American deejay and record producer DJ darryL spoke to Mark Lungley, at Greenbelt.

DJ darryL

Mark: We know you as a deejay and the chap who compiles Cross Rhythms' Sanctified Dance DJ listings. But you also make albums!

DJ darryL: I'm signed to the N-Soul label and Blinding Light Records label. My partner DJ c3po and I have just put a new release out in both arenas. We play very eclectic dance music. We will go anywhere from drum and bass right into disco, to trance; we're doing two-step now. Just about all of our songs you really need to take your tongue and plant it firmly against your cheek when you're listening to it because we take a lot of old samples, a lot of things that are a little different and plant them within the songs. On the N-Soul release we have drum and bass, jungle, disco and it's all geared towards a more club-type feel. We also have some songs that we feel work very well in a praise and worship setting, whether it's a church setting or a youth setting. The stuff I've done with Blinding Light is all trance and it's all a definite club-type feel to it. What I'm doing there is a 77 minute mix and so it has its progressions up and down.

Mark: I understand you've put some preachers to some trance settings.

DJ darryL: Blinding Light is a brand new label and it's out of Phoenix, Arizona. They've got about six releases and they've done some praise and worship dance stuff previously. We were going to put together a compilation of music. We have Plastiq Records out of Phoenix, Arizona and Herb magazine, Mix Mag have called it the number one trance label within the US. We were thinking one day, "Why don't we go to these people and see if we could license their product to use for us?" In the back of our minds, being humans and earthly people, we said, "This would never happen but God is bigger than our expectations so we're going to do it anyway so we can be faithful to God." So we went down there and knocked on their door and said, "We'd like to license some of your products." And they said, "No problem at all." Then we said, "We're Christians and would like to add some Christian samples, Christian preaching to it." They looked us right in the eye and said, "No problem at all. We would love that." So what we've done is taken some singles Plastiq have released. These singles have been mixed by Oakenfold and Sasha and Digweed and people like that, songs people know. We've taken one of our preachers, Tommy Barnett, and one of his sermons on fear (the CD itself is called 'Fear Not') and it's all around what we as humans fear - the fear of God in our lives - and puts a really nice bow around it. We take this CD and pass it out to a lot of the club kids for free. We feel like it's the 2001 edition of the four spiritual laws because, you know, they're going to hear the music they love and all that, but they're going to get these seeds of Christ planted in their life throughout these 77 minutes of music.

Mark: Who is this mysterious chap who works with you and how did he get such a strange name?

DJ darryL: DJ c3po couldn't be here as he's doing some shows in the Phoenix area. He has been a turntablist for probably 10 or 11 years now. He's probably one of the top turntablists on the West Coast of America. He was into Star Wars and stuff like that early on. I don't know if you guys know who Jay Baker is but he is Jim Baker's son and back in Phoenix a long time ago they started this club called Revolution and it was geared towards the punks and stuff like that, and they worked together. He would do scratching with different punk bands. They developed the whole Revolution ministry - probably about eight, 10 years ago now. That's where it started, in our back yard in Phoenix, Arizona. C3po sort of evolved out of that and is an unbelievable turntablist.