The dark stuff

The Deep Dish story is a bit of an odd one. Dubfire and Sharam first crept into the spotlight in mid-’90s with the release of the excellent Penetrate Deeper, a collection of their hard-to-find deep house meanderings. They followed this with the superlative ‘Junk Science’ in 1997 – a collection of deep, lush grooves that managed to be that thing that most house albums are not: good. And then? Then they ditched the deep and went progressive – dark drums and thirteen minute mixes a go-go. So to the ageing deep house fan, they’re almost pariahs. To today’s progressive kids they’re gods amongst men.

Call me old fashioned, but there’s definitely something in the water out Washington DC way. What gives, Sharam?

“Well,” he reasons, not entirely convincingly, “there’s always been a dark side to the music we make. It’s really nothing new for us.” Hmmm. He persists: “Listen to any of our older stuff and you’ll see it’s always had that dark, heavy edge to it. We never go into the studio with a set plan per se – but when the two of us work together, we can make some really dark shit. It’s not like a decision we made, a conscious decision, but it’s just the way it happens now.

“It’s like with our DJing, we just don’t see ourselves as progressive or whatever. We’re just house DJs – we see it all as house music.”

Despite this, today’s Deep Dish sound is resolutely a product of our times – that means drums. Lots of them. Their tough, tribal sound is the sound of now and the pair have attracted a profile outside of the US to match. Their fame, and no doubt their fees, has spiralled. You do the math. The question now is what they’ll do after this particular trendy train derails. But that’s another day’s work.

Speaking of trains, the pair are the latest names to join the big name gravy train that is the Global Underground mix CD series – they now count heavy-hitters like Tenaglia, Sasha, Digweed and co as bedfellows. In any big-league jobbing DJ/producer’s mind, it’s like an entry to an airline’s Gold Circle club.

“The GU series isn’t really something we actually chased,” says Sharam. “But we’ve always liked what they do and I suppose we believed that it was inevitable we’d end up working with them at some point in our careers. And it transpired that they had a spare slot in their release schedule at the end of last year – and we were happy to avail of the opportunity.”

The resulting mix, Deep Dish:Moscow, is, however, something of a disappointment. Relying too much on those dark drums for the house heads and too much on a more obvious track selection for the cred kids, it’s a world apart from their previous, almost eclectic Yoshiesque mixes.

“We decided to go for a different approach with it,” admits Sharam. “We kind of say it as a ‘summertime’ album, if you know what we mean.” Ibiza, presumably, where the pair held a successful residency last summer.

“Yoshiesque 2 was a different idea, it was more to do with the underground. But with the GU CD, we were aiming for a different audience than the usual one – and it’s certainly helped show even more people what we do.”