Mixing sounds to stand test of time

When United States DJ Kenny "Dope" Gonzalez comes to Auckland tonight, his audience will be seeing a master at work.

Masters At Work is the name under which he and fellow New York producer Little Louis Vega have racked up an impressive list of credits as musicians, producers and remixers. Michael Jackson, Madonna, Bjork and Donna Summer are some of the bigger names to figure on the MAW CV, but their tentacles have extended further.

The reason why Gonzalez and Vega are so much in demand is two-fold. Their remixes are sparkling reinterpretations of the track which are built to stand the test of time.

"The thing that we did back in the 90s when we were starting to do those records was we made sure that each record had its own identity so it wouldn't get caught up in a specific sound or something," Gonzalez says.

"I made sure each record had its own drum kit and stuff like that, so it would be fresh. Even though some of the tracks are real minimal, they still sound fresh.

"You would think the sound wouldn't compete with the way records are made today but it did. It held its own. That's what we try to do with all the records we make."

MAW also write and record their own records. The best-known effort by Gonzalez being 1995's worldwide hit The Bomb (These Sounds Fall Into My Mind) under the Bucketheads monicker.

While in New Zealand Gonzalez is nominally promoting his new release, Our Time Is Coming, a superbly diverse collection of Latin-tinged house sounds by Vega and himself. Nominally, because he admits it's unlikely he'll be playing any of the tunes on it while he's here. "I don't really play too much of our stuff," Gonzalez says.

"The stuff I play is brand new stuff, some of it not even released yet or we're testing out. I have some of the hits and I'll go into maybe one or two, but I don't play tons of our records.

"If I feel people want to hear them I'll put them on, but I like to play what's exciting me at the moment. People can hear stuff when I play long before it comes out ... it's a trip to the future."

Gonzalez, whose musical career has included working with dance music heavyweights such as Daft Punk, St Etienne, Roni Size and Armand Van Helden, is a fan of many different styles of music.

"It [the show] can go in any direction at any given time, that's what's cool about it," he says.

"We're trying to promote that more and take dance music into different areas, as opposed to just doing the same thing for a bunch of hours. It's more fun, too, when you do that.

"We're about melody. We like melodies, and it's from that start-point that we take everything else we build around a track. We'll add on hooks and play around with it and dissect it and all that kind of stuff, but the main thing for us is the melody. You've gotta have that melody." NZPA

* DJ Kenny "Dope" Gonzalez plays St James, 11pm.