Here is the eagerly anticipated video for Jason Dottley & Debby Holiday’s Party Round The World featuring the Twisted Dee Anthem Edit mix of the track! (Once again Dee knocks it out of the park!) This great little video has certainly spiced up my Monday morning! For all of those enjoying the long weekend blast this loud and Party Round The World with Debby and Jason!

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fzo3TEclKcI

Check out Ooh Ooh Ooh from hot new talent Jason Antone. The single is the second taken from his album Start To Move. The imagery in the video for the first single To The Limit caused a lot of controversy and propelled the video into top ten on the LOGO click list! The follow up Ooh Ooh Ohh features mixes by Twisted Dee, Josh Harris and many others which we will be sharing with Billboard DJs soon.  I’m feeling the Josh Harris mix which you can download below. What do you think?

Jason Antone – Ooh Ooh Ohh (Josh Harris Radio Mix)

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9CqIwubwlM

If you’ve seen our interview with Jason Dottley and Debby Holiday, you’ll know that he started his career as an actor. Starring in the LOGO TV series Sordid Lives alongside Margaret Cho, Olivia Newton John, Rue McClanahan &  Caroline Rhea. Here is a compliation of Jason’s ‘best bits’ from the hilarious series, and stay tuned all the way to the end for a preview of the Twisted Dee mix of  Party Round The World!

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2wdu971yqc

We took a little time to speak with Dee and find out more about the woman behind those stomping tribal mixes! Check out the interview below!

INTERVIEW (PART ONE)

INTERVIEW (PART TWO)

SUGARFREE (TWISTED DEE MIX CLIP)

What was the origin of the name ‘Twisted Dee’?

Well what a lot people don’t know is that I’ve been playing for the last, well almost thirty years that I’ve actually been playing and you know back in the day when I was playing on Long Island which is my home stomping ground there was a period where it was really in to have a DJ name, you couldn’t just go by your regular name you had to have a DJ name. I’ve always had a bit of a twisted perspective on life, so one day one of my friends was like ‘You’re so twisted Dee’ and everybody just started calling me Twisted Dee and it just stuck. Later on down the road when I started production, and started a production company, it was just like what better name for the company than Twisted Dee Productions and it just stuck. It works well ya know within production to  have a name that catches people’s eye and generates curiosity rather than just using your regular name so its kinda worked for me over the years.

So how did you get your start DJing what inspired you to take that up?

Well back when I was a teenager my dad and my uncle opened one of the first disco’s ever on Long Island, well it was the first disco ever on Long Island. It was when disco music was just breaking and they had the first club and as a teenager 15 or 16 years old my father would occasionally let me come down to the club when we as big acts playing like The Tramps, Gloria Gaynor and thinks like that, all those early disco artists. During the day I would  go into the bar and I had a job of setting up the bar for the bartenders and cutting all the fruit and things like that, and after I was done with my work I would always go up into the DJ booth and play around. I was just extremely fascinated with the music and the DJ there, he was a resident DJ and a very good friend of the family and he really showed me how to work the equipment, how to mix and stuff like that, really showing me the art of mixing music and it just never left me. Its something I was always fascinated with at a very early age. At a very early age, at like 16/17 I was DJing high school functions and I had my own little set up,  I would play wherever I could.  I actually got my first gig at a club in Long Island when I was 17, I actually had to have my fathers permission to work there as I was under age. I’ve never not worked since then, I’ve worked as a DJ consistently since then.

As you were just saying, you have had a very long career in the music industry, and its a very male dominated industry there aren’t to many successful female DJ’s. How do you feel about working in that environment?

I have to be completely honest and say there have been many, many times where I have just wanted to bang my head against the wall, because if I was a boy – like Beyonce’s song ‘If I Were A Boy’ – if I was a boy I think I would have been much further ahead than I am now, but ya know it hasn’t been easy, its been very hard to get people to take me seriously and its been a struggle. You know its funny, people will call me ‘up and coming’ now because I’m starting to get some recognition, so all of a sudden I’m this up and coming DJ. They don’t know that I’ve been around for thirty years.

So why do you think it is a male dominated industry? any ideas why you think its that way?

You know, I’m not really sure why it is such a male dominated industry, I mean I work predominantly in the gay community and  99.9% of the time I play for gay men, so that goes without saying that it would be a male dominated field, but as a whole straight and gay, I’m really not sure why it is male dominated. It shouldn’t be ’cause being a woman, I just feel that women can sometimes be so much more creative than men. I guess  there is an aspect of it, you know the late nights and the crazy people that you hang out with sometimes (laughs.) Not all woman really fit into that mold, I happen to fit in there really well being a night bird – I’m like one of these machines that never sleeps.

What is your favorite kind of music that you like to play when you are djing?

Well my music, as far back as I can remember has always been tribal based. I’m very very big on tribal drums and real instruments, real drums you know especially in today’s dance music where where everything is kind of taking a shift towards electro and computer generated sounds. I still am this firm believer in real drums and tribal drums. As a DJ I play predominately tribal music, underground more progressive house music, more after hours kind of a thing.  That’s really my forte the after hours, not so much the vocal ‘hands in the air’ kind of party music. I’m more that serious late night kind of sexy stuff.

Whats one of your favorite circuit events to play? I know you’ve played some big ones.

Yeah I’ve played a few big ones recently, which is funny cause I’ve never considered myself to be a “Circuit DJ” I feel very fortunate that I’ve crossed over into this circuit market and still been able to stay true to myself and my sound, cause I’m very different than most of the circuit DJ’s out there. Like I said, they are more vocal based, top 40 hits kind of a thing, but I’ve been able to go into some of these events and really do what I do and shine and i feel so grateful for that. It’s a really great feeling when your playing for not a couple of hundred people, but a couple of thousand people. Especially the bigger events in Brazil where you are playing for three and four thousand people. The high is just incredible!

So you have had a lot of success as a DJ what made you branch out into producing and remixing?

Well anybody that is a DJ will tell you that you really don’t move from where you are from your residency or where you live. You don’t really get the opportunities to travel and play different paces unless you are a producer. There is really no way for people to hear about you unless you have production under your belt, where people start recognizing your name on mixes and things like that. I’m one of those people that when I see a doorway I try to squeeze myself through it. So I saw that as an opportunity to get a little more recognition outside of my hometown and I’ve always been producing, I’ve been this bedroom producer since I was a kid, I’ve always had this little set up in my room. I’ve always been producing, but I have to say that it was really the breakthrough with being online and connected to the Internet where you had all these avenues  to reach people through your production. In the very early days of file sharing online I just saw it as an opportunity to get my music out there so I would just do a production and I didn’t care. I would just do a production and send it out and I knew that it was going to different places all over the wold, just to get my name recognized and get my name out there. Like I said  I’ve always loved producing and been producing, even as amateurish as it was when I was a kid. I just saw it as a way to be able to get out of my home town and be able to travel. That’s really why I dove into it as deeply as I did because I knew that was the ticket for me to get those big events and travel.

So lets get down to the equipment! What do you use?

Well I started out with Acid, Acid Pro and  I still do use Acid to this day but recently, over the last two years, I bought – well inherited a Mac, and I’m dabbling now in switching over to Cubase and Logic. Its a hard transition for me cause I’ve been using Acid for the last ten years, since the very first Acid came out actually I started with products, then i switched over to Acid when it first came out and I’ve been with it ever since. It’s a really hard transition for me, to move not only to a different software but a different operating system also, but I’m determined to do it, its a slow process but I’m getting there!

How does the remixing process work to you start with a concept of you want to achieve and go from there. For example how did it work with the Kat Danson track?

Usually when I’m doing a remix for someone you have an acapella that you are starting with, actually for every production that I do. I always start with my foundation, which is the drums. Always the drums first, never a melody line, never a bass line it’s always laying the vocal up against some drums and adding to my drums until I feel like “okay this is good, this is a good foundation” and then my next step would be the bass line, then my top layers, but always drums first.

What are some of your favorite tracks from this year?

That’s a really hard question. I’d have to say one of the biggest tracks for just about every DJ out there right now is the David Guetta and Kelly Rowland track. It just such a tremendous song, you know we haven’t had a song with such an incredible vocal like that in a long time. It’s just a vocal that just speaks to everybody and is just so breathtakingly beautiful. That’s a big record right now. For me there’s not really any one or two songs that stand out, more producers that I lean towards like Thomas Gold and Jessie Garcia, even those producers today are dabbling in the electro but they still do through us crazy tribal people a bone every now and again, they do go back to their trial roots and give us something great, especially Thomas Gold, I think he is such an amazing producers and I go to his tracks more than any other producer’s for my sets.

Am I right in thinking that you own a record label? Hammer Music? How did you decide that you wanted to start that?

That’s another good question, it all started from eight or ten years ago. I had one of my first original tracks, I’m not even gonna mention the name or the label cause I don’t really wanna talk bad about anybody, but I signed over one of my first original tracks to a record label, not really knowing what I was doing and they owned the track. It got very little promotion and it kind of just sunk in the water,  it was was really hot track that I thought could have put me on the map.  I was really disappointed with the job the label was doing at the time and I swore to myself right then that I was never going to do that again, give a piece of myself over like that and let them own it.

With all the online music buying it was so easy to create an electronic label where I could distribute my music electronically through places like Beatport, Masterbeat and Juno. I hopped right on board with that immediately and created my own label because I wanted to get my own music out there more than anything in the proper fashion. If it didn’t get the promotion it need it was my fault, if I didn’t make it, it was my fault not that I put my faith in anybody else to do this job for me. It was just a vehicle for me to be able to get my stuff out there, my original pieces out there, as well as a lot of my colleagues, they didn’t have places to go with their music. They wanted to remix and weren’t getting the breaks they needed for labels, and we know how labels often do to the same people for remixes for over and over again, and there is really a lot of talent out there that is totally untapped and I just wanted to create Hammer Music as a means to get those productions out there and get them the recognition they deserve. Its suffering now because I’m doing so much remix work for other people. I’m a one woman show here, I do it all by myself I don’t have somebody even taking care of my paperwork. So being that it is just me, something had to suffer when I’m so busy with something else. Hammer has kind of suffered over the last past year or so because I’ve been so busy, thank God so busy, doing work for other people.

Thanks Twisted Dee!