Digging Deep
Z-Trip Flips The Script, Still Rocks a Party. But Can a Scratch DJ Find
Happiness as a Major Label Recording Artist?

By Brian O’Connor
Photo by Jeremy Eric Siler
Published in the June 2005 issue of DJ Times Magazine
Volume 18 - Number 06

Can a former scratch DJ be taken seriously by number-crunchers at a major-label? More importantly, can that same DJ record a sample-based artist album without being sued into a different time zone?

Of course, there are number crunchers hired by major labels to answer such questions. But DJs should rejoice. One of your own has made the leap that few have attempted: DJ Z-Trip crossed over—after years of hitting it hard on the club-DJ circuit.

You might have heard of DJ Z-Trip as far back as 1998, when he tastefully remixed Rush’s “Tom Sawyer” and grabbed the attention of aging math-rockers. The hip-hop/rock crowd claimed him when he dropped his Uneasy Listening mix CD, a much-bootlegged work that reflected Z-Trip’s suburban Arizona classic-rock record collection and his belief that hip-hop break beats can be more powerful than a narcotic. Baby-boomers rejoiced, too, as they got their funk on when Z warmed up for The Rolling Stones. Financial planners always say to diversify your portfolio, and the tactic seems to work in the music business, too.

“I am a musical omnivore, and have always listened to all kinds of music,” says Geoffrey Weiss, the Sr. VP of A&R at Hollywood Records, who signed Z-Trip. “So Z-Trip’s ‘take-the-best-parts-from-everything’ aesthetic spoke to me immediately.”

With the release of Shifting Gears (Hollywood), Z-Trip joins an exclusive club: A DJ signed as an artist to a major label. These fortunate few you can count on one hand—even if your hand has been maimed in an assembly-line accident and suffered a severed digit: X-Ecutioners, Kid Koala, Cut Chemist and DJ Shadow—slim pickings indeed.

“There were always a lot of skeptics who questioned how you can sell an [artist] record by a DJ,” says Weiss, “but Z-Trip’s vision has always been so inclusive, so credible, and yet so big that I always thought he would rise to the top.”

Weiss’ math seems to have paid off already. The first single, “Walking Dead”—a dark, synthy alternative rocker featuring Linkin Park vocalist Chester Bennington—at presstime had been added at 40 modern rock radio stations nationwide. As evidenced by the record’s boogie-down breaks (“Listen to the DJ”), flipped rock samples (“Take Two Copies”) and eminently hummable choons (“3Rd Gear,” “Everything Changes”), Z-Trip has stretched the possibilities of what a DJ is capable of.

“I think he’s important,” says an enthused Weiss. “He’s bringing the true old-school hip-hop mentality into the modern era, and to communities that never dealt with hip hop before.”
DJ Times got with Z-Trip recently to talk about life as an artist and life as a DJ rocking the party.

DJ Times: Are you an artist, or are you a DJ?
Z-Trip: I’ve been becoming two different animals, some people know me as the guy who spins in clubs; other people know me as the guy who opens for bands. Either way, the fact that there’s interest is cool enough.

DJ Times: In terms of your DJ style, back in the day you were playing hip-hop tracks and you’d drop a rock bomb. And people would respond to the one rock track you played. How did that response influence your style?
Z-Trip: The thing is, I sort of had that style already, in the sense that I was dropping that rock track in the first place. I was little sheepish doing that at hip-hop shows, because at the time it was a little absurd—it’s still absurd, at certain hip-hop shows, to drop a rock thing. After the feedback that I got, I thought, “Well, if I like it, and they like it, I might as well keep moving on it, and keep trying different combinations and going further out on the branch.” It seems like the branch isn’t broken yet. It was good, to a degree I started to wean off the people who came out just to hear whatever club songs or hip-hop songs were hot at the moment. That helped for sure.

DJ Times: What are some tracks that pushed you further out on the branch?
Z-Trip: Dropping an AC/DC track, a Led Zeppelin track. If you drop a Black Sabbath track people always respond, and that was sort of the groundwork for me to go deeper. Then I started looking into the more abstract—“Let me see if I can pull up a Blue Öyster Cult sample in there.” These are all records that I grew up listening to; my brother had all those records, so it wasn’t like I was trying to go off on some, “This-will-be-corny-and-cool” thing. Me knowing these records the way I do, it just made sense for me to fit them in the way I fit them in. I see a lot of people now who have sort of adapted that style into their style, and the only negative thing—and there are people doing it really good—is that there are a lot of people who didn’t grow up listening to that music, they’re not really fans of it, but they see that it’s getting responses from the dancefloor, so you see them go out and buy the AC/DC Back in Black and that’s the only AC/DC they know. You can just sort of tell when someone’s mixing something in and it seems contrived, or forced, as opposed to someone who actually is pulling off a B-side or a deep album cut that only a true fan is going to know. What ends up happening is you get a lot of people playing “Sweet Home Alabama” and no one’s really digging deeper into these records or these bands, they’re just playing the “hits”—it’s OK, because it’s the new thing, but…

DJ Times: So you were the least surprised by the whole mash-up thing, right?
Z-Trip: Because I had been doing it for so long, and there were other DJs who had been doing it, when it caught on, it was like, “OK, this is kind of cool, everyone’s doing it now.” The thing that sort of gets me, though, is that a lot of people are doing it on a computer at home, you have people who technically call themselves mash-up DJs. And that’s sort of awkward, because there really is no such thing as a mash-up. We were mixing, we were blending records; that was it, there was no term at the time. So when people started putting a label on it, you got guys saying, “I’m a mash-up DJ.” Well, that’s cool, but to me the most well-rounded DJ is the guy who plays everything and mixes it on records. I’m a little bit of an elitist in the sense of that’s where I come from, so that’s what gets me excited. Not to knock what these people are doing, but the downside is when people are showing up to parties with their iPods, it completely strips the etiquette of what we do and how we came up with it in the first place. And the way they got their sound and the way they got their influence is through people like us and I like to see people like us still doing things that we do because it furthers the art form of DJing. When you’re not using vinyl or you’re not really promoting mixing records together, you’re just sort of promoting the byproduct of it. I’m a rootsy person.

DJ Times: When the whole Grey Album controversy hit, you’d already gone through some of that with Uneasy Listening, right?
Z-Trip: Correct. Uneasy Listening was out for about four years before the Grey Album hit. We just did it as something to do, sort of a goof, me and DJ P. We did 1,000 copies and the response was pretty good around town, and we got rid of them really fast, just giving them to people. So we pressed up another 1,000 and then they got bootlegged and burned. Some guys in Europe bootlegged it and put it out. We ended up tracking down people, because as much as we wanted people to hear it, we also wanted to keep it under the radar, to prevent us getting screwed with. It’s one of those things where the art took over, and ultimately the art will prevail. It’s cool because it’s become a cult classic, and it helped us get some recognition and I think to a degree it also helped me get signed. It was a good thing.

DJ Times: Did anyone issue a cease-and-desist?
Z-Trip: Actually, no. But what ended up happening was a lot of people that were on the record actually liked it. I met Barry de Vorzon, the guy who did the theme music to “The Warriors” [film], which is something we used, and played it for him and he dug it. And I heard the same sort of thing from other people that we sampled. I think people were into the whole idea of that style of mixing—we put it on the map in a way, although other people had done it before. Now, there are a lot of people who do that style of mixing good, but there’s a whole lot of people who do it bad. When you have guys that are downloading a capellas off the Internet and putting them into programs that allow you to do mash-ups…I think you need to have that history to know what things are in key and what things are in tune.

DJ Times: How did the Uneasy Listening experience lead to Hollywood Records?
Z-Trip: I think it was that, combined with a couple of other things, Uneasy Listening was the icing on the cake. Because it was such a promo thing, it generated a bit of a street buzz, but to a degree I already had something of a street buzz, with Return of the DJ, I did a couple of remixes—the “Tom Sawyer” remix by Rush. I think it led to a little bit of a bidding war. I ended up with Hollywood Records, who actually gave me the most freedom and ultimately the better paycheck.

DJ Times: You said that when you signed with Hollywood, your deal had to be hand crafted because you’re a DJ—how?
Z-Trip: There’s a part of me that’s the DJ, and there’s the club guy, and there’s the guy who’s the artist making music. So in a way we had to handcraft around that, because if I produce somebody or remix something, that’s not necessarily me being me. That’s me doing something for somebody else. Being a DJ encompasses so many factors that we had to go over them and figure it out before I inked the deal. They’d never signed a DJ, and DJs getting signed as artists, well, there aren’t too many of us out there, so it’s sort of a new frontier. Cut Chemist, Shadow, myself, Koala. We’re all breaking new ground. We’re not spinning records at some wedding. It’s a whole new thing.

DJ Times: What do you think Hollywood Records is expecting?
Z-Trip: From me, I don’t know. To a degree, I’m not really caring—I don’t want that to come off crass. It’s just that I was going to be doing what I do anyway. I think they just tapped into the fact that there was something happening here and they allowed me to have this creative freedom, so that just takes their expectations and throws them to the side. I assume they expect great things, because they invested in me, but at the same time, if I worry about what peoples’ expectations are, I won’t do the best work I can do. They’re getting behind me and they’re digging it. Right now, I got a song on modern rock radio and I’m a hip-hop DJ—so their heads are spinning. So DJs are playing a DJ, basically—so the whole concept is kinda new.

DJ Times: What kinds of sample-clearing nightmares were there for this project?
Z-Trip: Originally, I was trying to do a mix album along the lines of Uneasy Listening, and to do it cleared and legal. But for a year I tried my damndest to make it happen and I just couldn’t make it happen. A lot of lawyers, but there was no paperwork set up to do it, and there still isn’t. I still do want to make that record, I just don’t know when or where it’s going to happen. After the success of Uneasy Listening, I was like, “You know what? I really want to do this proper and have it be a thing people can buy in Best Buy.” Finally, after a year of it not happening, through lawyers, I decided I just had to make my artist album. I tried to use things that weren’t as obvious, and more catalog-type things, like the Scorpions thing I sampled, an old album cut. I did that and I was a little nervous, because you know, The Scorpions, they’re The Scorpions and they don’t have to clear shit. But they went ahead and did it, and I was really fortunate. I tried to keep the same aesthetic as I do with my live set, so it was a bit easier to clear that way. But at the same time it’s still not what I do live. It became more of an artist album—which is cool, because I had to keep growing as an artist. It started out as a nightmare and it ended up being difficult, but it worked out because the album’s coming out.

DJ Times: How much of a DJ is there on Shifting Gears?
Z-Trip: A lot. All the songs were made with my DJing in mind. I didn’t want to go way off the beaten path on some kind of tangent and make nothing but downtempo whatever. I tried my damndest to replicate what people knew of me in the clubs on the record. So there’s some scratching, but it was based on what I think DJs would want to play. It came from a very DJ perspective: lots of open drum breaks for people to mix over things. I’m putting bonus beats and a cappellas on the 12-inch, all sorts of scratch tools for DJs to use, because I’m a DJ trying to make a record for DJs to play. When you come from that angle, there’s plenty of me on there. When I made this record, it has to be DJ-friendly. I hate buying records or getting records in the mail and try to play and they’re so hard to mix. DJs wind up not playing them—not because they don’t like the song, but because there’s nowhere to mix them into your set.

DJ Times: And here you are, a DJ writing songs.
Z-Trip: It was very organic. I want people to know me from my DJ sets, but at the same time I want to let people know what I was about. I don’t think people knew that I could produce or write music. This is sort of my next step. I think eventually I’ll wind up doing less DJing on the road and spending more time in the studio. I had to make a record that was a hip-hop record, my first record out. If I didn’t, I think I would have been doing a disservice to what put me on, and hip hop has always been about the name check. I needed the first record to be that, although it did curb some of my production. But I learned so much.

DJ Times: What was the biggest surprise, in terms of producing?
Z-Trip: I think it was the physical process. I’d made songs and gone all the way down the lines, but I’d never made them in the sense in the bigger context—always made singles. I learned so much, that was my biggest surprise—how incredibly difficult it is, but once you go through it, how easy it becomes. Now I have a better idea of how to get better sounds through testing a lot of gear. To me, any artist, their second album is always more defining of them. I read an article somewhere were KRS-One said something and it’s really resonated: he’s made X amount of albums and has been in the game forever. He said the best thing you can do on your first album is to just go off, way off and do whatever you want to do because you’ll never have the chance to do your first album again. And that made a lot of sense to me and it made me go: “This record is for me. It’s about me and it’s about where I came from.” I hope people are into it, but I really had to do this for me.

DJ Times: Give me an example on the record where you think you went off and did some wild stuff.
Z-Trip: “Breakfast Club” is a perfect example. Who does fun hip hop anymore? Hip hop is all about who has the biggest rims, complete trivial nonsense. It’s like a Biz Markie record. That was me just going, “Screw it.” Another one was the song with Chuck D, “Shock and Awe.” When I tell people I did a track with Chuck D, people would think it’s a funky hip-hop track, but here I come with this rock track—all dark. That was me saying, “I’m not looking for radio play. I just want to get this song off my chest and say what I have to say.” And there wasn’t anybody at Hollywood leaning over my shoulder telling me what to do.

DJ Times: Not that anyone would know what the hell you’re doing…
Z-Trip: That might have been the reason why no one was leaning over my shoulder. They wouldn’t have known what to do, what to say: “Put more snare in that!” But when you’re doing something that few people have done, there’s no one there who can tell you how it should be done.

DJ Times: You haven’t been battling much recently, have you?
Z-Trip: I’ve kinda gotten over that. You get older. Now I want to make music and find out more of who I am and my surroundings, as opposed to wanting to take that other guy out. In my youth, I was all about taking the other guy out, and now I’m all about taking the industry out—let’s unite and take over, let’s do some bigger shit. Hopefully, this is a start of some new DJ revolution. I’ve had people come up to me and it’s heartwarming, because people knew me when I was DJing in bars for nobody for no money for nothing, and here I am, I’ve worked my way up the chain, opening for The Rolling Stones, opening for Linkin’ Park, got a song on the radio. And they’re like, “You’ve made a really big step for us, as DJs—thank you.” Guys like Jazzy Jeff, and Bambaataa, those are those guys to me, they made a dent when nobody was doing it. They’re my blueprint.

DJ Times: “Walking Dead” has been getting modern rock radio play. Walk me through that track.
Z-Trip: That track, there may be some skepticism of why I worked with [Linkin Park’s] Chester [Bennington] in the first place. I never do anything for shock value, there’s always a reason. That guy Chester, it was a really good process, and Linkin Park really looked out for me. They took me on the road and they understand me and hip hop and they get it, and I appreciate them for that. But the thing with Chester, it wasn’t so much as me tying to work with Chester of Linkin Park, as much as it was working with Chester from Arizona—I’m from Arizona, and he’s from Arizona. So what song could we do that would show the naysayers in Arizona that we came off. If I had not had my DJ career and Chester had not had Linkin Park, what would we have done? So we decided to make a dark track. And it came off and it’s blowing up on radio.

DJ Times: What’s your recording process?
Z-Trip: All the samples I used came off of vinyl—records that I’ve had for years. For instance, the “Listen to the DJ” track, that’s a sample I’ve wanted to use for five or six years. I throw the beasts into my Ensoniq ASR-10 sampler, and then dump them into Pro Tools, and start sequencing and recording vocals in Pro Tools. But certain things where there’s no Pro Tools, sometimes it’s just vinyl back and forth. I don’t have one process that I commit to. With the Chester track, we recorded one of the vocals on one of the tour buses, then more vocals at my studio, and it traveled with me for a long time. I wish there was a process that I could point out.

DJ Times: What will the live DJ set sound like?
Z-Trip: The main focus is always going to be the tables and vinyl. To a degree, I’m using the Pioneer CDJs…I’ll bring some samplers out on the road. Maybe bring some MCs out, and make it more of a party atmosphere, like the DJ sets are.

DJ Times: If you could remix anyone, who would it be?
Z-Trip: Led Zeppelin. First off, I grew up on them and I know all their songs in and out. John Bonham is my favorite drummer, and John Paul Jones is my favorite bass player, and Jimmy Page is one of my favorite guitarists and at the time Robert Plant, in his prime, was hitting notes that were out of control.

DJ Times: Which song?
Z-Trip: I would remix every song of theirs. I would stop what I’m doing right now and remix Led Zeppelin songs until I die. Their catalog covers such a wide array of styles, I could be busy forever. If there’s any way to do it, if Led Zeppelin would call me and tell me it’s OK to remix their stuff, I’m there. Throw that out there, big bold letters. Led Zeppelin? Any time.

Scratch: Z-Trip Goes to the Movies
For those looking to better understand the world of turntablism—its history, its nuances, its culture—we recommend a pair of fine films by Scratch Worldwide Media: 2001’s in-depth genre documentary, “Scratch,” and the rollicking new concert film, “Scratch: All the Way Live.” As performer and raconteur, DJ Z-Trip (aka Zach Sciacca) plays an integral part in both. DJ Times caught up with the filmmakers to find out what most impressed them about the Arizona-based DJ.

“Z-Trip can rock any party, any gallery opening, any wedding, any bar mitzvah, anytime, anyplace,” says co-producer Josh Kouzomis. “He can make a 13-year-old kid, a 50-year-old lady, or a 30-year-old hipster that is too cool for school jump out their seat and shake their ass. He gets people open, makes the bar money and, most importantly, makes guys and girls get together on the dancefloor. Z-Trip paid dues in the bar scene for years in Phoenix, played all types of music and can serve it to anyone without regurgitation.”

Brad Blondheim saw Z-Trip as the embodiment of a legacy. “My favorite types of films are about underdogs—and to me, the DJ is the true underdog of hip hop,” says the L.A.-based co-producer. “Z-Trip seems to be carrying on the traditions of Kool Herc in the sense that he’s interested in exploring various musical paths when it comes to his music. Plus, he is quite a character whom exudes confidence, charisma, and sense of humor.”

Director Doug Pray fell in love with Z-Trip’s skills, but remains mostly impressed by his sense of purpose. “I love Z-Trip because, as a DJ, he’s got his priorities straight,” says Pray. “First and foremost, he cares about rocking the party—making sure that every person in the room is having fun and loving the music, then, he follows it up with top-level skills: complete attention to rhythm and BPM, the ability to scratch with the best of them (he never just scratch-solos endlessly—his scratching is percussive and dynamic, and just the right amount), genius blending of diverse music, and, the thing I think he’s most loved for–a sense of humor. The guy plays music that makes you laugh and blows your mind.”

– Jim Tremayne