RS: Your Audacious mixed CD has a variety of music. With your DJ
sets, are you known for playing a wide variety of music?
Dave Aude: Yes. There's a lot of guys out there that just play one
sound. Most of my friends, DJ Dan, Christopher Lawrence, Tall Paul,
Dan Glaude, Icey, all play one sort of specific sound. I'm sort of
the party club DJ in the sense that I'm not afraid to play a mash up
or a bootleg or a progressive song or a house song or a breakbeat
song, I try and spread it out a little bit.
RS: Moving forward from Moonshine, out of Moonshine did you
start doing the remixing or did Audacious come immediately next?
Dave Aude: I was producing records on Moonshine and word got out
about what I was doing with Keoki, Carl Cox, Tall Paul, and DJ Dan.
The first major label remix was "One Week" by the Barenaked Ladies.
I did a big beat mix. Back in '95 I was doing a lot of big beat
stuff, which is basically another name for the trip-hop/breakbeat
sound of Norman Cook/Fatboy Slim back in the day. That was my first
major label remix that I ever did – thanks to Sergio Goncalves at
Reprise Records.
RS: For Reprise, you also remixed "Blue Monday" by Orgy?
Dave Aude: I did that with DJ Dan.
RS: So what's the difference between like a DJ Dan and a Dave
Aude mix? When you work with say Tall Paul or DJ Dan, do you work
differently with different people?
Dave Aude: No, I work exactly the same with everybody but they all
bring different ideas and different sounds to the table. What those
guys all bring to the table is really where their head's at musically.
I bring the technical, engineering, and production side to it.
RS: Are you working in Logic or ProTools?
Dave Aude: Been in ProTools since 1998.
RS: Back to Audacious, the record label, what was your
motivation to start your own label?
Dave Aude: After Moonshine closed down for the most part in 2004, it
took me about a year to get over that and put the space between that
and me. Rather than deal with record label politics and not getting
paid and publishing and all the stuff that really makes people not
want to be part of the record business, I just decided that I wanted
to start my own label and just do really low key sort of things to put
out my own music and not have to stress about signing third party
records from people and paying royalties and stuff like that. If you
notice, every record on my label I pretty much have something to do
with, whether it be producing, writing remixing. It's all my friends
as I'm not signing records from people I don't know. So I just wanted
to have a place that I could sort of control and put out my own music
on.
RS: That track with DJ Dan "Rock to the Rhythm" was huge.
Dave Aude: That's one of those things in the record business that
happens where you're doing a remix on something and it explode. When
I started the remixes, Nick Terranova aka Starkillers had a track
called Diskoteka that was just starting to blow up. So I heard that
track and said this guy's really good, let me give him a try. It just
was great timing because he really had a nine-month period there where
he was doing a lot of great stuff. He did the Iio remix and he had a
couple of his own tracks do really well, so it was just a perfect
timing and he killed it.
RS: Very cool. In addition to your own label you do a lot of
big name remixes right now.
Dave Aude: Yes, I've been doing a lot of stuff, you know, for the
last ten years a lot of major label stuff.
RS: I think one of the biggest records in the past couple of
years was the Pussycat Dolls song "Buttons." How did you get involved
with that project?
Dave Aude: Back in 2001, I got a call from a guy I know, Nick Hexum
who is the lead singer of 311. He said his girlfriend wanted to do
some club music and asked if I would come up and meet her. So I drove
up to his house and met a girl named Nicole Scherzinger and she'd just
gotten out of a band called Eden's Crush. So I worked with her a
little bit and noticed her manager really wasn't doing anything for
her. So I said to her that I had a really good friend who's motivated
and doing some big things. I introduced her to Jeff Herdad, and six
months later he was managing her. He took her over to Interscope and
got her auditioned for the Pussycat Dolls. She ended up being the
lead singer and they also gave her a solo deal as well.
So, I've been involved with the Pussycat Dolls from the beginning. I
had to score all the Pussycat Dolls music for their Vegas show at
Cesar's Palace in Vegas. I've also remixed all of the singles for the
last Pussycat Dolls album, and then last month I just finished
shooting the Pussycat Dolls seasons two TV show. I'm actually on the
TV show and for season two I'm the music director on the TV show so
you'll see me on TV here probably in November when the show comes out.
For season two, there is a new girl group called Girlicious.
