Once upon a time, Chicago-bred, L.A.-based DJ/producer Johnny Love was best known on underground dance floors as half of Guns and Bombs.
That project, as the name implies, was all about going hard and going big, full of searing chainsaw basslines and "subtlety" turned into a four-letter word. At the peak of the electro-house craze, they were bona fide rockstars -- and this, Love says, was precisely when he became disillusioned with the entire scene.
Love had cut his musical teeth, after all, in the diverse Chicago rave scene of the late '90s, when warrens of rooms offering different sounds, and partiers up for all of them, were par for the course. Electro-house, meanwhile, as he was finding it to develop, was turning into an exercise in homogeneity.
And so, he kissed Guns and Bombs goodbye and returned as the much darker Deathface. It was good timing, just as everyone was overdosing on neon vomit and turning to heavier sounds in electronic music. With the rise of dubstep, Deathface's churning, slow-burning, tracks like the stormer "Blood Rave" found welcoming ears, quickly.