LCD Soundsystem Do the Hustle

Even though you might think you hate disco, LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy and Pat Mahoney want you to keep an open mind. "I recognize that disco has a stigma – there's a knee jerk reaction to it that when people hear the word they imagine it's something funny," says Murphy, who called in from the Los Angeles stop on the duo’s currently running DJ tour. "But we're more interested in the other side of it." He says that when he buys vinyl to spin at these gigs, he's looking for obscure clues that he may have unearthed something weird and brilliant from an era that produced so much cheese. "A lot of time the artists only make one song," he explains. "It's an interesting way of digging for things: you're looking for label or producer a lot of the times when you're shopping. If the label looks funny, or it's an interesting year, or there's a weird combination of last names like a French guy or an Italian guy and it's from canda. That'll give you a heads up that it can be interesting." Here are a few more of Murphy’s tips for aspiring ultra-cool DJs:

What do you do to chill out before your shows? You mentioned you eat…?
No we just eat! We’re kind of boring. If you have friends in town, you’ll try to see them. Then you eat something that won’t make you tired. You can miscalculate that easily: Have a big burger and that doesn’t work at all. That’s basically it. And try not to get too wasted. Managing your body in a really lame way.

What’s ideal energy food?
Sushi is the best food. It’s not so heavy and it’s got a lot of protein and you don’t tend to eat tons of it. If you eat pasta or French food, you’re dead.

And what are you drinking?
I’m into champagne lately because it’s delicious and someone else is paying for it. And it’s not that strong. If I drink beer or whiskey I get too tired. Champagne is right in the middle.

Do you have to tailor your sets to the mood of the crowd depending on the city?
It varies from night to night. Early in the night, you have to figure out what people respond to, but not worry too much about it or it’ll fuck your head up. We haven’t been traveling around doing this too much, but we’re lucky in the sense that people know what we do. We don’t have to swim uphill too badly against a crowd that doesn’t know what to expect. Even when we’re playing London: I don’t’ know what a London crowd likes. But they know we do disco. When we go to Spain, I’ll take something techier. When we go to a festival, we’ll bring big, big 20,0000 people records so you don’t bum everybody out. The difference is that you have a handful of records that can steer it back to where you want it to be. Some times I’ll bring stuff that’s a little faster so we can steer it back to the tempo we want.

What’s the ideal tempo?
I don’t think there is a perfect tempo. Most classic disco is 120BPMs. But we like to play some stuff a little faster than that. And I like stuff a bit slower. But that seems to be the generic dance music tempo. Eighty BPMs was the hip-hop tempo back in the old days.

After you wrap up the disco tour, are you starting a new LCD Soundsystem record?
I’m not making any plans. I’m just enjoying not dealing with it. It’s the elephant in the room. Btu I don’t have to worry about it. I have of other stuff on my plate.