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Z-Trip
By Anne KeehnPhoto By Aaron Farley
Z-Trip stands at the top of the stairs in his Los Angeles home and picks up his Star Wars light saber. A red light glows from the base to the tip, and a crackle emanates from the stick. “It makes noise when you swing it around,” he says, and brings the light saber down onto his thigh with a fuzzy crash. “There are certain things you can fuck with, and certain things that are offlimits,” he says, putting the light saber back on its cradle. “If you approach a classic—Star Wars, whatever—you cannot fuck it up, because there’s so much attached to it.” Z-Trip is a purist, and not a fan of the digitally re-mastered version of the trilogy. “The puppets were more real,” he says. “The imperfection and grittiness has a depth to it. It’s like the difference between vinyl and digital.”
For Z-Trip, music—especially music on vinyl—is as sacred as his memories. When asked what his first records were, he harks back to his childhood: Sesame Street and Peter Pan albums. When he got the narrated version of Star Wars on vinyl, he became obsessed. “It was the first record I ever memorized, ‘cause I listened to it so much,” he says, and jumps across the room toward a shelf stocked with albums. “Check it out,” he declares, and pulls the Star Wars record out. He sits on the floor and takes out the liner booklet—“it’s crazy old-school”—and points at the pictures of R2D2 and Han Solo and Princess Leia. “When I saw Star Wars, it changed my life, like it changed every kid’s life.” On Uneasy Listening Vol. 1, the 2001 breakout album he created with DJ P, there is a sonic tribute to the original George Lucas trilogy.
Born Zach Sciacca in New York and raised in Arizona, Z-Trip first DJed at the tender age of 13. The first hip-hop record he bought was Newcleus’s 1984 hit “Jam on It.” A teenage graffiti artist, he took graphic arts classes at Arizona’s Glendale Community College, but dropped them when he realized his passion lay in music. He rocked local house parties and opened for national acts that came to town. In the beginning, he specialized in high-energy hip-hop mixtapes for breakdancers. These tapes found their way across the country, and eventually around the globe. By the mid ‘90s, Z-Trip was playing clubs all over the world, but it wasn’t until Doug Pray’s 2001 documentary Scratch, where Z-Trip was profiled alongside legends like Afrika Bambaataa, DJ Jazzy Jay, and DJ Premier, that he became canonized in hip-hop.
When he was about seven years old, Zach’s family moved from New York to Arizona. His parents divorced when he was in his early teens. He stayed in Arizona with his mother, but spent summer vacations with his father in New York. (“New York to New River,” he chuckles.) At first, he was horrified by his rural surroundings. Back in the city, he had gotten into graffiti and hip-hop. He could walk to the general store and hang out on the streets. “I was just starting to get into neighborhood-ism, the whole community and whatnot,” he recalls. “And that got stripped away.”
Thirsty for his New York fix, he obsessively recorded the hip-hop radio shows on Kiss FM and WBLS during his stays there. “When hip-hop was first getting started, anyone who came out to New York knew to record Mr. Magic and Marley Marl and Red Alert. It was only three hours every Friday and Saturday night, and that was it for the week. So you’d get your tape recorder ready and record it.”
His musical horizons expanded even more back in New River when he began playing drums in his older brother’s rock band at house parties. “I remember he dated this girl, and she was over at our house and we started talking about music. She turned me onto the B-52’s and Parliament in the same night, and I was like, ‘What the fuck is that?!’” On the way to school, his bus driver would pump country music—“Conway Twitty and whatever the hell else.”
Z-Trip spent his childhood immersed in a potpourri of pop music cultures. He straddled urban and rural lifestyles, the East and West Coasts, rock and rap. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that he helped advance the art of “mashups,” merging two or more tracks together to create a new, genre-bending production. The philosophy behind this style of mixing is egalitarian and inclusive: Pat Benatar blends with the Pharcyde; AC/DC blends with the Beastie Boys. As blogger Jermy Leeuwis wrote, Uneasy Listening “clearly came from kids who had too many records and watched too much television.”
Z-Trip is in many ways a traditionalist. He is nostalgic for the heyday of the record industry, when artists were allowed to develop over the course of several albums. “Nowadays, it’s not about that. It’s not about the 10-minute song,” he says.
But above all, Z-Trip is a pragmatist. In the age of YouTube and MySpace, new artists have to be as creative and fresh with their marketing as they are with their music. Z-Trip welcomes this challenge. “Record sales are suffering because our fans are downloading shit,” he says. “But at the same time, when we do shows, we’re selling out, so that’s the better gig. Downloading – you either roll with it or you figure out a way to function in the world, because there’s no way out of it.”
With his creative blending of new, old, and older, Z-Trip shows that it’s possible for artistry and originality to arise from the landscape of corporate branding in which he grew up as a member of Generation X. “The Breakfast Club,” a track from his latest album, Shifting Gears, is an ode to a childhood spent watching Saturday morning cartoons and eating name brand cereal. The song name-drops everything from She-Ra and Teen Wolf to Cookie Crisps and Fruity Pebbles. Z-Trip likens his role as a DJ to that of pop artists. “It’s Andy Warhol-style,” he says. “You take pop culture and art, put your twist on it, stamp it, and put it back out.”