DJ-producer up from the underground

By FEDERICO MONSALVE

Rjd2 is a tough cookie to jar. His music has been pigeonholed as "underground instrumental hip-hop". But with its layers of space-age and horror film sounds it goes beyond the usual parameters of the genre.

Rjd2 - real name RJ Krohn - is part of Def Jux, the new New York-based label that has been hailed by university radio circuits worldwide as a hip-hop saviour.

After a stint with Ohio-based Megahertz, Krohn released Deadringer, an album with an artistic depth and accessibility that quickly made Krohn into a hip-hop originator to look out for.

The man is modest, laidback and speaks with a disarming passion and honesty about his craft.

"I'm not too concerned with classification", says Krohn, defiant of labels as well as the stereotype that says his craft is ... well, just playing someone else's music.

"I make songs out of things I have remixed. And there are really two types of people out there - the ones that will pick and go through every inch of music trying to find influences and someone else's tunes, and those that just see it for what it is."

Ohio-born Krohn has been doing the rounds of university radio for about 10 years, and although his music has been constantly referred to as "underground", his aims are to be melodic and essentially pop.

"For me, Stevie Wonder was the apex of American music. He was playing every instrument imaginable, producing, doing the whole lot. Alicia Keyes and de Angelo are only singing and trying desperately to be like him. He is the black Beatles really."

The cliche has been to put Krohn on a par with West Coast turntablist guru DJ Shadow.

"There are not that many hip-hop instrumentalists doing what we do out there," he says, "so I guess it makes sense for them to bundle us together.

"Comparisons are kind of presumptuous, but I would like to do for music what Wes Anderson [director of the Royal Tenenbaums] does for film, make entertainment that is funny and lighthearted even though it deals with heavy-duty subject matter."

This is where classifying Krohn becomes a difficult task. His music, although essentially based on hip-hop techniques of sampling sounds and beats, doesn't really belong on the dance floor.

His 2002 album Deadringer goes from the classic hip-hop DJ/MC set up (in combination with Krohn's old buddy Copywrite), past heavily blues-based beats, through to Chicken Bone Circuit, a track where it seems Philip Glass has teamed up with Max Roach to do the music for a scene from Requiem for a Dream - sequential, minimalist and deliciously eerie.

"I couldn't do an entire dance album even if I tried to. I look for uptempo and happy but I guess the nature of my music is different," confesses Krohn.

In critical terms the only way to describe his compositional skills are that of deconstructionist, collage artist and as someone who hasn't quite made his mind up whether he'd like to be making art or pop.

That same insecurity puts his music comfortably between the two.

His dense, atmospheric songs work mostly because of their meticulous attention to structure, melody and well thought-out progressions.

"For my own tunes I keep a running tally of drum and piano segments that I want to use. Normally I have no idea how I will use them but they sit there for a while. So I take those two elements that might not work well together and try to manipulate them until they do work well along each other."

His remixes of Massive Attack, Elbow, Nightmares on Wax and others also seem to begin from a musical deconstruction. "I strip all the music from the song and tend to focus on the a cappellas and then just rebuild music around it."

"I'm listening to a lot of Mars Volta and Queens from the Stone Age at the moment. Simple, good melodies - they've got balls and to tell you the truth a lot of NY rap at the moment is very candy-assed."

Krohn describes his upcoming album as having "a more concise feel to it, more melodic, loads more vocals".

"I am also sampling a lot from live instruments. I don't know where it'll be placed on the local record shop - hip-hop, jazz, classic rock hopefully. Yeah, classic rock."

Performance

*Who: Rjd2, hip-hop instrumentalist

*Where: Centro

*When: Saturday April 3

*Supports: Main Room - Manuel Bundy and Plant Master Grant; B-Boys Room - Stinky Jim, Slave, Roger Perry and Nick-D

*Price: $33