Mix and Match - 3/29/2007

Ali 'Dubfire' Shirazinia's latest takes the dance underground to the masses

By Dennis Romero

Dance music is of two worlds. While Justin Timberlake, with the help of an electronic-music-crazed Timbaland, took the Best Dance Recording Grammy this year for the pop-rocker "SexyBack," there is a muscular contra-flow in the big, dark rooms of America, where dirty, industrialized tracks are eliciting euphoric sweat. Few people understand both worlds - pop and underground - like DJ Ali "Dubfire" Shirazinia, one half of Grammy-winning remix and production duo Deep Dish. Shirazinia has made music for Diddy, and he's been a champion of indie dance-floor shakers.

"Dance music producers have always been with pushing technology forward," says Shirazinia, 35. "I know that certain mainstream hip-hop producers do pay attention to dance music. At some point, electronic dance music is going to seep into what they're doing."

If Shirazinia's latest masterwork, GU31 - Tapei, is any indication, you can look forward to industrial influences coming back to the pop mainstream. His two-disc mix, out April 10, starts in Shirazinia's refreshingly subtle style, beckoning with the atmospheric house keys of Francois DuBois's "I Try," and locking into the electro-house gears of Booka Shade's "In White Rooms." But the flavor of the day on GU31 is industrial house, which takes over disc two with Dubfire's own remix of Nitzer Ebb ("Control I'm Here") and peaks with a molten-hot dub of Depeche Mode's "Everything Counts."

"We can call industrial house a fad, but it seems to define the sound of the moment," Shirazinia says. "It seems to be what everyone is into. People are tired with overtly commercial mainstream dance records. The scene seems to be split."

Indeed, the dance music faithful are either "SexyBack" herds or ultra-trendy trainspotters. Either way, there's still a need for train conductors like Shirazinia, a 15-year veteran of headlining the global club and DJ festival circuit. He can bring you a sampling of the world e-music currents without making you dig through bins and online catalogs. Yes, compilations like GU31 prove that the long-playing mix is more than viable in the age of the iTunes single. If time is limited, mix-CDs are essential.

"I think there are a lot of regular people who don't follow who's who," Shirazinia says. "They know the DJs, but they don't know the particular music or how to get it. For them, the mix-CD is an idea to have the sound of a particular DJ they can listen to over and over."

For Shirazinia, the sound of GU31 is, in part, the sound of his youth, synth-based music that has come "full circle," as he puts it. The Iranian-born DJ spent his childhood in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., learning musical chops early by playing guitar in teen bands and soaking up local heroes such as Fugazi and Minor Threat. He listened to industrial, new wave, and dub reggae with pal Brian Transeau, a.k.a. BT, who would go on to be a sometime collaborator and America's own trance pioneer. By the early '90s, Shirazinia was producing and remixing music with fellow Iranian-born artist Sharam Tayebi, as Deep Dish. When the superstar-DJ phenomenon peaked at the dawn of the millennium, the duo slotted itself as a rare American answer to Europe's dance music domination. Around 2003, Deep Dish - along with Felix Da Housecat, Erick Morillo, Harry Romero, DJ Hell, Darren Emerson, and Nellee Hooper - found itself working on an album for Diddy, which was never released.

"I have the album," Shiraznia says. "We're all sort of scratching our heads, wondering what he's going to do with it. He could definitely target a different audience. At the time, he was spending a lot of time in Ibiza and at clubs around the world. Maybe that's not where his head's at, at the moment."

The intersection of pop and underground can be elusive. Shirazinia travels both roads. This spring he plans to launch a digital-only label, SCI+TECH, with his own vocal cover of Love & Rockets' "I Feel Speed," which is featured on GU31. He calls it "a label of love." At the same time, he'll reunite with Tayebi for a Deep Dish artist album due in the summer or fall of '08. The upshot? "It'll definitely be geared toward a mainstream audience," he says.