If you can’t afford the gear you need to launch your DJ career, you can always rip a page from Diplo’s book and steal it. “The mixer was a load of money so I just stole one from the Sam Ash music shop in Florida,” he says matter-of-factly. “I just ran out of the mall.”
Thankfully for him, and for us, the law never caught up with him. And if it’s any consolation for the shop owners, the stolen goods played an integral part in forging young Diplo’s future. Now 26 years old, Diplo aka Wesley Pentz has so many fingers in so many pies, he might as well be a baker. Best known for supplying explosive-tipped beats for UK guerrilla girl M.I.A, Diplo’s projects, like his music, lie all over the place.
In addition to rewiring MIA’s ‘Arular’ with his ‘Piracy Funds Terrorism Volume 1’ mixtape, between him and his Hollertronix partnership with DJ Low Budget, he’s already remixed the likes of DJ Shadow, Bloc Party, Gwen Stefani and Le Tigre. Somewhere in there, he also found time to release his debut album, ‘Florida’, a superb yet overlooked trip hop opus in the league of RJD2 or Kid Koala.
Most recently, Diplo has mixed down the latest instalment of the London superclub series, FabricLive, which unravels like a musical DNA sequence of his influences – from early electro, dancehall and Southern-fried hip hop to Brazillian ‘baile’ funk alongside indie gems from Cat Power and even The Cure. Deciding on just 25 tunes for the mix proved almost impossible. “Hell yeah, it was hard,” he says. “I gave ‘em like 100 tracks and only got forty cleared!”
Australian fans will have most recently spied Diplo behind the decks at M.I.A.’s Big Day Out shows. He’s quick to point out he’s more than just her tour DJ – “I’m kinda like her band as well”. He’s also her boyfriend too. The musical version of “Bennifer” (as Diplo jokes) met for the first time at Fabric back in 2004. She was a fan of his work and as fate would have it, he was playing her guerrilla hit, ‘Galang’ (still an indie hit back then), when she entered the room. Some time later, they began to make beautiful mixtapes together.
The couple make for a formidable musical pairing. Both are young, brimming with talent and planning… world domination? “We’re trying to take over Tasmania. We’re going to put a bunch of people there and make a new country,” he laughs. “Y’all wont miss Tasmania, right?” But who wins the music arguments? “I always win, man! When it comes to music she’s much weirder than me, you don’t even know.”
A self-described “child of everywhere”, Diplo has lived in Florida, Japan, Philadelphia and London. His hunger for new music and local scenes is well known, even taking him to the notorious favelas (slums) of Rio de Janeiro to observe baile funk (bass-heavy dancefloor beats trading on afro-brazillian rhythms), usually made by kids who carry guns as readily as records.
While the Australian scene may hardly be as dangerous, Diplo is keen to do some reconnaissance of his own on a string of solo DJ shows. “I’m trying to go to Alice Springs to drop a bunch of CDs off on everybody. But I couldn’t get a gig there,” he says. “The DJ scene seems pretty decent though – you guys are dropping loads of cool music in clubs. I even heard one of my tracks at Honkytonks in Melbourne!”
When it comes to his sets, Diplo professes he plays only the “good shit”. While he hops, skips and jumps from genre to genre in a matter of minutes, his philosophy remains straightforward. “Making people dance all night is a simple goal, but I get so bored all the time so I got to play as much weird new things just to keep me interested.”
So for a DJ who throws so many sounds in a pot, how far is he willing to push it? “If the crowd is down then, I’m going far out but I can still play for a bunch of 30 year olds at a wedding, man. I’m a DJ. Pleasing the crowd is job one. But you know that Diplo does something special right, so don’t bring your parents.”
Diplo plays this weekend, don’t miss out!
Thu 16th Feb – Beck’s Verandah, Perth
Fri 17th Feb – Gershwin Room, Melbourne
Sat 18th Feb – Mandarin Club, Sydney
FabricLive 24, mixed by Diplo, is out now through Fabric/Inertia.
