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Few DJs have had as big an impact on music and culture as Z-Trip. 

He is an award-winning global DJ and Producer, and is often referred to as the pioneer of the mashup movement.

Z-Trip’s roots are in Hip-Hop but there’s no style of music he doesn’t touch. This allows him to collaborate with just about anybody. The List of artists he’s worked with reads like the best Spotify playlist ever. Linkin Park, Bassnectar, Nile Rodgers, Public Enemy, Lee Scratch Perry, Tom Morello, Nas, Galactic, Travis Barker, Shepard Fairey, Run The Jewels, Talib Kweli, Karl Denson, Busta Rhymes and many more. For almost a decade he’s been performing alongside Hip-Hop legend LL Cool J. Their shows have been described as so exemplary that the “crowd can barely handle the greatness.” The two have been continuing that momentum with the launch of LL Cool J’s new channel on Sirius XM, “Rock The Bells Radio”. 

As a performer, Z-Trip not only plays traditional festivals like Coachella, Lollapalooza, Bonnaroo and Austin City Limits, but he’s also a staple in the EDM world. His Electric Daisy Carnival, Holy Ship and Shambhala sets are always festival highlights.

“Shifting Gears”, Z-Trip’s artist debut album, received 4 stars in Rolling Stone. His subsequent releases also given high praise. He has remixed tracks for Nirvana, The Beastie Boys, Rush, Jay-Z, Motown and The Bob Marley estate. As a composer, Z-Trip has done numerous work for video games such as EA Sports “Madden”, “SSX” and “Skate” as well as Activision’s “DJ Hero” series. He’s featured as an avatar in the game alongside Daft Punk, Tiesto, DJ AM, Deadmau5 and other icons. 

Z-Trip’s presence in TV & film is equally impressive. He curated, performed and led the tribute to friend LL Cool J for The Kennedy Center Honors. He was one of the 5 

members of the musical supergroup that closed out the 55th Grammys with what Vulture called “ The Best Rap Rock collaboration ever”. He’s worked on movies “The Boss”, ”Battle of the Year,” and “Drum Battle”. Z-Trip also scored music for the documentaries “Infamy,” “Scratch: All The Way Live” and was the special music supervisor and composer on “La Bare” directed by good friend Joe Manganiello. His latest project, live-scoring Harold Lloyd’s silent film classics via turntables, premiered at both Tribeca and AFI Film Festivals to rave reviews.

Whether in the studio, behind the decks or behind the scenes, Z -Trip continues to push the boundaries beyond what we’re expecting and wow us with his innate sense of what it takes to make us dance, think & discover.

I was first introduced to you through the 2001 movie Scratch. In it, you explained how DJs at the time screwed themselves over by not pushing enough boundaries. 15 years later, how has DJ and turntablist culture evolved, and how is it faring?

Back then we had way more people who were interested in the art form, simply because it was new. We were developing a lot of the stuff at that time, we didn’t have as much technology, all the mixers, all the gear, all the endorsements. We were just getting to that stage where people were understanding what we were doing was an art form.

While there is still a huge community who are into it – maybe not the scratching, but what the community stood for – those people would gravitate towards producing and making beats. [Production] opened up and became really prevalent, whereas the turntablist world ended up taking a backseat.

Also, the secrecy and hunting around is gone. Technology has made it easier for people to get the music, or to be able to do what we were doing on vinyl. Now, you can pretty much get everything you need online, and the Internet’s there with a million different tutorials. I could go online and in ten minutes get everything I need to do this, and while that’s amazing, it’s made it accessible to everyone.

The downside of that is you also have all these people who didn’t really get into the art in the live setting, they’d do it all in the studio. These people end up making great tunes and getting popular and people want to see them then perform and they go on stage and they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing. They go up there hit a couple buttons and jump around, and that is the sad thing of it being so accessible, because the learning curve went the way it did.

I do feel like that’s coming back to be honest. People are trying to figure out how to perform, therefore there’s this new wave of people who are just learning how to do this stuff now. In a metaphorical sense, I feel like once Serato [software] started, that’s when ‘babies’ were born. Now, seven or eight years later, people are finally figuring out how to form full sentences, figuring out how to perform in a sense.

So you’d say you’re now more confident than ever?

You get to a point after all the stuff I’ve done, that you have to challenge yourself, you have to have fun and be innovating. For me the confidence level comes from knowing that at the very least I can go back and play a set that I know works, there’s a safety net in a sense, but I’m really not wanting to pull that out.

There’s these moments, every good DJ knows the feeling, when you’re playing and it’s going good but you don’t know what the fuck you’re going to play next. There’s something about that adrenaline rush when there’s only a minute left of the song and you’re like, ‘I could blow this whole thing right now if I select the wrong tune’.

I have another project that I’ve been doing just like that. I’ve been doing this stuff with silent films. Back in the 1920s or 30s they had a piano player or orchestra play along with the movie because there was no sound. I was approached by Tribeca Films to do just that, to become the music person and compose live in front of an audience, and that sounded fucking amazing.

I’ve now done that three times and it’s incredible because it’s a whole new approach and angle to apply these skills, rather than just going to the club, raging, and then calling it a night. Trying to choose the right song, make sure it ends at the right time, have the right sounds to correlate to the images, it’s really interesting because it’s a completely different angle.