Disco Infiltrator: Don't sleep on James Murphy. Long an
Outsider to DJ Culture, the former Indie Rocker & His LCD Soundsystem Have Gotten Back to the Basics of Making You Shake Your Waist

By Jim Tremayne
Photo: Deborah Clark + Jenny Lewis
Published in the July 2005 issue of DJ Times Magazine
Volume 18 - Number 07

New York City—Ever since the notion of “disco” was filtered through our collective system and guiltless straight people began to enjoy rhythm-based music again—OK, call it post-Acid House—dance music has undergone a great cell division.

Genres begat micro-genres, which mutated into wholly new forms. Some conferred coolness, others solidified into cheese. That, in itself, was fine because, in clubland, nothing is worse than a tired sound. But DJs got so bent out of shape over how to categorize a particular track or producer, they often seemed to drown in the sea of minutiae. A music conversation with a DJ often resulted in a competition of cool, instead of the answer to the question: Um, did you like the record?

One might think that an interview with James Murphy would go that way—after all, he did beat us to the punch with “Losing My Edge,” one of the most spot-on sendups of music geekdom you’ll ever hear. But thankfully, it doesn’t. His take on dance music is really fresh and basic, somewhat like the offerings from his band LCD Soundsystem. A longtime indie-rock insider with a background in pro audio, Murphy has an outsider’s view of club music. He gets its purpose with unfettered clarity—dance music makes people dance, and dancing makes people happy. It hardly matters from which record-store bin you pull the grooves.

For the past three years, Murphy, DFA Records (the NYC-based imprint he runs with partner Tim Goldsworthy) and LCD Soundsystem have enjoyed the kind of critical approval that might have you bringing these writers one big drool bucket. The remixes (like The Rapture’s “House of Jealous Lovers”) and singles (like the fabulous new groove train, “Disco Infiltrator”) seemed to signal a rock-dance coalition of the willing. (“Gee, rock and dance melding together, and with referential humor—how great is that?”) Sure, an artist can “signify” this or that and talk a good game that’ll get ’em over for a minute (see The Bravery), but it ain’t worth a damn without great songs—and Murphy’s got ’em spilling out of his cargo pants. Fact is, if Murphy got hit by a delivery truck tomorrow, he could enter Heaven, Hell or Limbo happily knowing that he wrote “Daft Punk Is Playing at My House” and “Losing My Edge.”

And it’s not by accident. LCD’s eponymous debut—which brilliantly includes an extra CD of early singles like the manic acid workout of “Yeah”—is one of the year’s best albums, period. Genres be damned. Murphy and cohorts know how to assemble a groove that gets you going and remains interesting—basically, if you find yourself unconsciously bobbing your head throughout an entire track, the groove works. It shouldn’t be so revelatory, but somehow, for many of us club vets, it is. For Murphy—the DJ, producer/remixer, engineer, label chief—the equation gets back to basics: It has a good beat and you can dance to it.

We caught up with James Murphy the week after seeing him DJ the crazy Revolver party during Winter Music Conference.

DJ Times: So how long have you been DJing?
Murphy: Since the end of 1999—that’s it.

DJ Times: How long did it take you to sharpen your skills?
Murphy: Oh, I don’t know. I got really into it not thinking about that stuff at all. I just played totally nothing mixed, just total fun stuff. Then I started fooling around with mixing, and I found it really easy in the beginning. It was beginner’s luck.

DJ Times: But you played drums, right?
Murphy: Yeah, I played drums. But it’s wildly different. When I’m playing drums, I don’t have to see how loud I should hear my left hand because my right hand might be going too fast.

DJ Times: No, but you can count.
Murphy: Yeah, you can count and, actually, it’s not too hard. But I don’t think I’m a particularly skilled DJ. It’s must a means to an end. If it’s fun, it’s fun.

DJ Times: I read somewhere that your indoctrination to club music was fairly typical.
Murphy: I never really got that interested in club culture. I was kind of interested in the ’80s, and then I kinda got bored of it and got into rock. It’s not something that I focused on much. Then in ’99, I did a [studio] record with David Holmes—that’s how I met my partner Tim Goldsworthy—and he was DJing on the weekends and we’d all go out. He was playing all records that we were listening to while we were making the records, like The Stooges…

DJ Times: And “Crosstown Traffic.”
Murphy: Yeah, stuff like that. I wound up doing E and dancing and having fun—and then deciding that dancing was fun.

DJ Times: A small epiphany, I guess?
Murphy: No. I mean, yeah. It was awesome. It was great. It was like, “Oh, I actually enjoy this…”

DJ Times: Were you sullied at all from your experience with indie rock? Was this something that you were really ready for?
Murphy: I was bored. I’d quit playing music because I didn’t like being around the people that I was around. I guess I just got interested in going out and having fun. It just seemed like at the time the scene was so weak that it seemed like easy pickings to make dance music that was interesting—because it was all so sub-genre. You’d go to a record store and it would be like, “Well, what do you like? Do you like step-tech-house? Or do you want progressive-minimal?” And I was like, “I don’t give a shit about any of this stuff.” [Laughs]

DJ Times: You just wanted to play records you liked.
Murphy: I read Last Night a DJ Saved My Life [by Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton] and I got really obsessed with disco and formative, genre-less dance music. It just seemed that all the stuff that was really high-quality—the stuff that I was interested in—had nothing to do with genre, and all the stuff that I thought was shit was just kings of genres. Like some guy would say, “Oh so-and-so is going to DJ,” and I’d go see him and it would be like, “Holy crap, this guy sucks.” And he’d be like, “Oh, he’s the most important blah-blah-blah DJ.” And I just couldn’t believe how boring it was. Whereas when I went to see Carl Craig DJ at SXSW in Austin in 2000, of all things—in front of 16 people—it was awesome. It was great. It was super-amazing and fun and strange and it felt conversational and really good.

DJ Times: It’s funny how the dance-music people are just as insular as indie-rock people. It’s almost like one big high school.
Murphy: Yeah, totally. It’s all the same, but it was new to me. Plus, dance music has a leg up on other genres because it has a point. If you dance, it works. You can actually measure it. Someone can say, “Oh, I don’t like [Daft Punk’s] ‘Da Funk.’” And you might say, “Well, alright, I’ll go play it right now…”

DJ Times: And watch what happens.
Murphy: You can say it’s crap, but there we go.

DJ Times: That’s almost why some of the critical evaluations of dance music are silly. Most of these people are never in the club at 3 in the morning watching it work.
Murphy: Right, it’s pretty simple. It’s like making food. It’s like the difference between being a weird, effete pastry chef or making food. You make food. People eat. They’re happy.

DJ Times: What’s in your perfect DJ booth?
Murphy: Oh, a [Rane] 2016A with the expansion EQ, three 1200s and CDJ-1000s. A tape delay would be nice, but that’s about it.

DJ Times: Have you dabbled in any of the digital toys beyond the CDJs?
Murphy: I have no interest in that stuff. It doesn’t work with my personality. I have a hard time even playing CDs. If there are old records that I don’t play much any more and I need room in the box, I’ll put it on CD and carry it. So, I’m like, “Oh, fuck. I wish I had ‘Double Dutch Bus.’” Then I’d go get it. Or things that just don’t exist on vinyl, I’ll put on CD. But looking through CDs when DJing—I just don’t do it. And looking through a list of songs on a laptop—I don’t know what it is and I’ve talked to a couple people about it—it’s not that interesting to look at and it doesn’t really remind me. Names don’t do much for me. It’s like, “The red one works.” Or, “Oooh, I’ve got five Prelude records—which one of those do I want to play?” Visual stuff works for me, but lists and names and having 40,000 songs? I just get tired and sit down.

DJ Times: DJs who’ve made the conversion will tell you that the digital revolution has reinvented the whole notion of selection and what you’re presenting to your audience.
Murphy: But it makes your [DJ] bag a lost art. Being able to put together a bag and do anything with it is part of the game to me. It’s like knowing what not to bring and what to bring. It’s being able to get into a club and realize you’ve brought the wrong records and making it work anyway. That’s just more interesting to me than having 40,000 songs at my disposal.

DJ Times: Is there a situation where that approach works?
Murphy: There are people who do it incredibly well. Like Optimo [Scottish DJs JD Twitch and JG Wilkes]—if you go to Optimo club in Glasgow, they play for eight hours and they use Ableton Live. What they’re doing with it is very often playing records that they’ve played for the past eight years, but reworking them each week so that people feel familiar and kind of new at the same time. That, I think, is awesome. It just doesn’t work for my head. Very rarely do I look up to see a laptop DJ and find that I’m enjoying myself. I don’t have a moral thing about it—I just often find that it isn’t a recipe for fun. It’s a recipe for seamless beatmixing.

DJ Times: And that doesn’t always matter.
Murphy: More than that, it actually doesn’t mean anything to me at all. I actually like trainwrecks. If you end up beatmatching too much, you get caught in a corner.

DJ Times: But you do play CDs.
Murphy: I like it. It’s easier to play than records a lot of the time. I don’t think they sound quite as good as vinyl, but they don’t feedback, which is nice. But they don’t resonate very much. They’re fine, though—they’re fun. I’m not picky about anything, really, except the signal path and the system. If I have my own needles, a good mixer that sounds good and a good system that makes me really happy.

DJ Times: How much effort do you put into DJing?
Murphy: I don’t know how to answer that. I put a lot of heart into it. But I don’t ever practice. I just DJ out. All the preparation for me goes into picking records and buying records. I kind of like flying by the seat of my pants and doing stuff that I don’t know that I can do for sure.

DJ Times: Do you think the DJ scene with the big-time DJs acting like Led Zeppelin has gotten to a level of distastefulness?
Murphy: I think it was always at a level of distastefulness whenever it happened. It’s always embarrassing. I mean, they’re playing records that other folks made in sequence—everybody needs to relax. It’s not that big of a deal. You can make people really happy—I take that part of it seriously. I take that seriously like I take providing for your family seriously [laughs], but you don’t say, “I’m providing for my family and therefore I rule!” It’s just your job—it’s what you’re supposed to do.

DJ Times: So, in your mind, what’s a DJ’s job?
Murphy: Making people happy, and doing it without being totally pandering—trying to make it a little bit complicated for them. Like Tim Sweeney from Beats in Space. He’s super-amazing and super-calm, not egotistical.

DJ Times: What do you want from a DJ?
Murphy: I just want quality. If you’re playing something new and you don’t care if people like it…I don’t get that. You’re a DJ. If this is your art, in the sense that you don’t care what people think, you’re in the wrong job. A lot of times I think people just want to be contrary—like they have disrespect for the crowd. I don’t like that. But if someone plays something they genuinely like, that’s great. That’s musical evangelism.

DJ Times: But that street goes two ways…
Murphy: When I started DJing, I’d be jumping up and down listening to dance music and I say, “Man, if somebody played ‘Loose’ by The Stooges, everyone would freak out—it would be awesome.” Then, when I’d try to actually play that at techno clubs, people would want to pull me out of the booth and beat me. So I’d have to learn how to bring them along a little at a time. If people don’t think that you respect their taste, they don’t care what you play—they won’t listen to you.

DJ Times: Alright, time for the regulation Daft Punk questions…
Murphy: No, they’ve never played to my house [laughs].

DJ Times: They show up in a couple of your songs and it seems like you’re taking the piss out of them.
Murphy: No, not at all. I like them. They’re convenient signifiers. It’s not a joke. I like using them as if to mean dance music that’s not “genre dance music”—they’re not Richie Hawtin or something that’s really specific. They just make really hard things, really happy things, really poppy things.

DJ Times: “Daft Punk Is Playing at My House” sounds like a fantasy record.
Murphy: It is. I used to be in punk bands and played at house parties—they were my favorite shows. I thought it would be really great if someone threw a house party and had them play—like somebody who just got into dance music, maybe somebody from Des Moines.

DJ Times: What I like about LCD is that you can spot all the obvious reference—The Fall, The Trammps disco basslines, The Beatles, etc.—but it never sounds like you’re aping it. It seems like you’re just passing it through.
Murphy: That makes me very happy. That’s what we’re trying to do. When you know if you’re aping something is whether or not you’re hiding it. I don’t feel like I’m ever hiding it. I don’t make wholly new music, like black guys do—they make genuinely non-referential music. I think most people make referential music at this point, like The Strokes or whomever. It’s in a tradition. I don’t want to make music that’s in a tradition sonically. I like people like Todd Rundgren. And that’s why I feel like that’s my place. I wish I could feel akin to David Bowie or Brian Eno or Roxy Music, but I don’t think I have that kind of…um…

DJ Times: Let’s face it: You’re not as cool as Bryan Ferry.
Murphy: Right! I don’t have that kind of charisma or aggression. I’m just not like those charismatic dudes. But Todd Rundgren? OK, I can put that hat on.

DJ Times: So what’s in your studio?
Murphy: The most important thing is a heavily modified analog Oram 24-bus/40-channel console. We rewired all the faders and put in a new ground bus and power distribution, and new master section. It’s pretty important because we don’t mix in the computer. We use the computer for recording and editing, but we mix on the console, which is a big deal. We use Logic and the [Emagic] EXS24s for sampling or one of the old Akai S-6000s with the removable faceplate, which we like a lot. And we have real instruments and mics—and we’re hitting things with sticks.

DJ Times: What’s the remix process for you and Tim?
Murphy: There’s a gauntlet of questions that they have to get through to get us to do a mix. Number 1: Do we have enough time? Usually, no, so 90-percent of the mixes just die on the tracks there. Number 2 is multi-tiered: Can the bigger artists afford us? Or, if it’s a friend, can do a remix trade with them? That’s rare—we’ve done that twice. Is there a track that we really want to do? Number 3: Will they grant us a license back for the remix for our remix compilations? Number 4: Is the track something that has a way into it? Some tracks that we like, we won’t want to remix because there’s no way into it.

DJ Times: What are you trying to accomplish with a remix?
Murphy: We’re always trying to make it sonically interesting, always making it sound like us. I treat it like a job, because people hire us. We never save ideas, like, “Oh, let’s save that for one of our own tracks.” I find that reprehensible.

DJ Times: What you, DFA Records and LCD Soundsystem do are always described as “hip,” but sometimes the discussion seems to end there. The merits of the music aren’t always discussed.
Murphy: In reality, to explain it to somebody, it helps [to say], “Oh, it’s New York, it’s rock with dance.” It’s misleading, but it’s not misleading if you’re describing it to somebody like my aunt. It’s fine. It’s like, “I’m in a punk-funk-disco band, grandma.” And that’s a totally relevant moniker.