So Matt, what is the deal with Terravita anyway?

Terravita is a three person production group. Two of us are DJs and one is an MC, so we also perform live DJ sets. We've been together about two years now. Our main focus is on the drum & bass genre—we have a few tunes released on UK labels including Technique Recordings, Bad Company's BC Presents, and a forthcoming single on Virus Recordings. In addition to that, we have a house side project called Hot Pink Delorean.

You guys started Hot Pink Delorean as almost a joke right? You were sort of the Spinal Tap of the uber-hip electro-house music that's coming out now.

I don't know, it was definitely cheeky but I don't think it was completely a farce!

Well you called it Hot Pink Delorean so it can't be totally serious!

We have a lot of fun with it. We were originally going to be called Jigawatts as a play on the whole Back to the Future thing (1.21 Jigawatts of power were needed to make the time machine work). But there were already a few artists out there with that name apparently [laughs].

You mentioned you initially did the tracks just for fun, but they started to get a lot of attention on some of the blogs and major DJs started picking up these songs and playing them out.

It was more Chris Crisis and Incite, the other members of Terravita, that wanted to try something different. We had been doing so much drum & bass, and they had a better idea of the format for this style of music. I started off engineering it and we went from there.

The first tune we did was with our friend Fantastadon (also known as Stereolith) who is only 20 and he's already making these incredible tunes and turning a lot of heads.

How could you possibly release a track by "Hot Pink Delorean featuring Fantastadon" that would not be an instant hit? But regardless of that the tune is very good.

I enjoy it. It's fun to make. There's not as much technicality when you engineer it as there is in drum & bass. In drum & bass there are just so many things going on in the mix that it takes more time just to make everything fit correctly. It's extremely dense.

Especially with Terravita, where you specialize in these larger than life mixes.

We really enjoy that aesthetic. We really like the evolution of drum & bass that's come about in the last five years or so with people like Pendulum, Subfocus and TC. And of course the guys like Bad Company, Ed Rush and Optical and Drumsound & Simon Bassline Smith are big influences, too. But there are a million different influences.

You started out in the Providence, Rhode Island scene back in the rave days when things weren't so locked into genre. Tell us a little bit about your influences and how that plays into who you are today.

Yes, Chris Crisis and I both started DJing in that scene. It was much more ravey - hard house and all of that. The first record I ever bought was a deep house record.

But I didn't start "genre-fying" rave music and getting into drum & bass until the late nineties. I was a raver kid wearing candy and all of that for one God forsaken summer. I was also hugely into more experimental electronic music like Aphex Twin, for an entire year I listened to almost nothing but Aphex Twin. I was obsessed with his music for ages and still to this day I love it.

But even before that I was a grunge kid, with the torn jeans and flannel and all of that, listening to Nirvana and Soundgarden. I went through a ska phase as well.

I don't know how you could be a New England kid during the 90s and not be into ska. There was something about this area.

Yeah strangely enough, when we first opened our record store, Trainspotters Music, a couple years ago, we ran our store out of an old band performance space. The space directly next to us was where the Mighty Mighty Bosstones rehearsed for something like 10 years.

But I think it's really important when you're making music in a genre like ours that is established and has been around for some time, to get inspiration from different places. The worst thing that can happen is when music starts to get inbred.

You can look back, but you don't want to get stuck there. There are always going to be songs that are timeless even though they're in a specific genre. Right now there are tons of tunes coming out with larger than life mix downs and extremely well engineered drums and while it sounds amazing, a lot of this stuff will get forgotten. Some of it will stand the test of time.

But it's all art at the end of the day, so it's really subjective.

The three of you all seem to have different perspectives. Chris is a guitarist and Jon is an MC. How do you guys contribute and work together?

Usually it's a tag-team writing process. I may start an idea and the other guys will come in and work on it. Then I'll come back in and do some more and maybe repeat the process until we're all in agreement that it sounds good.

Jon brings a lot of lyrical ideas and melody to the table. Chris is really comfortable on guitar, so he sometimes starts by playing parts on the guitar. Then we might go an extra step and recreate that part with a synth.

I've been extremely immersed in the engineering side of things and I am trying to get more into the writing and vibing aspect. That's why there's three of us, too. We'll sit and write a tune together and it all seems to work out and we all end up making something that's good.

The engineering aspect is much more of a scientific approach, and I approach it like that. With writing it's much more subjective I think. You could have the same pieces or samples and how you arrange them can change the entire feel of things, even if they're engineered the same way.

You guys are in an interesting position because you also run Trainspotters Music, which is a vinyl record store. How does it feel to be a vinyl shop in the MP3 era?

It's funny, people walk in say, "Are these all used? They don't make these anymore do they?"

I love and respect vinyl. It is always going to be the ideal format, especially kinesthetically for DJs. Plus, there is a whole mystique to the cutting house and getting a record cut. It's rewarding to have that tangible piece of vinyl in your hand.

I don't think drum & bass on vinyl is ever completely going to die. It's been around so long. Nobody even thinks about cassettes anymore, but vinyl has continued on. I think CDs will die first, and people will bring their disk drives to gigs and plug those right into their vinyl emulators [laughs]. I don't think turntables will ever completely die.

What's interesting is what we're seeing with MP3s and electro. The business format is completely different. Most of your tunes you just give away! People refer to the genre as "Blog House" because people post the tunes on their blogs and that's how they're distributed.

But what you make your money off of is playing the gigs. So you give out all of this stuff for nothing and just let people have it. Then everyone knows who you are. Then when you go out and play everyone comes to see you because they know who you are.

It's funny how far things have come from Metallica suing Napster. We're starting to see the industry change starting from some of these fringe genres, and it could be moving towards rock music and the mainstream.

I think it will spread to everything eventually. It's just the way commerce in music will eventually work.

I'm more concerned about the market getting too saturated because there is so much stuff out there. But I think that is where production quality comes into play. If you're good at engineering and mixing, people will notice what you're doing, even if it's not on a conscious level. People will think, "Hey, I like this song because it sounds better. It's a lot like this group or this band, but it just sounds better."

I think in electronic music the writing and the engineering are the yin and yang. You can't have one without the other. You can't have a song that has the most amazing mixdown but that's a poorly written song and expect it to do well. On the other side of things you could have the best song in the world, but if it's not well engineered you'll have the same problem. It's really a 50/50 thing, especially with dance music. You need tunes that people will remember and get feeling and a vibe from, but at the same time you need to make sure that they rock the sound system that you're playing them on.

Without giving away the farm, what are some of the tricks to getting the larger than life sounding mixdowns that Terravita and HPD are known for? How does Ozone 3 play into this?

I always make sure the low-end fundamentals are the parts that pump the track. Ozone has a great Multiband Dynamics module that allows me to tame the heaviness in a mix without losing the low end pump. The Loudness Maximizer and Paragraphic Equalizer are also great tools that I use all of the time.

You also mentioned you're using iZotope RX to actually analyze and compare your mixes?

Yeah the spectrogram display in RX is great! I use it to A-B tunes when I'm mixing them down. By adjusting some features within the display options, I can really look closely at certain elements of a sound to make sure there aren't any unwanted things happening.

Thanks for taking the time to talk to iZotope, anything you'd like to add?

YES! Please vote for Terravita in the Drum & Bass Awards, we're up for the Best International Producer award!

To learn more about Terravita visit www.myspace.com/terravita
To hear Hot Pink Delorean, visit www.myspace.com/thehotpinkdelorean