Caroline Chang
For a longtime Zeds Dead fan, the first few notes of their Friday night set were immediately recognizable. A ray of nostalgia shooting right through Grand Park onto a crowd full of gleaming faces — a song they released on Myspace back in 2009, which would have been an unusual choice to open with, had the tour not been named after the song itself, “Journey of a Lifetime.”
“We feel like since that song, it’s really been the journey of our lifetime with the fans. We’ve had this journey together,” Hooks of dubstep duo Zeds Dead told me. “It just felt like a cool tour name”
The pioneering dubstep artists brought the tour to Downtown Los Angeles last Friday and Saturday, Oct. 2 and 3, for a two-night finale before slipping into an upcoming touring lull. I sat down with the Canadian duo, composed of long-time friends Hooks and DC, to see what the journey looks like in the rearview.
“We wanted to represent a lot of our catalog and make this kind of like a Zeds Dead eras tour,” Hooks explained about the thought behind the set, “but we didn’t have three hours, so we ended up remixing a lot of stuff and mashing a lot of things together to make new versions that could represent a lot of years.”
“When your catalog gets bigger, it gets tougher,” DC added. “But with being around as long as we have, other people are making different versions of our songs too, so we keep getting more ammo to play with.”
With over seventeen years of dubstep domination under their belt and their iconic electronic music label Deadbeats turning ten this past summer, the duo has a lot they’re building on, and a lot to reflect on as well, but they still keep the focus on recent work and “where this world we’ve been building” is going. “The concept is that we’re trying to tap into this spectrum of intergalactic happiness. It’s kind of an unknown, infinite, all-encompassing spectrum that includes all the art of the present and past,” Hooks told LA Weekly. “With the actual physical set piece, we have a large satellite where we’re literally physically trying to tap into the spectrum.”
That sense of a world being built stands out onstage. Their recent albums are woven from found clips and samples, and in the show those fragments come back with matching visuals. “The albums and the show exist in the same world,” Hooks said. One sample on the album comes from a documentary, a voice explaining that sounds never die and just keep traveling through space, getting quieter, until someone builds an instrument sensitive enough to pick them up. Onstage, they describe themselves as “the guys in the science lab trying to pick up these frequencies.” Bringing the source videos into their live sets about five years ago, they reflected, opened up “a whole new inspiration.”
Their intergalactic lab certainly came to life Friday night, with old-school NASA-like computers blinking colors around the duo while they led the crowd through an expedition in their world. The set list leaned heavily on their two most recent records, Return to the Spectrum of Intergalactic Happiness and Return to the Return (of the Spectrum of Intergalactic Happiness), both of which came out within the past two years. But of course, they included plenty of glimmering nostalgic tokens for the audience to hold on to, including “Rude Boy” from 2010, “Lost You” from 2014, and their very recognizable collaboration “Ecstasy of the Soul” with fellow dubstep heavy hitter GRiZ.
“It has been the Journey of a Lifetime,” DC says. “I think we’re just incredibly fortunate to have these things that we can always tap back into and pour ourselves into at different times. And just the fact that people still want to come out and see us is such a blessing.”
For now, Los Angeles feels like the right place to leave it. Hooks lives here, and he says finishing in this city feels something like a homecoming. The duo plans to step away from touring after completing this run for an indefinite amount of time, which is sort of the point.
“With us taking a little time off next year, it feels not only the end, but it feels sort of like maybe we’re closing a chapter and starting a new one,” DC explained. “We just want to let whatever creative spirit guide us and intentionally keep it kind of blank. Exist in a world where there’s no show on the horizon for a little while and just see what comes of it.”
Despite their ambiguous step back, Zeds Dead fans can rest assured their favorite pair won’t forget about them. The duo has already announced that they will stay true to their annual dual-night Chicago headline this December, which sets a promising tone for other staple Zeds Dead events including their yearly Red Rocks rendezvous outside of Denver in July.
And of course, even if they go quiet for a while, the fans would never forget about ZD. If there’s anything that’s stood out to me about the many Zeds Dead sets I’ve attended over the years, it’s that their old Myspace hits hold water with their fans as if they were brand new. Very few artists could rinse 2012 SoundCloud bangers and be met with not only recognition from the crowd, but glowing smiles and shouted lyrics — that’s something very specific this duo has built.
“We’re more of a tortoise than a hare,” Hooks said. “Some people have blown up really fast. You’ve seen a lot of people shoot up superstardom and stuff, but we’ve just been there kind of trucking along.” And that strong foundation, that longevity, really makes the difference.
They ended Friday with their fan-favorite flip of Blue Foundation’s “Eyes on Fire,” their breakthrough track, which was originally a viral bootleg remix from 2009 — the perfect way to close the circle for now.