Darshan Jesrani (Metro Area)
Darshan Jesrani grew up in Poughkeepsie, New York, population 43,000. In this sleepy town, he started out breakdancing and (legend has it) hacking with an underground network of computer nerds. Next came music. As he told us at the 2003 Red Bull Music Academy, Darshan explored techno frontiers before starting to dig up records that Shep Pettibone had dropped on Kiss FM back in the day. Via the net he crossed paths with Morgan Geist, and they established a unique sound that put the name Metro Area firmly on the map.
Hosted by Darshan Jesrani My name is Darshan Jesrani, I record with my partner Morgan Geist under the name Metro Area and we record for Environ Records. It’s a label that is run out of Brooklyn, New York. TONY NWACHUKWU How did you and Morgan Geist come together to make sweet music? Darshan Jesrani I guess we pretty much made contact sometime in 1995 or ’96. We had some common ground in music. Our interests were similar in terms of what we were into mood-wise. Also we’re both into older styles of electronic music. We were into reviving older production sounds and techniques from before. Metro Area didn’t really start until years after we met. Initially, it was a lot of foundation building and talking about music. TONY NWACHUKWU Did you record together before under the name Metro Area? Darshan Jesrani We did a couple of tracks before. But it didn’t really go anywhere. We did one track under the name Phenom. It came out on a compilation. Some of the ideas that we use in Metro Area today were already there. TONY NWACHUKWU Did you or Morgan come up with the name Metro Area? Darshan Jesrani Morgan came up with the name. Originally, he wanted to start a house music label called Metro Area. Eventually, it became the name of our project. TONY NWACHUKWU Metro Area is definitely a testament as to how a DIY ethic works. You record your music on your own and you release it on your own label. You are building what you love to earn your living on. Darshan Jesrani Yeah, we are trying. You draw from inside yourself and you put out records that you believe in and that touch you personally. Hopefully, people catch on. I think that’s all you can ask for nowadays. For us, it’s impossible to appeal to big companies to put our music out necessarily. I mean, you can do that, of course. Some do and some people are lucky. The good thing about today’s technology is that you can be in charge of own stuff – not only of the production of the music, but the venue with which it’s released. You can also decide where the CDs and records are manufactured and so on. TONY NWACHUKWU Could you describe your working style when recording a track? Darshan Jesrani Usually, one of us would make a sketch, like a drum pattern and some other element, a bassline or a minimal arrangement of two or three sounds. If Morgan started, he would bring it over to my place or vice versa. We sort of trade back and forth. Sometimes we’ll start stuff together. If we do a drum pattern, we don’t just do one pattern. We sort of lay out the whole song; even if you’re using only one instrument or sound, you make it change. That’s the foundation for a piece of music. Unfortunately, electronic music encourages you to build your song on just one loop. Especially those who started off with sequencing tend to work this way. When you record something and loop it up, it sounds cool and you might like it. But, eventually, you will get tired of it. A loop is not a composition. TONY NWACHUKWU Yourself and Morgan hooked up in 1995. Were you DJing at that point? Darshan Jesrani Early on, most of my DJing was on college radio. I spent a lot of time doing music direction at my school station. That’s where I learned how to mix. I went to a school called Colgate University, which is in upstate New York. It’s very cold. TONY NWACHUKWU Do you still have your high school T-shirt? Darshan Jesrani No. (laughs) I went there from 1991 to 1995. It was a kind of strange school, having a very sporty culture and not so much focused on the arts. So I really got into my music and spent a lot of time with like-minded people who are also really into music. I got involved in the radio and finally did what I wanted to do. I got some support from small record labels to send me records and I did dance shows. TONY NWACHUKWU What kind of records did you play at that time? Darshan Jesrani I liked all the house stuff. There was a dance music column in a college music journal called CMJ. I would read that and follow tips. I tried to get the records that I was curious about. I put them on the play lists at the radio station, reviewed them in the show, encourage other people to do dance shows and I would try to throw parties at the school. TONY NWACHUKWU Did you dabble with making beats of your own? Darshan Jesrani Yeah, at that point I was very much into making beats. But economics really play a big part in either your ability or inability to produce music as you have to acquire some gear. It’s a lot easier now. All you really need is a computer to do sketches. You really don’t need a whole bunch of gear. But back then you did. I started off with one sampler in 1989. It was a Korg DSS-1 – a 12-bit piece of shit. [laughs] TONY NWACHUKWU [laughs] The snare was OK. Darshan Jesrani The snare was alright, yeah. And I had to split the keyboard into 16 different places. That means you get, what, like two keys per sound? You can’t do very much with that. Also I had an IBM PC with a little monochrome display. Just real old technology, [laughing], just crap. TONY NWACHUKWU But at the time, though. You can’t say that, man. You’re sitting there with your early sound player and your IBM PC, you were the man. At the time. Darshan Jesrani I could mix stuff. And that was important to me. One of the first things I did with my sampler was sampling a U2 beat and I taped the key down, so it would repeat. Over this I played little sounds. And I thought, “OK, I’m making music.” TONY NWACHUKWU Let’s play some music now. What did you bring? Darshan Jesrani I’m trying to illustrate the ideas that I had from when I started and sort of where I’m at now in music. When I play records now, I still play a lot of stuff I first got into. I feel like a little bit of a unification of my history and my music. I don’t feel like I’ve gone through a lot of different sounds and styles that have been abandoned subsequently. I feel more like a unification of my own history in a kind of cohesive way. TONY NWACHUKWU The name of the label? Darshan Jesrani Environ? TONY NWACHUKWU Yeah. Darshan Jesrani Well, Morgan kind of came up with the name for it. I think what he had in mind was he has this sort of notion of music and sound as creating environments or atmospheres and creating moods and spaces, so I think the name of the label, Environ, is just a testament to that idea. When you put a record on, when you have a piece of music that is actually creating a very effective mood or atmosphere, it’s really changing the environment in some way. So I think that’s what he was getting at. The first record I play, we did on Environ in 1998. We were inspired by a friend of ours. His name is Daniel Wang. I’ll play a record of his right after this. Basically, we didn’t sequence very much. Morgan just did a skeletal sequence of drums and synth. Then we played around using a Roland VS-880 digital multi-track. This was before recording to your computer hard drive was as accessible or ubiquitous as it is now. You already could do it, but it was a little expensive. You had to buy converters and you needed a pretty decent machine to do it. So we used this dedicated hardware unit to just layer sounds on top of each other as you would do it using a tape recorder. Basically, it is just a glorified multi-track tape recorder. Here it is. (music: Metro Area – “Atmosphrique”) The drums and the bassline were sequenced. And then we recorded the claps on top of it, we recorded our own hand claps. The idea behind this is some sloppiness is good, you know? We wanted to avoid that very rigid feel when you sequence everything. We wanted to go back to the spirit of these older records introducing a little bit of a live feel and looseness. The keyboard parts are also played and not quantized. Some mistakes are good. Otherwise, it will sound way too rigid. That was one of the things we were fighting against when we made that record. And, as I already pointed out, we were inspired by our friend Danny [Wang], who would do stuff like this. (music: Daniel Wang – “Like Some Dream I Can’t Stop Dreaming”) He made that out of samples, but it’s still very loose. That’s I think it was 1995, something like that. ’95 or ’96, Look Ma No Drum Machine EP on Balihu, and it was the first Balihu record. He’s doing really interesting music. It’s not quantized, it’s electronic and it’s groovy. So this was a very big inspiration for us. TONY NWACHUKWU Have you worked together? Darshan Jesrani No, not really. I mean, we already hung out a little bit together in the studio. But we haven’t worked together on a piece of music. I know Morgan did a remix for Danny. TONY NWACHUKWU Do you find it difficult combining your extensive DJing schedule with making music? Darshan Jesrani A little bit. When I come home from doing a gig or if you’re traveling, it always takes some time to recover and get back into the groove of making something. And especially when you’re working on a piece of music, many of you know you have to be in it. You work on it, and maybe you step away from it but your mind is still engaged with the thing you’re working on. And when you have to leave town because of a DJ gig, it takes you away from the mental world of making music. That’s the challenging part of it, is to get back home and dive back into what you’re doing. TONY NWACHUKWU Are you working on tracks at the moment? Darshan Jesrani Yeah, I’m working on a remix and Morgan and I just started some new Metro Area stuff. TONY NWACHUKWU Who started it first? Darshan Jesrani We started it together but I think for the first track, Morgan had the seed of the first ideas, the first rhythms. TONY NWACHUKWU How do you feel about that, Morgan got there first? [chuckles] Darshan Jesrani It’s cool, it’s fine, I’ll do the next one. Audience Member What do you think about licensing issues since some of your tunes have been bootlegged? Darshan Jesrani I always feel like artists should be compensated properly for their work and credit should always be given all the time. People deserve to know who made a record and the authors of the record should be compensated for their work. But there’s also that other end of things where the people want to have a particular piece of music, but it’s just not accessible. Then some people will take it upon themselves to provide this piece of music by pressing it themselves illegally without licensing it properly. I’ll buy a bootleg record sometimes – a bootleg like an old, sought-after classic. But at the same time, when you’re at the other end of the stick, it’s not so nice. For example, we had a record we did and someone took our whole track and put a vocal from another record on top of it. Now they’re playing it on 98.7 Kiss FM in New York. Our own original track would not get played on that station. I think it’s great that they play it, but at the same time they don’t know that we did it. We’re not getting any credit for it. It’s a weird spot to be in. The flattery [of being played] doesn’t necessarily outweigh the practical aspect of being credited and compensated for what you’re doing. Audience Member Would you mind if someone sampled some bits of one of your tracks, for example a snare drum? I sampled a snare of yours with a tune that begins with a kick drum and a snare drum. Darshan Jesrani No, we do the same. We take little drum sounds. We don’t mind if someone samples from us. We do the same using bits of a drum beat. We just try not to sample music. But a little drum sound? Who owns them? We probably took them from somewhere else. You’re taking them indirectly from where we took them from. Audience Member What is the difference between promoting vinyl and CDs? Do you look at it as a totally different product and target market? Darshan Jesrani Yes, definitely. I think when we were doing vinyl records we didn’t promote at all. We didn’t even do DJ mailouts. Some labels make a practice of this, others don’t. We didn’t even do that. The extent of my promoting our vinyl records is I would run around to the clubs and sometimes give away a record to the DJs that I like or that I wanted to have play the stuff. But that’s really about it. The other beautiful thing about it is vinyl is received by music enthusiasts. Vinyl is like a commodity. People talk about it. They will play a record to friends if it’s good. It’s almost self-promoting in a way. TONY NWACHUKWU What can aspiring DJs learn from your experience? Darshan Jesrani First and foremost, people should really draw from their deepest musical fascinations and things that really appeal to you musically. Don’t compromise that at all. Make this the foundation of what you’re doing. That’s the fuel of a good piece of music or DJing. When you feel something yourself is, that’s what other people are going to be into. When you have enthusaism and you’re into something, that’s when it’s contagious and people can feel it, both when you’re DJing and making music. If you really love something, people should pursue exactly what they love and nothing less. If you go along those guidelines, everything else is sort of secondary. Also, pay attention to the quality of the sound you record. Each sound you record should be clear and a strong statement, no matter how small this sound may be. It should mean something in your piece. I used to layer a lot of stuff together. Again, I was all too happy to make these sort of dense compositions where you could pull a sound out and it wouldn’t make a difference. In retrospect, I don’t think that’s the right way to go. When you have a piece of music, if you pull a sound out, it should sound incomplete. Audience Member Yesterday I saw you giving Hugh Masekela a record that you remixed of his music. I wonder if you could play that to us? Darshan Jesrani Actually, there is one more thing I wanted to talk a little bit about the notion of a remix. This issue became apparent to me when I worked on a remix for Hugh Masekela’s song “Mama.” When people are remixing today, they will usually take some samples of the original and record a whole new track. But there’s also another approach, which is what people used to do. You take the whole multi-track recording and re-adjust the individual elements. This means that the original composition and recordings will still be there, but the balance is different to achieve a different result. Maybe a couple of sounds can be added, but it’s not going over the original. The original recording is treated with respect. That’s the way people used to do a remix in the past. I learned this when remixing this track… Let me play the original first. (music: Hugh Masekela – “Mama”) That was the original track. Now I would like to play the remix we did. We just let the original track run but we rebalanced them and the sonic result is totally different. TONY NWACHUKWU What were you given to work with? Darshan Jesrani The whole recording. All the drum tracks, the trumpets, the guitars. We had the whole multi-track recording broken out into instruments. Different audio files. We had the original multi-track recordings as individual audio files on a CD. TONY NWACHUKWU Kind of construction work to do. Darshan Jesrani Yeah, basically when you put these parts into your studio environment, they should all line up and play together. Maybe the volumes will be wrong, but you can re-adjust them. (music: Hugh Masekela – “Mama” / Metro Area Birthday Dub)