Photo by Damian Guiney
Audio By Carbonatix
There’s a lot that goes into being an internationally touring DJ and record producer, but it’s the performance aspect that brings everything together for Dirty South. The Melbourne, Australia-based musician says he uses crowds as “guinea pigs” to test new beats and believes the celebratory nature of playing his songs for nightclub and festival crowds is what keeps him motivated more than 15 years into a seemingly endless cycle of recording and touring.
First gaining recognition in the mid-2000s for his remixes and mashups of other artists’ tracks, Dirty South (birth name Dragan Roganovic) has earned two Grammy Award nominations for his remixes and collaborated with a slew of electronic artists, including Axwell and David Guetta. After dropping two albums last year (XV and Darko), he’s back with the EP Little Devious. The record is set for release this month via This Never Happened, the label run by his friend and fellow DJ, Lane 8.
To create the four-to-the-floor rhythms and hypnotic synthesizer leads that drive Little Devious, Roganovic struck out with a clear intention to produce “more club tracks for my sets,” he says. Though some artists claim not to think about how their music will be received while they’re sweating over hot beats in the studio, he always considers how his tracks will come across live.
“I’m trying to create moments in all the tracks that work on the dance floor. I do keep that in mind,” he says. “Sometimes that changes when I’m in album mode and not necessarily thinking about the clubs; then it’s more just about song structure. But, yeah, when I’m making club music, I’m definitely thinking about how the crowd will respond to it.”
To see how people react on the dance floor, Roganovic regularly rolls early versions of songs into his live sets in something of a feedback loop. If a particular track falls flat for whatever reason, he’ll go back into the studio to “change the moments, maybe by increasing or decreasing energy.”
Though Roganovic admits fatigue occasionally creeps in during the process of performing, tweaking, and re-testing his songs, he draws energy from the vastly different experiences of working alone in the studio, “fighting [himself], questioning whether or not this is good,” and presenting that work in a shared setting and “getting [his] answer.”
“It’s what keeps me fresh and interested,” he says. “If I was just DJ’ing for 15 years nonstop, I think I would get bored. If I was just making music, I would get bored with that too. But I get to do my own solo thing in the studio and then go on the road and meet people and play to maybe a couple thousand at once. I see the fans and see their responses. It kind of puts a stamp on what you’ve been doing for the past three months. I think that’s what keeps me going.”
Dirty South. 11 p.m. Friday, August 16, at Treehouse, 323 23rd St., Miami Beach; 305-614-4478; treehousemiami.com. Tickets cost $10 to $25 via eventbrite.com.
