Dirtyphonics Is Here ~ So Get Your Butts on the Dance Floor
By Jane Croft
Irreverence, the Dirtyphonics’ forthcoming debut full-length for Dim Mak Records is what we’ve been waiting for ~ even if we didn’t know it. The French electronic dance music quartet merges heavy bass music, drum n’ bass, dubstep, and electro with grimy club energy. Just listening to the beats will make you sexier, naughtier (it is DIRTYphonics, after all), more confident, and ready to take on the world. Take a listen to “Walk in the Fire” HERE and feel the energy.
Once the group ~ Charly, Thomas, Julien, and Pitchin ~ joined musical forces, they could do no wrong. The stars were aligned, the magic was palpable. Charly and Thomas met in 2000 while attending the same design school and immediately began making music together. In 2004 they met Julien.
“It was just one of those times when you meet the right people and you start chatting about life, music and you click right away. The morning after, we all went to the studio and started working together,” Charly remembers.
At the jump of 2008, they added Pitchin to the fold and expanded their collective aural palette even further. At the time, Pitchin was on the road, working hard on his own solo career, but the Dirtyphonics’ potential was just too strong to ignore.
Inspired by a motley crew of muses including Metallica and Korn, Daft Punk and Pendulum, the guys love taking their place as a consistent game-changing entity with hyper-charged, unpredictable tempo shifts and the veritable genesis of “drumstep.”
The beat never stops, and neither do the band members. In 2009, they snagged the “Best Newcomer Producer” honor at the Drum & Bass Arena Awards. They’ve headlined stages with everyone from Steve Aoki and Knife Party to Rusko and Skrillex at sold out shows worldwide. Over the past three years, they’ve become an international powerhouse, playing the hottest festivals and clubs in every corner of the globe. They proved to be standouts at festivals including Electric Daisy Carnival, Glastonbury, SXSW, Sziget, Pukkelpop and countless others.
“We worked really hard, had a lot of passion and we were also a bit lucky, I guess,” Charly says of the band’s success. “We always wanted to do this, and we stayed true to our vision and not what we were ‘supposed to be doing.’ It really worked out for us.”
According to Charley, Dirtyphonics’ creative process is organic and collaborative, with every track tweaked, stream-lined, and thoroughly discussed and developed by the band before being unleashed to the world.
“Basically when we sit down to write a track, it’s the four of us in the studio with our equipment and instruments,” he says. “We talk about the concept, the way we want to go with the music, and then we just sit down and start playing with a bunch of instruments. We get the beats down and the melodies. Then there’s a long period of discussion until we build a track and make it happen.”
Charley believes that Irreverence represents what Dirtyphonics is all about. Even as full length albums become fewer and farther between these days, the band wanted to take the opportunity to explore personal boundaries and look at the whole spectrum in terms of the band’s identity.
And the future promises even “dirtier’ opportunities for the quartet. They’re touring over 40 cities between the US and Canada at present, as well as writing a great deal of music on the road.
“We’re going to be doing a lot of collaborations in the near future ~ this year and next,” Charley shares. “And after the tour we’re going to be hitting all the major festivals. After that, we’re doing a European tour in the fall and we’re talking about doing an Australian tour as well. We never have any down time and we don’t want any.”
Check out Dirtyphonics live:
5/8 Boston, MA Royale
5/9 Philadelphia, PA Theatre of Living Arts
5/10 New York, NY Best Buy Theatre
5/11 Baltimore, MD Baltimore Soundstage
5/15 Raleigh, NC Lincoln Theatre
5/16 Daytona Beach, FL Aqua Lounge
5/17 Morrison, CO Global Dub Festival at Red Rocks Amphitheatre
5/18 Atlanta, GA Quad
5/19 Tallahassee, FL Tallahassee Coliseum
5/24 Edmonton, AB Encore at WEM
5/25 Calgary, AB Flames Central
6/7 St. Louis, MO 2720 Cherokee Performing Arts Center
…and online: