The filthy curb-crawling new wave disco of Dirty South is a result of debauched years behind the decks and a lot of time spent at home creating his own musical fun. His Sleazy debut is the perfect introduction to the Dirty South school of naughty thought – a passionate electronik glam revenge on sadistic ghosts of past affairs.
Dirty South caught the technically transmitted disease of DJing long before he even owned his first set of turntables. With the DJ bug in his blood, a young lad could be found teaching himself mixing skills on his NEC tape deck, utilising nothing more than its twin cassette players, a pause button and nimble fingers to recreate the sounds of club DJing in the safety of his own bedroom. By the time he got his first decks at the start of the millennium he’d already honed the techniques ready to take on the world of his heroes such as Eric Morillo and Felix Da Housecat.
At the same time he was mastering the concept of DJing, South was also readying himself for a future in studio knob-twiddling. Spurred on by the megamixes that filtered through the radio waves into his disco den, the devious young man hotwired the family computer (once the domain of innocent school projects) with illicit music software smuggled to him by sympathetic allies. Soon he was jacking out his own remixes and edits of sordid club anthems and nasty chart hits. Wallowing in the grime of his secret life, South soon slid into the murky world of mash-ups and bootlegs. It was only a matter of time before his treachery became notorious around the global underworld – his tracks seeping out of the local club cesspit and infecting the airwaves from the Australian Nova network to Pete Tong’s Radio 1 playlists in the UK.
It was only natural that Dirty South was embraced by the twisted, like-minded crew at Vicious who fuelled his perverted past time with remix duties for Mr. Timothy, Sgt Slick and the year’s most decadent 2005 anthem in Australia, Midas Touch by Midnight Star.
Enter Sleazy. The throbbing electrock snarl reflects his lust for all things clubby as well as his unnatural affinity for the dirty denim guitar sounds of Led Zepplin and post-punk posturing of Franz Ferdinand (check the angular strings of the Anthem Mix for further proof). Top it off with a payback house reworking from Mr. Timothy and you’ll be hard pushed to find anything sleazier this side of a late night gutter crawl.
At the start of 2008, Dirty South was nominated for a Grammy in the Best Remixed Recording, Non-Classical category for his reworking of Kaskade's Sorry. He was beaten out on the night (by Benny Benassi) but he remains one of very few Australians to have ever been nominated for a Grammy.