We Talked to Downliners Sekt About Working in the Porn Industry

We often pigeonhole musicians into two-dimensional characters rather than seeing them as fully realized human beings. Extracurriculars is a series that uncovers unknown, surprising, and often super weird non-musical interests of DJs and producers—and lets them explain how it all relates back to their work.

Let's skip the cute lead and get to the good stuff: the guys from post-dubstep duo Downliners Sekt used to work in the porn industry. Coincidentally, Fabrizio Rizzin and Pere Solé were both involved in dubbing foreign sex films into French and Spanish before they collaborated on introspective, downtempo beats. Rizzin was a voice actor, and Solé was a sound engineer—But they're careful to point out that this all happened about 15 years ago. "We don't want to be seen as French perverts," Rizzin jokes.

These days, the two Europeans are onto bigger and better things. Over the past few years, they've released a few EPs on InFiné, and now the pair has a full length set to drop on April 7. On the eve of the next step for Downliners, we asked them to look back on the titillating jobs they had in the past.

Fabrizio Rizzin: It wasn't a regular thing. I used to have a friend who worked for porno industry producers in the South of France. He knew I was looking for a job, and he got me a gig dubbing porno movies. Mostly they were Scandinavian and some American movies, and we had to translate what they were saying, but mainly it was dubbing all the extra sounds you have to do, like—you know what I mean, like "uhn" and all of that. I was in the studio with another guy and two girls, and we were shown the scene we had to translate, and we had a microphone in the studio—it was like making music.

Pere Solé: I did the same job in Barcelona, dubbing porn into Spanish, but we almost never talk about it. I was just the sound engineer, so I was the one mixing what people like Fabrizio were doing. In my case, it was really strange porn, like really extreme, like shemale porn. The funny thing is, it was really low-cost productions, so the sound guys and actors were in the same room—it was not even isolated. We were supposed to work really quietly, because our noise could end up on the final tapes. It was really funny, because I remember this old-ish lady, about 50-ish, who was really sweet, and then all of a sudden she was dubbing shemale Brazilian porn. There were also sound effects.

Pere: We were also doing Pokémon movies for a while. You could do a Pokémon movie and then a Brazilian transsexual gang bang movie. They were translating the kind of scenes like where the postman says, "Wow, it's very hot in here," or whatever. It was written, so they were reading the scripts, but when the action started, it was total improvisation. So they'd start saying weird jokes, and everyone would laugh.

Fabrizio: Back in the 80s, the French production of porn was really big. Spain wasn't too far away, so they used to rent buses from Spain to come and see porn movies in France, because in Spain it wasn't allowed under Franco. In my hometown, it was really well-known that buses came every week to see porn movies.