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Canadian alliance
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Deepest winter, even for hardy Canucks, is generally a time of hibernation, slowed heart rates matched by upped intakes of beer and Battlestar Galactica. Not for DJs Grandtheft and D.R.One of Team Canada, who remain busier than, uh, what’s that bucktoothed beast on our national five-cent coin? Beyond a hectic tour schedule, both together (a recent European debut) and alone (GrandTheft planted the TC flag in Tokyo while D.R.One returned once again to China), and keeping an eye on their baby, the Blue Dog Motel bar, the pair have concocted a new mix CD and Grandtheft has got the ball rolling on a label called Tremendous. Mirror: Tell me about your new disc, Canadian Club Vol. 1. How is it different from your Classic Material Vol. 1 and 2 mixes? Grandtheft: I guess the first two were a lot like mixes of different kinds of music, what I guess people back in the day were calling mash-ups. The new one is more a production CD. I mean, there are still remixes of rock songs and popular songs, but it’s all our own productions, our own beats. D.R.One: Also, it’s a lot more dance-based, more club-based, four-on-the-floor type beats that are more uptempo, the new style. Less hip hop and more dance-based remixes. M: Grandtheft, do you want to talk a bit about the Tremendous label, or is it too early? GT: Yeah, it’s a label we’re starting in partnership with Last Gang. We’re really excited, we’ve got lots of good records coming up. The focus is on putting out singles for our first year, and doing things really organically—Jesper [Quist Kaaland, Tremendous co-founder] is a publicist and I’m servicing DJs and getting a lot of cool remixes done. The ultimate goal is to put out good music by us and our friends. It’s a really hard time to start a label—a lot of people would say the worst time ever—but the way we’re doing it is real organic, with a focus on records that we know DJs want to play. We’re putting out European bands that haven’t been released here, but a lot of North American DJ records as well. Eventually, the goal is to put out Team Canada official releases, so Canadian Club Vol. 1 is kinda bridging the gap to that. M: Back to Canadian Club Vol. 1—there are rumours of a big Canadian act supporting this. What’s up with that? GT: We’ve got our friend Kardinal Offishall, who’s doing great things right now. He’s an artist we’ve respected for a long time, we’ve done a whole wack of shows with him and every time it’s just a wicked show, we always vibe. Actually, we got down with him first because we did a show with him and his crew years ago, right when we put out our first CD. We gave him one and the next day, he and his manager and everyone independently e-mailed us to say it was the craziest stuff they’d ever heard and that they wanted to do stuff with us. We always talked about doing a mixtape together but it never happened, so this was just the right time. We’re in the States a bunch now and he’s really making a lot of moves Stateside, so it’s just a cool Canadian alliance. He’s hosting the CD, basically, and what he did is really cool—it adds to it, for sure. CD LAUNCH WITH DJ ILLO AT TRIBE |
