We're bringing it back home this week with a live mix and a fresh new interview with Pocket DJ duo idiot Savant.  "Hold on," you say, "aren't idiot Savant Pocket DJ's?"  Correct.  "So, you're doing a Pocket interview with Pocket Dj's?"  Correct again.  You see, we here at Pocket HQ are all about the music, and the talent that we manage and work with are always what we consider to be the top of the top.  So it makes perfect sense that we would choose idiot Savant as this week's featured DJ's, 'cuz these guys are serious music aficionados with decades of experience between them and yet together barely pulling the IQ of chimpmunk.  Perfect.

While both of these guys are old friends, they're also among the best DJ's I know.  Both of them have been mentors to me personally over the years, I've learned from them, lugged speakers with them and killed more than a few brain cells right along side them.  Their knowledge of music is greater than anyone I know and their attention to detail behind the booth is unparalleled.  Yes, both of these guys are total goofball morons, and even so they're both completely on top of their games and, we believe, destined for great things.  Keep your eye on idiot Savant, these guys are the real deal . . . fo realz!

First, check out this great video reel of idiot Savant, J. Phlip & John Tejada from Woogie Nights LA - 12/16/11!

Let this live recording of idiot Savant on Beat Soup be your soundtrack while you read!

POCKET: Hey guys!  First, let's clarify for our readers, we're talking with Jesse Wright (JW) and Ron Levy (RL).  So, your live set on The Woogie Stage at this past Lightning in a Bottle festival rocked a lot of worlds and removed a lot of clothes.  Can you give us a little insight as to why people seem to want to get naked when you guys play?

RL: Apparently I was the only one who missed all the naked women dancing 2 feet in front of my face.  Gonna have to recheck that eyeglass Rx.  I suppose getting naked and listening to Techno on a Funktion 1 system are both very liberating experiences.

JW: It’s Ron’s fault. He does this cute little Woody Allen type shuffle dance when he spins that just drives the ladies wild.

POCKET: Yeah Ron, you "missed" two gorgeous topless women right in front of the DJ booth.  Mmm hmm.  Seriously though, your set at LIB 2011, following Lee Burridge, was truly epic.  What was that experience like for you guys and how does it compare to other events you’ve played?

RL: LIB has always been a very special event for me.  I’ve been blessed to play there 3 years in a row and always look forward to the end of May.  It’s just an amazing event thrown by amazing people, and it somehow always falls on my Birthday, which is a special treat!  How does it feel going on after a 3 hour Lee Burridge set?  Ha!  Let’s just say I hope you start including some Xanax in the booth in addition to the booze.  Jesse and I knew we just had to do and play what we love to do and play.  Obviously Lee’s set was pure magic and we felt we needed to start from scratch and bring our trademark trippy funk.  Seemed to work nicely and we had the time of our lives…..

JW: Yeah, it is always an amazing experience playing the Woogie stage and it somehow gets better every year. For idiot Savant, it’s all about delivering our music properly to those who would have us.  The Woogie delivers. The people on the floor are always just waiting to soak in new sounds and this is the perfect environment to let ‘em have it. I have to admit that following Lee last year was a tad intimidating and very exciting.  He plays with so much color and mood from a beautifully organic place; we use a lot of color as well, but from a more synthetic sound field. We’re glad we fit.

idiot Savant's mind bending, face melting set on The Woogie Stage at LIB 2011.

POCKET: You guys have a really amazing, unique sound.  How would you describe what you guys play?

RL: Hopefully good music!  It’s so hard naming this or that genre or sub-sub-genre.  It’s all 70’s Disco after all, isn’t it?  Obviously the spectrum is House to Techno, but for us I think it always has to be funky, sexy and a touch higher than a hippie on a helicopter ride.  What’s funny is people assume we generally have one color in the sonic palette, because we often get booked for the banging slots; Jesse and I actually love Ambient and Down-tempo but rarely get to play it out.

JW: Agreed, haven’t played any down-tempo in a long time. We do love the funk and we’re well into the house / techno realm, tech-house?  But we like to keep it heavy, deep and musical.

POCKET: DJing and producing well with someone else can be really hard, but obviously you guys make it work.  Can you talk a little about what your process is for working well together?  What collaborations have you done in the past and how have they influenced your current work together?

RL: Any creative endeavor involving more than one person is like a marriage.  It involves sacrifice and trust.  We trust we have the same vision in the booth and it just seems to work.  There’s a definite push and pull.  We’ve been really close friends in the Pocket collective for 8 or 9 years now.  We knew what we were getting into.  At the end of the day we seriously do it for one reason only:  to have fun.  The day it stops being fun is the day we stop.

JW: Great, apparently I’m married to Ron now. I think that the push and pull has a lot to do with what sets us apart.  Some times there’s more push or pull than others, and we’ll be talking after trying to figure out what happened, and then someone will come up and tell us how much they liked that particular part of the set. I have to agree with Ron though, the day it’s not fun, is the day we’re done. We both absolutely LOVE what we do!

POCKET: How & when did you first get into DJing?  Who/what were your inspirations?

RL: I bought my first pair of 1200’s in 1997.  I was living in Salt Lake City at the time.  There was quite an amazing underground scene in SLC in the mid to late 90’s.  I was fortunate to befriend some amazing DJ’s who took me under their wing and taught me the craft of DJing.  They were my inspiration at the time.  Guys like Jesse Walker of New City Movement, Sergio Hernandez from Chicago and Stephen Santoro (RIP) who was a resident at the big club in town, Bricks.  They taught me how to play and they taught me the proper history of the music.  

JW: I think it was around 2000. Right around the time that Sasha and Digweed were doing their Northern Exposure tour.  Those guys absolutely blew me away, inspired me to get into it. I was way into progressive house and spaced out psychedelic progressive trance.  Then a good friend bought a couple 1200s and it was all over.

POCKET: What is your background musically?  Do you play any other instruments besides the wheels of steel?

RL: I studied Spanish Guitar for a while and eventually realized the rhythm section is where it was at.  My mom refused to buy me a drum set but let me study Bass Guitar instead.  I spent many a day and night trying to transpose fucked up Jaco Pastorius tabs much to the chagrin of my folks….

JW: I always had guitars and bass guitars when I was growing up.  I was pretty much self-taught until I finally got my own drum kit, then I studied my ass off, took lessons and started playing in bands.  At one point I think I was playing in 3 bands at once, gigging almost every night of the week. I was always the first one at the gig to set up (because of course I couldn’t just have a small kit) and the last to leave. Once I learned to spin, that was the end of that. It was SO nice showing up with a crate of records and headphones and that’s it.

POCKET: Both of you were die hard vinyl enthusiasts before the digital revolution.  What is it about vinyl that you love so much and how is it different than playing CD’s or digitally?

RL: No contest really. I was a vinyl purist for 10+ years.  It’s the smell of the record when you first crack the plastic.  It’s the tactile sensation of holding the music in your hands.  It’s viable.  It’s concrete.  It’s sexy.  It sounds amazing.  You get none of that with the digital world.  And I get that.  It started seriously evolving…and you had to adapt or die.  Jesse and I held out for as long as we possibly could.  Ultimately it came down to the creativity the digital realm afforded us.

JW: What Ron said.

idiot Savant at Woogie Nights LA, Dec. 16th 2011.  (Photo by Wobsarazzi)

POCKET: You guys are fully digital now; tell us about your current process for playing live and the pros and cons with it?

RL: We use Traktor Pro with 2 X1’s synced with MIDI clock.  Of all the systems out there, we felt Traktor brought the most to the table.  It’s amazingly intuitive and just rock solid.  The things you can do on the fly with looping and FX are just crazy.  I would say a majority of the time we’re really pushing the “live remixing” thing as far as we can go.  It’s easy to get caught up in it, and generally I would say less is more.  I do miss flipping through my crate though.  Choosing tracks for me was always such a visual thing. I would literally associate tracks and melodies with the colors on the record sleeve as I was flipping…

POCKET: Is wading through thousands of tracks on-line really better than flipping through a hundred records at a record store?  How has the digital revolution of electronic music helped or hindered the entire process of DJing?

RL: It’s the age-old argument.  It’s all so accessible now.  Ultimately you still have to put in the time and dig.  It’s easy to recognize the folks that just download the latest chart of their favorite DJ’s on site X or Y….finding those gems and B-sides is another story.  By the same token, I no longer have to press a dubplate of a new cut I want to bang out.  I can bounce an edit and have my way with it at the club 20 minutes later.

JW: Also, we’ve been fortunate to get to know people that produce and label folks, so we get the digital “white labels”.  It’s pretty rad knowing that we have some brand new stuff to play, and we get to check the way the crowd responds and report back to the artist about it. But I really do love this digital age; there is such an amazing amount of really good music out there that is so attainable now.

POCKET: We’ve been hearing stories of your epic 5 hour set at Burning Man this past year, are you going again in 2012?

RL: 5?  Wasn’t it more like 9?  Absinthe tends to warp the space-time continuum a bit…of course we’re going!  We’ve been going since ’04 and are absolutely in love with the place.  It’s a modern wonder of the world.  We already have some pretty crazy shit planned so we hope to see all of you lovelies there.

JW: Wait, hold on, I woke you up with music at like 7am right? And we played till 2 I think. So that’s 7 hours if memory serves. Yeah…Absinthe…delicious! I’ll have to check the recording.

POCKET: Are you guys producing any original tracks?  What can we expect from you guys on that front?

RL:  Absolutely.  We have some plans in early ’12 for a collaboration with the boys from Android Cartel.  Expect an EP very soon.

POCKET: Why “idiot Savant?”

RL: Because Jesse and I can both, from memory, draw any building in Downtown L.A. in either pastel or charcoal…to perfect scale.  We can also both recite PI to at least the 100^th digit.  Tying our shoelaces on the other hand…..

JW: It’s true, you should try and talk to us before a show...you’ll be wondering how we even made it to the gig. It’s frightening. 

POCKET: Do you guys do a lot of pre-planning of your sets or do you just come together and improv?

RL: Preplanning a DJ set is like preplanning sex.  Yeah, you have a general idea of the positions and kinky shit you wanna do; but do you really know what’s gonna happen for those 4 hours?  A lot of improv…although a finishing move is nice to have figured out, perhaps…

JW: I think Ron’s answer to this question answers the previous question as well.

idiot Savant & Lee Burridge playing the Pocket after hours at LIB 2011!

POCKET: Jesse, you’re also a bad-ass drummer, how do you think that effected your process and ability as a DJ?

JW: Bad-ass huh? Thanks! Well it really helped me figure the whole beat matching thing when I was a new DJ. Aside from that, I tend to pick tracks that are groove heavy and a little more on the simple side. I think it also helps me anticipate how people are going to react to particular transitions and how to manipulate those transitions to make tracks push forward or pull back. Sometimes, you put two tracks back to back and it can seem like you’re speeding up or slowing down without changing bpm. It’s a fun little trick.

POCKET: Anchovies or lox?

RL: Ah, you know the way to a man’s heart.  Both in huge servings please.  Let’s call it anchovy paste stuffed lox slices…with a side of Duck Buttered toast.

JW: Lox for sure, though I’m vegan now, and still haven’t found a good fake lox substitute. If anyone knows of one, please let me know! I miss it!

POCKET: What is the craziest story you have from your DJ career?

RL: It seems Burning Man always comes up when people ask me that.  This past year, going on hour six of playing a ridiculous party, the DJ Booth collapsed in front of 1000 people.  Just crumbled into the crowd, console and all.  There was a mushroom cloud of turntables, CDJ’s, Laptops, MIDI controllers, plywood and playa dust.  Luckily I was using Jesses laptop…the only casualty was the “6” key I think?

JW: Yeah, still can’t get that “6” key on Ron. 

Click to listen to idiot Savant's studio mix Never on Sunday.

POCKET: Tell us a little about your relationship with Pocket?

RL: It’s about family.  We’ve been doing this thing for so long.  Everyone in the collective is like a brother or sister.  We have such a unique, amazing vibe and that’s a rarity in this culture.  People know when they attend one of our parties it’s not about a pretentious, red-velvet-rope, bottle service, chin-stroking attitude.  It’s a shake-your-ass-first, ask-questions-later mentality.  It’s worked up until now and seems to be a successful model for us. 

JW:  Pocket is my family. It actually extends out beyond us DJs...there’s a bunch of us, we’re very silly.

POCKET: For someone thinking about getting into the world of DJing, what do you feel are the most important things to know and do?

RL: I’ll tell you what one of my DJ heroes told me when I approached him and asked him the very same thing in 1997:  “Spin for fun.” 

JW: Ask yourself why you’re spinning what you’re spinning. If you love it, then great!  In my opinion our job, as djs, is not just to rock a dance floor, but to find really cool music and get it into peoples ears. Do your own thing!

idiot Savant doing what they do best, on The Woogie Stage at Lightning in a Bottle 2011!

Well guys, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us and share a little insight into your process as DJ's.  We see big things in store for you guys and are super excited to be part of the adventure!!