G: I like your song titles.
DJ: They’re kind of off the top of my head; the whole record has a bit of a spontaneous feel. I didn’t really belabor it.

G: I like the word combos though. Not to over-think it, but since its instrumental, the titles can function like a hint about the sounds, and there’s a good dynamic between the words in your two-word titles.
DJ: Sometimes the titles are film-inspired. “Blind Yachtsman” was partly taken from Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman. At the time I was listening to a lot of ‘70s yacht rock. That song, I don’t know if you would call it sinister, but it might be amongst the other songs; I was going for the feel of a duel.

G: The colors of your songs are brighter than what I usually associate with electronic or digital music.
DJ: I was shooting for a bright [palette]. When I was with Call and Response, our first record was bubblegum pop, and the next was a bit moodier, so I was returning to the feeling I had when I was writing those earlier songs.

G: A song like “Airbrush Dragon” goes through a lot of passages.
DJ: I really like chord changes. I lose interest in a lot of dance music [if] it doesn’t have the cool changes I want to hear. I look to older music to inform the chord changes. Some music from the ‘70s was part of the main frame when I was writing songs. That might be where the songs lose some people in a dance setting – there might be too many parts or too many changes.

G: Have you heard Sorcerer songs in a club setting?
DJ: I’ve heard a few of the songs. Usually DJs have to mix the songs at a certain tempo, so people tend to play them early in the night instead of at the end when things are raging.

G: That reminds of how the British press seem to ask you if your music is Balearic. They’re tapping right back into the days of ambient house.
DJ: It’s funny how even American journalists are mentioning Balearic as a legitimate category – it’s so British [as a reference point] that it almost doesn’t mean anything. But it’s also cool – to me it represents this hedonism and having fun.
Balearic as a genre seems to be picking up steam

G: How did your connections with Prins Thomas happen?
DJ: Tirk [Sorcerer’s label] had “Surfing at Midnight” in mind as a single, amongst all the songs I’d sent them. They said they’d like Prins Thomas to do a remix. I was familiar with the Lindstrom and Prins Thomas album and some of his earlier stuff. We started emailing and I told him about some other things that were happening and he asked me to send more music.

G: There are always going to be musical connections between different parts of the world, perhaps more now than ever because of websites. But I’ve been struck by some similarities by Bay Area and Norway artists making dance music or instrumental tracks – what they’re doing has more of a musicality and more organic instrumentation than a lot of club music.
DJ: I think that extends to pop. Our band Call and Response, we’re friends with Kings of Convenience from Norway. We met them a long time ago and have been friends with them ever since; we went on tour with them in England.

G: I’m starting to see space disco thrown around as a term in more of a gross sense. I’ve seen at least one compilation invoke disco in what seemed like a pure marketing move.
DJ: Some punk kids are starting to incorporate some form of disco into their music – I don’t know, it’s just a new stage. My stuff is a little more insidious. I like to tap into it.
I grew up in Oakland until I was 11, and my mom was into Prince and my daycare teacher was in a band, so I heard funk and disco all the time growing up. It seemed right to, for my own music, do something that came naturally to me rather than laboring for new combinations.

G: One reason I enjoy the album is that it sounds like you’re making music for pleasure. People don’t do that enough.
DJ: I try to look out for the stuff that has that quality, from all different genres.

G: One thing I enjoy on your MySpace page is how you’ve made up your own genres for the music. I like the idea of ‘80s montage music, or music inspired by montage.
DJ: So many friends, when I played them music, would say, this would be an ‘80s scene or montage music .I definitely grew up in that period and watched the movies, so it’s engrained, so I thought might as well just go for it.
I like having some humor and playfulness about it, I think that’s important. Do you know Thomas Fehlman, the Kompakt guy who was in the Orb? I like the Orb. I like the spirit of older, ‘90s electronic music.

G: That makes sense; I can see some affinities between you and the Orb, though what you do is more melodic.
DJ: There’s something simple about it. At some point a lot of electronic music got caught up in always trying to do something new, which made things more chaotic. It’s fun to do, but it isn’t always fun for the listener. It doesn’t inspire to pick up my guitar and write a song.

G: One new rhythmic pattern just ends up being imitated by 100 more people.
DJ: I liked it drum machines were more static, and you couldn’t do as much with them. I like the synthetic nature of that drum sound. In my stuff, the beat isn’t what’s making you go “Oh, wow.” If it’s happening, it’s from the chords.

G: Are movies an influence on your music?
DJ: It’s fairly key. I was never a film student, though I took a class on the French new wave [recently] and sometimes I’m just inspired by the process that directors go through to make movies. I always listen to the commentary track of almost any DVD I watch. I find the craft interesting. I watched Aguirre[The Wrath of God] again the other night, and it had a great commentary from Werner Herzog – he really gets into the technical side of making the movie. That inspires me. The discussion of craft gives me ideas.
I like European gangster films: Alain Delon, Jean-Pierre Melville.

G: DVDs have changed the way people see movies; more people watch them than go to theaters today.
DJ: If it helps good movies be seen, that’s good. My girlfriend and I just saw The Simpsons Movie and didn’t care for it that much. I like the older Simpsons episodes.

G: I know, but I can’t help but love The Simpsons. They could have done so many other things with the movie – I suppose that’s the curse.
DJ: We’ve been renting through Netflix. My girlfriend has been getting stuff like DC Cab – that was good – and Hudson Hawk. She plays volleyball, so we watched Side Out. It’s with C. Thomas Howell, and it has every ‘80s sports plot point, but applied to volleyball – beach volleyball.

G: We’re back at the beach again; it pops up within Sorcerer’s music.
DJ: I used to surf a lot, and recently I got to go surfing again for the first time in twelve years. My mind was able to get some distance from everything, and when I got back I wrote “Surfing at Midnight” and some other tracks.

G: There is a strange beach connection happening with some of the Norway and Bay area music makers I’m talking with; I was looking at Todd Terje’s site the other day and he was listing “coconuts, the beach” when asked what he likes right now. That isn’t necessarily the first thing you would think of when listening to his music.
DJ: Maybe the beach represents this free place, away from computers and the city and the technology.

G: And the horror of the world right now – the ocean is one area that isn’t obviously territorialized.
DJ: In the ocean you still feel like there are no rules, almost. You’re having fun, and it’s almost dangerous fun, a kind that you don’t find in the city.

G: The other day I saw a cooking show where the ingredient was opah, and I couldn’t believe the look of that fish. Tropical fish are gorgeous. Some friends of mine just got married at Coney Island and the reception was at the aquarium there. One of the fish, the yellow tang, was brighter than anything living thing I’d seen. Gorgeous. But it was funny, the bride is from England, and some of her friends came down and were marveling at the tank with me, and then one of them joked, “I’d like some fish and chips now.” [Laughs]
DJ: There’s a cool fish shop [Nippon Fish Co.] on Geary out by Green Apple books. I went there recently. You’re kind of scared walking through there because you’re so close to the animals and they look kind of crazy.
We went to Hawaii for Christmas a couple of years ago, and “Hawaiian Island” comes from that, from diving and looking at fish.
I’ll store up these visual ideas and then suddenly it’ll flow out [in a song]. I’ve been writing and learning music for years so sometimes once I have the vision I’m able to turn it into a song more easily. I just need an image to start with. When I’m at work for weeks and months, it’s harder – you need those natural experiences.
A lot of times with dance music, I think people are really conscious of the listener, and of music working on a dance floor, and that brings a set of restrictions and expectations for the modern producer. I’m not really a DJ and I don’t really pay attention to that side of it.

G: Here’s the Prins Thomas comp [Cosmo Galactic Prism]. I love that he starts it all with Joe Meek’s “I Hear a New World.”
DJ: It’s funny that the CD starts that way, because my friend Sam of Hatchback is a big fan of Area Code 615, and I love “I Hear a New World.” The fact that he [Prins Thomas] put them together was weird; it was like, “Are you reading our minds?”

G: One thing a lot of you guys – Dominique Leone and Lindstrom too, for instance -- have in common is a love of Todd Rundgren.
DJ: He’s made a lot of music, and not all of it is good, but he’s a great pop songwriter. His early stuff is kind of Phil Spector-y in a way.
[Looking at Lindstrom’s Late Night Tales comp] I like George Duke, that’s a good song. I don’t know Lindstrom, but I feel in tune with the particular songs he and Prins Thomas are choosing. They’re ones that have special chord changes – British DJs will choose similar artists, but they won’t find the same chord changes.