Diplo: the DJ's DJ

“I’m having a hip-hop day. I’m in the streets of Philadelphia, cashing checks.”

Wesley Pentz, better known as international DJ pimp Diplo, is in downtown Philadelphia looking for a bank. It’s the same city where he made an instantaneous impact on the DJ scene, with his partner Low Budget, as a driving force behind Hollertronix, a raucous club night that grew into a sound, encapsulating dirty south hip-hop, Baltimore club beats and random nuggets of ‘80s classics and radio hits. In between asking passerby for directions, he caught us up on his latest sonic escapades, from his new record label, Mad Decent, to his production work on one of the best albums of the last few years, M.I.A.’s “Kala.”

We caught up with him before a show at Skully's on April 17.

Now that you have a record label, who are some new artists that you’re excited about?
We’ve got these Jamaican kids, South Rakkas Crew. We just signed these kids from Canada, Thunderheist. There’s a new Philadelphia DJ called Paul Devro. And I’ve got this group from Africa that I’m really excited about. I’ll be producing them. They sound like an African TV on the Radio. Even though most of the guys in TV on the Radio are African, so maybe that’s not a good description! I can’t tell you their name yet though. Switch and I are putting a record out that we’re going to make in Jamaica.

What’s it going to sound like?
Between us, we did like 95% of the M.I.A. record [“Kala”]. So it’ll sound a lot like that, but with different dancehall artists instead of M.I.A.

One of the hottest beats on the M.I.A. CD is one of yours, “Paper Planes.” How did that one come about?
A bunch of us were sitting around watching HBO series “The Wire.” It inspired me to make a more contextual hip-hop track, something about what’s really going on out in the world. I’d been messing around with that loop from the Clash song “Straight to Hell,” and what I came up with was really groovy and kind of reminded me of “Maps” by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Maya [M.I.A.] and I were hanging out at the house and it came together naturally. We wrote the lyrics together in a tongue-in-cheek fashion, not your usual club lyrics. I just did a remix of that one with Rich Boy and Bun B from UGK. They both killed it. Bun B’s verse on the remix really puts the whole song in perspective.

From a DJ perspective, the latest Hollertronix 12-inch single “#7” might be the best one yet.
Yeah, I did those with DJ Eli, a cool guy from the old-school days. We’ve been putting out loads of edits on the internet, and thought it would be nice to put some of them on record. We’re getting better at making edits all the time. Eventually we’d like to collect all of those joints on one CD, since they’re only on vinyl. That’ll probably happen after “#10.” I’ve got “#8” ready to go. There’s an amazing version of Smashing Pumpkins’ “Zero.”

Do you and DJ Low Budget ever get together and do Hollertronix reunion parties anymore?
They aren’t really reunions. We still do stuff together when we can. He’s busy doing his thing DJing for M.I.A. on her current tour. There’s nobody else that can do a better job of it than he can. He’s a good-ass DJ. He handles his business.

Do you still buy records at all?
Yeah, I still pick up used records. I’ve been buying a lot of CDs though. I collect a lot of weird, newer stuff that’s only on CD. I bought loads of CDs in Russia recently. There are some crazy samples to be found on them. I did a song for M.I.A. called “Big Branch” that’s a bonus cut somewhere. It started as a sample from an old Russian record I bought the last time I was there. We’re talking pots and pans drum beats from the Balkans. The messed up part was that the actual Russian releases were mostly horrible. I had to buy these British imports that were collections of the best tracks. Here I am thinking I’m the first guy to do this, and there are already UK comps of the stuff.