Get your ears around this lively floor-filler from master muso and old friend of CLASH Matt FX.
The accomplished New Yorker made his name as music supervisor for hilarious Comedy Central hit show Broad City, and still does plenty of film work plus odds and ends hosting MTV.
In 2015 he put out his first original record under the banner of Scooter Island – a cheerful suite of upbeat, Africa-inflected pop.
"For awhile I’ve thinking about releasing stuff under my own name," Matt tells CLASH over the phone. "I went to school with Richie [Quake] and he reached out to see if I wanted to maybe think about doing a remix of Hesitate."
"Something weird I’ve noticed as a DJ recently though is this backlash against ‘standard’ remixes. The old trick of lifting the vocal line and putting it to a whole different production… people dance harder to the original beat than to 'remixes'."
"People seem annoyed when you mess with it too much."
"So rather than changing up the beat I kept it very much the same, but added [LA rapper] Yung Skrrt and Mari from NYC for a couple verses and made it more of a house party, posse kind of track."
So much like DJ Khaled, Matt FX’s role is less about tweaking beats than bringing the right people to the table. Although FX has brought his prodigious party DJ experience to the fold – note the (ahem) air horns.
"Ha, look dude, I just wanna have fun. It’s 2017 – there’s some dark shit going on in the world right now."
Words: Andy Hill
