What have you been up to in the past month? Any touring or recording?

Well let’s see, when did I get back from London…maybe about a month ago. I went on little mini-tour and did London, Hamburg, Nottingham, and then London again. Got back and wrapped up a few things for “Party,” that 12-inch that is out now I suppose. Other than that, just been making more tunes.

How long have you been making music?

I’ve been making music in some form or another since I was five or six actually. I played the drums and then the bass for years and years in jazz groups and stuff. Then about two years ago I started FaltyDL, this project called FaltyDL

Where does the name come from?

It’s actually an old e-mail address. I used to be FaltyDL@aol.com, and I don’t know why I chose that but I did and it just sort of stuck. My friends would call me Falty for short, so I went with it.

After you decided to switch from working with 180 BPM to 130 BPM, did it take very long for you to settle into the different style, or was it an instant fit?

I think it took awhile to start making good tracks so to speak, tracks that I really liked. But it was just easier to work at a slower pace for me, because I had been doing so many tracks at such a fast tempo for so long. Like the second or third track I ever made down around there was “Human Meadow,” which was the first track on the Planet Mu album. So I guess it didn’t take too long to get into it.

How long had you been sending tracks to Planet Mu before “Human Meadow?”

Maybe a couple months, two or three months, but I was sending a lot of that really faster jungle stuff and Mike (Paradinas) wasn’t really into it until I sent him that track.

How did you decide out of the hundred or so tracks you made for Love is Liability which to put on the final album?

I worked pretty closely with Mike compiling wise. There was a rough draft of the album that was very pure electronica in a sense, and then as I started making more hip-hop induced garage tracks, 270-tracks, it just started shaping up that way. So it took a little while because I kept making more tracks and we’d say, “Ok now we want this one on there instead of that one.” Then eventually after a few months it just formed into the way it is now.

What do you think of ‘funky house’?

What I’ve been hearing lately I’ve really liked a lot. I had to go out and see it live or in a club to really get into it. Initially it didn’t really grab me at home, but I wasn’t really listening to it a lot. But then when I finally went out I thought it was really wonderful. There’s a lot of really good stuff out there.

Any current favorite DJs or producers?

I listen to a lot of different stuff. There’s a guy in Canada who is about to have his first album out, a jungle album, and he records under the name 0=0 (zero equals zero), and he’s just going to blow a lot of people’s minds with the stuff he’s doing right now, his jungle and stuff. I also like a lot of Floating Points, a lot of his stuff. Everything he does is really well thought out. I don’t know how long he takes on his tracks, but they seem like they really are…they’re natural, but they work really well, like he spent a lot of time on them. Although I have no idea how long. I love his stuff.

Any preferred tech or software for recording?

I just use a really old version of Reason. It’s just what I’ve always used, about five or six years old. I’ve never really wanted to try anything else because I’m so used to it at this point.

If there were a place where dubstep, drum and bass and 2-step all converge, who would be sitting there?

I think they already converge in the sense that they’re all dance music, and that they’re all sort of…I mean there’s a big debate about the hardcore continuum and where these things come from that I’m not educated enough to really comment on. But it’s all very interesting, the conversation about what comes out of what and what belongs in the underground continuum. It’s all very fascinating. But there are some artists that spring to mind who can sort of do all that, and one of those is Breakage. He used to do a lot of drum ‘n’ bass and jungle and now he’s doing all sorts of dubstep stuff. And I think he’s done that very well. Again, I feel funny commenting on it because I don’t enough about it, but I do think that dubstep and funky and stuff like that, while they have been around for awhile, can still be considered to be in their infancy because a lot of dance music is still very young. It’s only been around 10, 15, 20, 25 years so to speak. It’s interesting to see where they will go, and who will be there.

Do you find the general estimation that dubstep is a genre dominated by Londoners to be true, or is this becoming more of a false stereotype?

I’ve honestly never thought about it. I have no idea. I mean I think it comes from there. To be perfectly honest with you, I never really listen to dubstep, and I never have. I just got into it in the last year just because of different label mates sending me tracks, or the label sends me tracks, so it’s been put in front of me, but it was never something I found on my own. I don’t really know about it. I listen to a lot of jungle, and I listen to a lot of jazz and a lot of hip-hop. That sort of dominates my listening.

I’ve read that you have certain BPM range you like to go through while DJing. Can you tell me what inspires that idea? How successful is it?

Sometimes it’s more successful than others, I guess it depends on how open-minded the crowd is. I had a really fun time playing in London and starting with hip-hop. That worked really well, and I think I can get away with playing some Nas tracks or whatever because I’m from New York. The way I listen to music at home is so scattered and all over the place, I’ll go from a hip-hop tune to a jungle tune to a jazz tune or whatever, it’s just naturally the way I think about music. I’m not a DJ’s DJ, you know? I’ve been successful at keeping the dancefloor going, but I’m not really solid at keeping it at one tempo. I’m sort of all over the place. But if you can do that and keep it interesting, that’s fun. It’s more of a memorable experience maybe. Then again, maybe you don’t need that experience, maybe just going out and dancing is enough and that’s awesome. I think that’s great because I do that too. But when I’m playing, I’m thinking about some journey that I’m on, y’know?

What was it like to play fabric recently?

It was a really crazy night. I had just arrived from the plane, I didn’t sleep on the flight, and I didn’t get a chance to catch my breath before I was playing fabric later that night. I was a little out of it. Room 2 was like Metalheadz 15th anniversary, so that was packed with Goldie and dBridge, a bunch of amazing junglists. Then Room 1 was Buraka Som Sistema, this like, portugese house duo DJing really chest-pounding stuff. And then in my room it was me, Hytel, Luke Envoy, and King Cannibal, and I think we were sort of doing our thing. It was such a packed club in those other rooms that it was hard to gauge how we were doing. I spent most of my time in Room 2 dancing to Jungle. It was fun.

How do you feel about the current scene in New York?

Well, there’s a few nights a month where I can go out and have a really good time. But I spend a lot of time at home and with friends. There are probably hundreds of amazing producers and DJs and parties in New York right now that I have no idea about because I don’t go out that much. There’s always been a scene here. It might not be as advertised now as it used to be, y’know, blogs and magazines and stuff pick up on the trends that are really, really big. But you know there is still a big house scene here in New York. You can go and find a little basement club and dance till 6 AM on a floor covered in baby powder. New York is so big that whatever you want to find, you can find.

Compared to cities like Berlin, how do you think the NYC dance/electronic scene will bounce back?

There’s a couple of ways to achieve that. If people were producing a sound here that pleased some of the more established scenes that are happening now, maybe it’ll turn some heads. But I think that people who know where a lot of good music comes from know the history, and know it’s from New York.

Photo Credit: Sabine Mirlesse