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For the last few years U-Tern has been putting in work and really building a name for himself in the dance and pop music scene. This year is no different as it’s poised to be a big one as well, having already released an official remix for Britney Spears with production partner Oligee. Recently he took a bit of time out of his busy schedule and talked about his past, present and what’s going down in the foreseeable future.

So let’s start from the beginning. How did you get into music and eventually realize that it was something you wanted to pursue as a career?

I got into music in my mid-teens through the whole skate/hip-hop scene. We used to just skate all day, smoke weed and listen to Wu-Tang and Nas and stuff like that, from that I gained an interest in DJing because I wanted to learn how to scratch, DJ Premier was a huge influence on me. I don’t think I ever consciously thought about pursuing it as a career, I just couldn’t do anything else without being bored to death. Money was never a motivator for me; I just wanted to enjoy my work.

Your roots weren’t always in dance music; you initially were a turntablist and more involved with hip hop as mentioned above.Talk a bit about those days. (ups, downs, experiences)

It was a great learning experience for me, it makes me appreciate being paid to DJ because I didn’t make a dime for years and years, and it was more about being really good technically and having skills or whatever. I would just hermit out for hours practicing and trying to get better. I used to enter battles back then too, I even won a couple, at the time that was the best feeling ever. Back then I had no idea you could get paid to play records in clubs every week, that was a whole different scene I wasn’t aware of.

What made you decide to switch genres and pursue dance music?

It was a natural progression, I was into hip-hop and interested in all the original records that producers used to sample which was mostly funk, soul and disco. I just got bored with hip-hop a little in the early 00′s and dance music seemed more interesting to me. I started getting into the French house/filter house stuff and they were sampling a lot of the same disco/funk records that I was into from the hip-hop days so there was a common thread there.

Cordova – Paradigm
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So your previous experiences in hip hop helped with your development in the dance music genre?

Definitely, back then house music and hip-hop beats were made the same way kind of, samplers and records, maybe a synth or two, just bedroom style production. There are a lot of things that carried over from the hip-hop days, mostly just the hip-hop DIY attitude, like making the most out of what you have. Hip-Hop to me was always about taking all your favorite things from all kinds of music and making it your own, that’s still how I like to approach making music.

On that whole DIY tip, how do your ideas generally formulate when you take on a song? Is there something you hear immediately that you know you can fine tune and/or enhance or does it have to sit with you?

It’s different every time, the Mark Ronson remix for instance was originally a remix/edit that I made for DJing out, I just replayed it and added my own flavor to it, then a friend heard it and told me I should put it out, after that Mark got in touch with me and put it out officially. Usually with remixes I’ll make several versions before I settle on something. The goal with edits is to bring out the best in the original song and make it sonically competitive with modern club tracks, just give it a little extra juice.

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