De Lux x Idjut Boys
L.A.'s De Lux are a post-disco dance-punk DIY duo that sound like they could have come out of 1979 or 1982 just as easily as today. Founders and multi-instrumentalists Sean Guerin and Isaac Franco didn’t meet so much as simply appear to each other, sometime before high school ended and after learning to correctly fall off skateboards began. Even at age 18, however, it was the kind of connection that had been years in the making. Sean had been writing songs since he was 15 and had spent recent years recording and re-recording his own songs. And Isaac had been on a strict diet of classic and obscure disco and boogie music since he too was 15, figuring out the original source of hip-hop’s greatest samples thanks to an older brother with a DJ sideline and an enviable collection. They both were after the same thing in music—the groove, they say, where the bass and the beat align in a perfect way that makes you want a song to go on forever.
Ten years on from their well-received debut album, Voyage, the band now has four full length releases under their belt, including 2022's "Do You Need A Release?" Funny, profound & easy to groove to, De Lux has a host of influences ranging from 80’s new wave of the Tom Tom Club to the experimentation and imagery of The Clash’s “Sandinista!” to the cerebral DFA disco era.
Dan Tyler and Conrad McDonnell, aka Idjut Boys, are an English duo whose dub-heavy home songs incorporate their playful love of life. The duo met in the late '80s in Cambridge discovering that they shared a passion for similar music. Soon after, both moved to London and established the U-Star parties. The Idjuts' fusion of dub, house, and techno soon caught on and landed them gigs DJing all over the world.
McDonnell and Tyler established U-Star Records in 1993, releasing their debut 12" Idjut Boy. They continued releasing numerous 12"s throughout the 90's up to the current period consisting of original productions, along with remixes & re-edits of obscure and not-so-obscure material by other artists and a handful of DJ mixes. A proper Idjut Boys studio album, Cellar Door, was released on Smalltown Supersound in 2012. This was followed by Versions, an album of reworks of material from throughout the duo's career, in 2015.
On this 12" vinyl, the Idjuts remix a single, "What's Life" from De Lux's most recent "Do You Need A Release?"