DFA: the soon-to-be jukebox juggernauts with a notion for motion

Interview, Nov, 2003 by Matt Diehl

DFA producers Tim Goldsworthy and James Murphy appropriately take their name from the phrase "death from above": The New York City knob twiddlers have been murdering musical boundaries with a run of combustible singles, such as the Rapture's "House of Jealous Lovers" and LCD Soundsystem's "Losing My Edge." Their idiosyncratic vision--a fusion of Can, Black Sabbath, the Fall, and Donna Summer--has clicked with simpatico souls in the city's dance-punk underground and has the duo fielding calls from the likes of Britney Spears and Janet Jackson.

Goldsworthy, an Englishman, met Murphy in 1999 while working on DJ-producer David Holmes's album Bow Down to the Exit Sign (2000). "My whole musical career is based on great New York musical forms--disco, punk, hip-hop," explains Goldsworthy. "But when I arrived here, it was so boring that we decided to recreate what we thought New York should be like."

With DFA Compilation #1 (DFA) and the Rapture's Echoes (DFA/Strummer/Universal), both released this fall, Goldsworthy and Murphy are now poised to bring their mayhem to the masses. "We're music dorks to a certain degree, but the point of DFA is really to make music that's not just for other cranky, aging nerds," says Murphy. "We want to make something that'll work on any dance floor, period."

Matt Diehl is a contributing music editor for Interview.