric CD?

DJ: We wanted to try and represent what we do in terms of hitting a mix of influences from different angles. There’s like some typically more funky soulful stuff in there, there’s some new wave angular stuff in there, there’s a little bit of weird New York tracks. We wanted to try to include all this stuff but also not necessarily play all the things that we do in a DJ set and we wanted to throw on a few oddball things that we wouldn’t play in a club and of course the final set of parameters were what they were able to license so we have them a bunch of tracks and they gave us back a list of things that were cleared and we worked with those and I think we were able to hit all the bases with them but that was the idea, to give people something a little bit different than what we might do in a club but include all the facets of what we like

C: It was definitely a different mix from what you normally hear

DJ: Cool, because I didn’t really know people were doing with the series I’d heard Carl Craigs one and that was pretty tracky and consistent

C: Yeah, I think bar James Murphy’s one, they’re very current but for example hearing the Hot Tracks mix of Voyage - Souvenirs that you guys put on it, that’s obviously something you don’t hear every day, unless you listen to an old tape.

C: What hobbies and interests have you outside of music?

DJ: I’ve eh, (laughs), almost out of necessity, because I’m building one, learned a lot about architecture, studio design & acoustics, I know that’s peripheral to music but eh, that kind of stuff. I like food; I love to go check out different restaurants, high brow and low brow. I like films, I wouldn’t consider myself a film buff but I like to watch films, different things like.

C: What’s your favourite movie?

DJ: Yeah, there’s an animated movie from the seventies called Fantastic Planet which is really cool and there’s a cult gang movie from NY called “80 Blocks from Tiffany’s”

C: So you are recommending them to me? (Laughs)

DJ: Yeah definitely!

C: Interestingly enough, speaking of cult films, I have only seen Spinal Tap for the first time recently and I was mortified that I’d overlooked it for so long!(Laughs)

DJ: Yeah sometime there are movies that are sort of like in the air that everybody talks about and maybe because of that you kind of get numb to that and don’t go check it out

C: What’s your favourite book?

DJ: I don’t really have one at the moment. I’m reading one right now, which I’ve been reading for quite a while called Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts which is really very good but I don’t know if I’d call it my favourite. I’m not ashamed to say I’m not that big of a reader at the moment (Laughs)

C: What’s your favourite food?

DJ: All kinds of Asian food particularly Vietnamese stuff and I also like tapas. There’s this type of tapas, this Basque style stuff called Pinxtos, its really good.

C: It’s the name of a restaurant here in Dublin!

DJ: Yeah I don’t know if it’s exactly that style but that style is really good.