NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Derek Vincent Smith, the internationally renowned DJ who performs under the name Pretty Lights, has a simple request: Don't call what he does electronic dance music.
"My music is made electronically," Smith said. "It's definitely music and I do want people to dance at my shows, so I guess it is EDM. But it's not because it's more than that, you know what I mean?"
Listen to Smith's new album "A Color Map of the Sun" and you'll get exactly where he's coming from.
The album, self-released this week for free like all his music, is the result of a 2½-year recording odyssey he conducted while becoming one of the world's most sought-after headlining DJs. After setting himself the challenge of releasing three hourlong albums in a year in 2010, he was looking for a very different challenge. So instead of sampling the work of others — one of his records might use up to 20 samples — he wrote and produced a series of live music vignettes at Brooklyn's Studio G, New Orleans' Piety Street Recordings and his own studio.
Over a year he coached local musicians in these different locales through a series of musical experiments meant to reflect a style or an era — without the benefit of sheet music. He might offer a series of chord progressions for a guitarist or horn player to follow or beat box out a rhythm for a drummer. He would give singers lyrics typed out on a page with no annotation and walk them through different vocal approaches, sometimes describing emotions or scenarios into the singers' headsets even as they laid down tracks.
The 32-year-old DJ then took that tape and pressed it onto vinyl and brought that crate full of original blues, soul, hip-hop and electronica home to Denver where he created "A Color Map of the Sun." Call it analog electronica.
"I can plug a guitar into my computer and record it," Smith said in an interview a few hours before his late-night takeover at Bonnaroo last month. "I have the technology. But it doesn't sound the same as when I play a 1963 Gibson into a UA47 mic into a Neve console from 1971 with the signal path running through $200,000 worth of analog hardware, then onto quarter-inch tape and then onto acetate, and then I scratch it up a little bit, and then I resample it. All the sudden that guitar line sounds like it was in a record store for 40 years and recorded in a garage in Cleveland in 1968. That's what I was gunning for."
Smith, wearing a Yankees cap with a turned-up bill and a perpetual smile, said he realized the vast majority of the 50,000 spaced-out revelers who would turn up for his laser light-fortified set wouldn't know the difference. But that didn't matter. He was reaching for something higher when he started the journey, and he believes he achieved it.
