Revolutionaries
With Body Tricks, Master Scratches & A New Digital Domain, X-Ecutioners Have Climbed To The Summit of Turntablism: A Career

By Brian O’Connor
Photos by Rahav Segev
Published in the September 2004 issue of DJ Times Magazine
Volume 17 - Number 9

      You see them, animated and muscle-bound superheroes, in print ads for Shure cartridges, and their on-stage body tricks boast more bounce than a three-ring circus. So no one questions the X-Ecutioners’ credentials as the turntablists’ turntablists.
Yet while recording their second major label release, the recent Revolutions (Columbia), the three members of the X-Ecutioners—Rob Swift, Roc Raida and Total Eclipse—employed technology that until recently would have been considered heretical in the provincial vinyl world of turntable fetishists: CDs.
      Don’t be misled. They’re still dedicated to the art of vinyl manipulation, as every track on Revolutions attests—Total Eclipse still practices hours each day on improving his scratches. And they certainly didn’t embrace CD technology (the Pioneer CDJ-1000, to be specific) to broaden their appeal (their previous release went nearly Gold, an unprecedented feat for a turntablist act).
      Rather, they’ve always been about bending pitch control, a crossfader and a piece of vinyl to their artistic will. So they merely do the same with the Pioneer, which proved to be more malleable than they had previously believed, with some riveting results, as only the longest lasting crew in the turntablist game can do.
      DJ Times spoke with Rob Swift while the crew was on the road, during a summer tour backing up their new release, and talked about life as the only turntablist crew on the map with a career.

DJ Times: You guys are on tour now. What’s the current state of the crowd that goes to see turntablists?
Rob Swift: We’re in Kentucky right now, and it’s going good. The crowds are cool. We’re playing a lot of smaller venues, so it’s more of an intimate type of vibe. But people have been coming up to me with CDs of the new album that they want signed, and that feels good.
DJ Times: Have you been getting the hip-hop crowd, or more of a crossover crowd?
Swift: Crossover has always been the case with us. We’ve always managed to bring in a variety of types of people to our shows—rock, alternative, and obviously a lot of hip-hop cats. It’s cool, ’cause we know that our music is being heard by a lot of different types of people.
DJ Times: Obviously, the Linkin Park song [“It’s Going Down”] from two years ago went a long way to further your reach.
Swift: The song that we did with Linkin Park definitely played a major role in widening our fan base. Our fan base grew, but before we even recorded that song our fan base was pretty mixed—we’re big in Europe, big in Japan. So, we’ve been exposed to different cultures and a variety of tastes in music, so it was already mixed, but with Linkin Park it just got bigger.
DJ Times: Are the turntablists still coming out to the shows?
Swift: Nowadays, the majority of people who are coming out to see us are seeing the turntablist thing for the first time. I’d be rich if I could get a penny for every time someone told me, “Yo! This is the first time I’ve seen anything like this.” Just yesterday, we had a show in Cleveland, and this guy walked up to me and said, “I bought your album and there was a song on it where the rapper says, ‘You’re not a real DJ if you don’t know how to scratch.’” So the guy says to me, “Is that true, man? Because I just started DJing and I don’t scratch. I don’t even use vinyl—I use CDs.” There are a lot of guys out there that know about the DJ world, the DJ culture, but to a small degree who don’t know about guys like us who manipulate vinyl. I would say the majority of people who are coming out to see us are seeing it for the first or second time—and that feels good, because we’re opening a lot of eyes to what we’re about.
DJ Times: The body tricks must help when trying to attract the non-tablists.
Swift: Sonically, we like to think of ourselves as among the best DJs, but there are a lot of people who come out to see us for the first time and they don’t understand what a flare sounds like or what a transformer sounds like. So, yeah, the body tricks keep them interested.
DJ Times: Your last record was by far your biggest-selling record, at 400,000 units. With this new record, there must be some expectation to sell at least that.
Swift: It’s scary, to be honest with you. On our first album, Expressions, there wasn’t that pressure to have a single, or shoot a video; we were making music the way we felt it at the time. Our label, Asphodel, was just happy about the renaissance that was taking place among the DJing culture. So they were happy just to put out a turntable album. With Built From Scratch, our opportunity came along with Loud Records, so we released that album, and things got more serious because now we were on a major label. A lot of times, with an indie, they’re fans of the music and they want to help the music get out there. With a major label, they’re in it to make money—it’s a business. While they were fans of what we did, they weren’t in it to lose money, so there was that pressure there to make successful music, music that’s more understandable to the consumer who buys records. That’s where the pressure started. Now, it’s our sophomore major-label release and we obviously want to outdo what we did on Built From Scratch. The pressure triples. So there’s definitely pressure to make music that appeals to the mainstream audience, but at the same time, we’re not losing the integrity of the group or what the group does. You really have to find a good balance. I’m not shy to say I’d love to sell a million records—I’d love for my music to be heard and bought by every person in the world. But at the same time, I’m not gonna change how I approach the music. But I think anybody who buys this album will come away respecting the way we approach DJing—underground or mainstream consumer.
DJ Times: On Built From Scratch, you bought home studios. How have you advanced your production “game” since the last record?
Swift: ProTools has taken off since then, and so have CD turntables. With Revolution, we were actually able to say and rap things ourselves, burn our voices onto CD and then scratch it back in. There’s a song that we did with Cypress Hill, where I got a friend of mine to play some guitar and I burned the audio onto a CD and I scratched the guitar sound back into the song. There’s more of us manipulating instruments on this album and there’s more of us showing you the wide spectrum of things you can do as a DJ, as a scratcher. Where with Built From Scratch, at the time the CD technology hadn’t really taken off yet, so we were forced to use more records, so on this album we had more options and I think it helped to make a better sounding album.
DJ Times: As a turntablist, was there a learning curve with the Pioneer CDJ-1000?
Swift: There was definitely a learning curve, because the CDJ doesn’t feel like a turntable—it’s close, but it doesn’t feel like a turntable. It’s a learning curve, for me, that took a couple days to get used to. Just moving my fingers slightly differently, but that invention helped us to reduce the limitations that we had. I’m not one to down the CD technology; it can be used, depending on the setting and how you use it. It can come in pretty handy.
DJ Times: You’re on the road with it?
Swift: We have one onstage, but we use it as a seventh turntable. We use it to play the instrumental music from our album so that we can perform the song without worrying about the record jumping or whatever. For example, if we want to perform “Space Invaders,” we burn it on to CD, do our scratches on the turntables, but the instrumentals are being played on CD. But when it comes down to doing the live routines that we’re known for, it’s just us and six turntables and three mixers.
DJ Times: One of the more radio-ready singles on the album is “Let Me Rock.” Did you use the CDJ on that?
Swift: That was a track that we wanted to be an instrumental scratch track, with a heavy rock feel to it. Over time, we decided that it would sound even better if we added some vocals to it. So for months we were going through a list of artists that we thought would do a good job performing over it vocally, and finally our A&R guy, Kevin Patrick, hooked us up with Luke from Start Trouble. And you know what’s funny? That was the first song that I did for the album, and it was the last song to get finished—so it’s about a year-and-a-half old. I sent Luke the instrumental, he recorded an amazing three verses to it, and basically, yeah, that’s another song that I used the CD turntable. If you listen closely to the guitars, they’re not being played the way you would normally hear guitar playing on a track. I burned all the guitar parts on to a CD and I scratched it all in. So when you hear him rhyming, and you listen to the guitars under it, they’re all being scratched in. It’s almost like every two bars, or every four bars, the guitars are being cut in, over the beat. It might go over some people’s heads, but if you listen closely you’ll hear why we call ourselves turntablists—we become the instrument that we’re using. In that case, I became the guitar player through the use of that CD player.
DJ Times: Did you use the CDJ on parts other than guitars?
Swift: On “Get With It,” on the vocal, “Get with it, can you get with this,” that’s my voice. I knew that was the hook that I wanted for that track, but I had no source—I didn’t know of a vinyl record that said, “Get with it,” the way I wanted it said, or “Can you get with this,” the way I wanted it said. So I said, screw it, I’m gonna say it myself the way I want it to sound. So I just recorded myself saying it, and then I burn it to a CD, threw some effects on it, and it sounds like I got it from some record. If you listen to the album, the entire album, that’s a lot of the stuff that we’re doing.
DJ Times: Each of you guys own home studios. How do the three different approaches come together?
Swift: It varies. All of us have different styles and different ways that we approach the music, and I think that’s what makes our group so dynamic. These different styles combine. I have my own style of making music; Raida, he’s more like a street hip-hop kind of guy, so he takes an approach of a DJ Premier or a Pete Rock. Whereas I take the approach Premier/Pete Rock, and then I say, “How would Bob James or Herbie Hancock or the Chili Peppers do this?”—because I listen to more types of music. And Eclipse, he’s more about energy. He’s trying to capture energy in his music—intense stuff. So what we do is try to help each other. If Eclipse has an idea that he wants to start formulating, that’s what we do for each other.
DJ Times: Speaking of Bob James and Herbie Hancock, having worked with those guys, what did you learn from them?
Swift: Just the fact that those guys are trying to re-invent themselves and do something different every time. I grew up listening to Herbie Hancock, and “Rock It” was obviously a huge influence on me and my music and every turntablist out there. And working with guys like Bob James and Herbie Hancock made me know that I was doing something right. I don’t think they would want to work with me if they didn’t see something unique in my approach to DJing. There are a million DJs out there—but when they approached me to work with, that was special. When I finally met Herbie, he said what I do is incredible and that he was glad to have me on his album. Bob James invited me to his house to work on music with him—you know, bought me lunch, stuff like that. I was almost outside of myself looking at myself.
DJ Times: You guys are the odd group that has managed to make a career out of turntablism.
Swift: We’re definitely trying to build a career out of this. We want people to understand that this is an art form—not a phase or a fad. I’ve been doing this since I was 12-years-old and we want people to take it as seriously as we do. It’s a really good feeling and I pinch myself every single day.
DJ Times: Tell us about your home studio.
Swift: I have a [Digidesign] Mbox Pro Tools set-up with a Powerbook, a Roland VS-2480 hard-drive recorder, a Roland VS-1680 digital recorder, an [Akai] MPC2000XL [MIDI production center]; an E-MU 6400 [sampler], and Rane mixer. That “Rock” song we were talking about was recorded entirely in my house. I sent the beat to Luke, he did the vocal there and sent them back to me in Pro Tools and I flew everything back into my stuff at my house. Goes to show how the technology has evolved. These days, if you have the right set-up at home you can do anything you want. “Like This” I also did completely out of my house. Being able to wake up at 4 in the morning with your boxers on, and no shirt, and walking barefoot, and being able to work on a track makes all the difference. On Built From Scratch, we had to wait and book studio time; at home, you have all your records at your fingertips.
DJ Times: You’re producing your own drums, tell us what you’re looking for?
Swift: Drums for me need a real heavy solid kick, a snare that snaps and a hi-hat that you could just hear and fit between the kick and the snare. Our music revolves around energy, so the instrumentation that goes into it—the EQ, the sounds—really play a major role. For me to make a song, first the beat has to make me want to scratch to it. It has to inspire me to do my thing as a DJ.