Which isn’t all that surprising, considering his approach to spinning. “It’s about the club; it’s about being a DJ and responding to the crowd and just rocking the house,” he says, when asked what Perth punters can look forward to. “I expect to go everywhere: electro, all the new cutting edge stuff, moombahton, dancehall obviously, old school hip hop. I’m gonna go all over the place and make the party jump.”
Shaw spent the months leading up to his international tour releasing music to build excitement – and when the tour finishes, he’ll be working to clear the backlog of music he wasn’t able to complete. “As soon as I get off the road I’m back and on it,” he says. “That’s the whole idea of this tour, is just to get all this out of the way so I can just get in the studio and work, you know? That’s what I really want to, just get back in the studio and start pumping music back out as much as possible, as quickly as possible.”
His next project is likely to be a new single and remix EP, Pumpin Music – a collaboration with Jamaican dancehall acts Monsta Twins and Flexx of T.O.K., in keeping with his origins. “Dancehall is my birth; I was born in Jamaica, so almost everything I do, I hear dancehall on it, and it’s the easiest and most accessible thing for me,” he says. “But I’m definitely up to doing whatever, recording with whoever, as long as I think the sound is cool.”
It’s an approach Shaw has taken throughout his career. He met Alex ‘Alex G’ Greggs through Toronto’s local music scene, and the pair eventually moved to Florida and formed South Rakkas Crew. Their partnership blended the yin of Greggs’ pop sensibilities with the yang of Shaw’s hard-edged dancehall sound.
Shaw and Greggs parted ways in 2010, and Shaw has continued on with South Rakkas Crew. “It hasn’t really changed at all. We’re still moving forward; it’s just about cutting edge music with our flavour, which is the whole dancehall or Jamaican influence,” he says. “What Alex contributed to South Rakkas Crew was more of a pop flavour, maybe, more polish, but with the last couple of things I recorded, like Go Hard Go Home, had a real pop and commercial edge to it… So I can’t even say that that element is missing.
“We’ve just been doing it for so long, I think South Rakkas’ flavour is South Rakkas’ flavour. It’s not really conflicting. In the beginning it was me pushing more on the hard-edged stuff and him pushing more on the pop stuff, and then it coming together the way it did, but at this point it just is what it is.”
BY JOSHUA HAYES
