Electronic Night Life interviewed The Crystal Method live on-site at the Pioneer Art Mix in New York city about their original Pioneer CDJ-2000 design.

How are you today?

I’m doing great!

How did the idea for creating a piece for pioneer come about?

Well we thought about it a lot. We wanted to make a piece that soft of embodied what we thought about the CDJ which is that it’s an instrument. We are DJ’s but we also play live. We play live concerts and we actually did more liver performances at the early stages of The Crystal Method than DJ. When we first started before we were mixing records we were only playing live. Recently we started DJing a lot. We wanted to present the CDJ-2000 as an instrument, so it had to have a keyboard.

Is it a functioning keyboard? Does it actually work?

Well here’s the thing. It’s a keyboard that we have used and broken.

Haha oh wow!

It’s an old keyboard that Scott has massacred on stage that we tore apart to create the keyboard base for this. What’s interesting though is there are little string holes in the keys that act as the bridge to hold the strings to the base.

Yes, I saw the piece it’s pretty magnificent.

We put more work on it that people know.

Did you guys both work on it together?

Oh yes definitely. We worked on it together and then we enlisted a guitar maker to come up with the actual bass necks and to string it. It’s all reused woods, it is a very green product. The CDJ itself also still works.

Really?

Yes, we have a Crystal Method flash drive mounted in it that plays our last album. We are very proud of it. We are actually sad to let it go but we are happy to let it go for a good cause.

That’s just amazing!

How long did it take you to construct it?

Well I don’t know. From beginning to end it took about a couple of months. When we finally got the ideas together it came together within a few weeks.

Where did the inspiration come from for your design?

It was just out of the blue. There is no other keyboard double neck bass CDJ’s in the world.

Oh absolutely not!

How did you first get involved with the project through Pioneer? How did this all come about?

We have been working together with Pioneer for a while. We are very good friends with Davey Dave from Pioneer. He’s been a long time supporter. We actually held onto vinyl for a long time. We finally gave it up and went to CDJ’s but we are not into having a laptop on stage. What’s great about the CDJ’s is that we can bring a big music collection right on a flash drive and it still acts as though you are spinning music.

Right, and then you don’t have to carry all of that extra baggage.

Yet it still works like you are spinning records.

Yes, it is still very hands on.

That was important to us.

In regards to production are you working on new material at the moment?

We have a new single called “Play For Real” which features the guitar player and vocalist from a band called The Heavy. We are also in the process of doing a lot of soundtrack work. We are working on a big film that will be coming out in the fall. We are also very serious about film production. We are working on our next album as well.

That sounds great!

What can we expect from CM in the coming months?

We are performing at the Identity Festival, and we are working on our new album and film.

Do you have any other comments or info you would like to share with us?

I would like to say check out a new non-profit that we’ve allied ourselves with called the Electronic Music Alliance at http://www.ema-global.org/

I would definitely like to be a part of that.

We are trying to green up the Electronic Industry.

Sounds great, thank you very much for your time!

http://www.thecrystalmethod.com/

http://www.PioneerDJusa.com