Datsik Rising: Dubstepper's Career Started With Challenge From Excision

Posted on May 25th 2012 3:00PM by Chris Dart
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Dim Mak

Dubstep producer and DJ Datsik may not be a full-fledged star yet, but he's certainly not far off.

In addition to having remixed a diverse array of artists, including everyone from Diplo to the Wu-Tang Clan, he also recently finished the 45 city Deadmeat tour -- which he co-headlined with house superstar and labelmate Steve Aoki -- and had a coveted late-night time slot at last month's Coachella festival.

It turns out that all of this success comes, at least indirectly, as the result of an uncharacteristic display of drunken arrogance from the otherwise almost shockingly humble Kelowna, BC native.

Datsik, who's known to his mother as Troy Beetles, was first introduced to dubstep after seeing fellow British Columbian Excision play a set at 2008's Shambhala festival. A bedroom hip-hop producer since his early teens, Datsik was instantly converted. A few weeks later, he tracked down Excision at a club in Kelowna and made a bold statement.

"I was kind of drunk, and I was like, 'Dude, I'm going to make a track for you that you're going to play in your Shambhala set next year,'" Datsik tells Spinner. "He was like, 'No, you won't.'"

That skepticism sent Datsik into a creative frenzy.

"At that point I felt like I had to do it," he says. "So I spent the next four of five months doing nothing but trying to crank out as much dubstep as I could. After the third track I sent him he was like, 'Holy crap, I'll play this...' I was pretty stoked at that point, and that kind of lead to my first release."

Datsik's first full-length album, Vitamin D, came out in April on Aoki's Dim Mak record label, an imprint best known for house acts like MSTRKRFT and the Bloody Beetroots, as well as Aoki himself. He says that the two decided to work together after becoming friends during last summer's Identity tour.

"He kept swinging by my sets and just being really stoked," says Datsik. "At that time I guess he didn't know that many other crazy dubstep artists... After the tour he hit me up and was like, 'Dude, what do you think about releasing an album on my label?'"

As a former hip-hop head-turned-dubstep producer, signed to a house label, it's not surprising that Datsik is a big fan of genre-bending. Far from being a straight-up party dubstep record, Vitamin D features guest vocals from Korn's Jonathan Davis and BC-based rapper Snak the Ripper, collaborations with mash-up pioneer DJ Z-Trip and psytrance heroes Infected Mushroom, and a solid handful of classic house vocals samples. Datsik says that he's just part of a broader trend towards a more hybridized version of electronic music, something that he saw in action on the Deadmeat tour.

"It was really cool seeing dubstep kids mosh out to house, and all the house kids going crazy to dubstep." he says. "I feel like even six months to a year ago, it still felt very confined. If you went to a dubstep show, you'd hear nothing but dubstep, maybe and little drum and bass. Now, if someone comes to see me, they can expect to hear all different genres... You don't want to hear the same tempo all night. That's like eating one type of food all day. That's no fun... unless it's bacon."

Watch Datsik's "Fully Blown" Video