Hang The DJ?

07/19/2001 3:00 PM, LAUNCH
Lily Moayeri

The Crystal Method has spent most of the time between the release of its first full-length album, 1997's Vegas, and its new one, Tweekend, on tour--unlike most electronic acts, which come from DJ backgrounds, the Method's strength is in its live performances. In fact, the duo has been gigging live since the release of its first single, "Now Is The Time," in 1994. Building up their reputation and fanbase with appearances all across the world--primarily at raves, but pretty much anywhere that would have them--Ken Jordan and Scott Kirkland experienced the impact of their decision to be a fully live act from the get-go.

Having sold 800,000 units (and counting) of Vegas, the Crystal Method is ready to go back in with Tweekend. But the electronic music climate has changed a great in the past four years. In 1997, breakbeats with a face--the Chemical Brothers, Fatboy Slim, etc.--were all the rage with marketing people. Nowadays, the torch has been passed to DJs primarily playing trance, such as Paul Oakenfold and Sasha. Always careful to differentiate themselves from DJs, Jordan and Kirkland feel there's enough room to celebrate both types of musical delivery: They solidified this belief by taking a DJ named Taylor on the road with them, giving him his own spot and his own lighting onstage so he could shine on his own.

"When you talk to the people who are into the music, and you ask them who their favorite artists are, they don't name artists--they name DJs. You ask them the name of a song and they don't know it," Jordan muses while discussing the phenomenon of trance DJs and DJ fans. "We were never making that kind of music to begin with. The climate was still the same. Even though in America DJs are a little more popular now, we do what we do, and they do what they do."

Tweekend features only two more guest collaborators than appeared on Vegas, but the significance of these collaborations is much greater and much more attention-getting this time around: Stone Temple Pilots' Scott Weiland, Rage Against The Machine's Tom Morello, Beck's DJ Swamp, Jon Brion (producer of Macy Gray and Fiona Apple), and Styles Of Beyond's Ryu all make appearances on Tweekend.

Despite all the new infusions, Tweekend still sounds quintessentially like the Crystal Method you already know: funk-filled breakbeats, aggressive keyboard work, and an inventive electro style. Considering the most notable and successful of the disc's tracks are the ones with no vocals at all, but rather infectious hooks and catchy vocal samples, it's clear that the Crystal Method doesn't need any notables to sing over its material in order to get people to dig the music. Facetiously crediting their use of guests to "they owed us money," Jordan and Kirkland claim they didn't intend to recruit any guests for Tweekend--that it was all happenstance.

"If, while we were working on Vegas, Tom Morello came in and said, 'Hey, I really like your track,' we would have said yeah," explains Jordan. "None of those opportunities were available to us then. On this album, we weren't trying for any name collaborations, shying away from all of that. We would feel really uncomfortable chasing someone or approaching someone that we didn't already know pretty much for sure was into it. It's not so much that they came to us, but on those two [Scott Weiland and Tom Morello], they just worked out really well, and we thought we'd be crazy not to do it."

And electronic music fans would be crazy not to like the results.