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Music

Meet The Crystal Method, the Big Beat Duo That Soundtracked Every Early-Aughts Movie That Mattered

...Except that one song.
(Photo via The Crystal Method/Facebook)

When I was 12, The Crystal Method's debut album Vegas (1997) was one of the first albums I ever bought. Opening with "Trip Like I Do," a hyperactive banger that situates us in "another world, another time, in the age of wonder," the album is an hour-and-one-minute ride through unadulterated electronica frenzy. Listening to it as a pre-teen felt like being in those scenes in Requiem for a Dream where everyone's pupils dilate after consuming copious amounts of drugs.

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Vegas came about in an era where American record labels were noticing the success of electronic acts and rave culture abroad—a Big Beat explosion led by UK acts like The Prodigy and The Chemical Brothers. Mainstream radio stations were still putting Aerosmith's "I Don't Want To Miss A Thing" on infinite repeat, but, if you were lucky, the local "alternative" station might play The Prodigy's "Firestarter" in between The Offspring and Kid Rock. Vegas, which was certified platinum in 2007, helped to establish the duo as America's ambassadors to this burgeoning electronica scene—a title they shared with a tweaky bald-headed dude named Moby.

A few months after Vegas dropped, the 1998 vampire action movie Blade came out. Although unrelated, both seemed to share a common aesthetic—specifically, a dark, gritty take on the apocalyptic future that the encroaching millennium probably had something to do with the encroaching millennium. Perhaps for this reason, the track played in Blade's most iconic scene—a blood-soaked rave full of techno-punk vampires—was commonly (and mistakenly) attributed to The Crystal Method. (For what it's worth, it's actually The Pump Panel Reconstruction mix of New Order's "Confusion.")

This Friday (October 9), the duo will rectify this historical wrong by headlining Blade Rave, a Comic Con afterparty organized by New York-based production company BBQ Films. Known for their painstaking recreations of famous scenes from cult movies, BBQ Films will be bringing the blood-saturated rave from Blade to life, with The Crystal Method joined by Pictureplane, The Dance Cartel, A Place Both Wonderful And Strange, and DJ Choyce Hacks.

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I recently had the chance to speak with Ken Jordan and Scott Kirkland about their upcoming gig, collaborating with LeeAnn Rimes, and providing the soundtrack to a generation of popular media… while doing my best not to fully regress to my 12-year-old self.

THUMP: What was 1998 like for you, with the recent release of your first album against a backdrop of the rave and movie cultures of that era?

Scott Kirkland: Wow, ''98 and '99 were busy years. Vegas had come out, then [California radio station] KROQ added "Busy Child," and a bunch of other stations followed suit. The music was changing, and it felt like it was influencing movie production at the time. Like, I don't think The Matrix would have been The Matrix if it didn't have that cutting-edge score, if it hadn't had all that Massive Attack and Rage Against the Machine—things that were much different than the typical sort of grunge.

We were just touring relentlessly. In '98 we went with Orbital and Low Fidelity All-Stars and did like 20 to 30 shows around the US. We got to watch and hang out with Orbital every night, and it was just a pretty phenomenal couple years. It was really before the rise of the internet to a full extent, and people were just going out a lot and thankfully continued to buy records for a few years. Then, you know, everything sort of cracked open and the genie was totally… give it all, give it out [laughs]. Just give it to everybody.

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But you still had a record that managed to go platinum after the trading culture exploded.
SK: Yeah, we were told so many times that people would play it and somebody would borrow it and never give it back and so they would have to go buy another one.

[laughs] That's key.
SK: You know, it was a pretty wild couple years. We were trying to get back into the studio but at the same time we wanted to ride this energy that we were having. We wanted to make sure that Vegas had its full audience because when we went back into the studio afterwards, we were ready to do something else and it was really good for us to change because we were just getting bored of sort of the scene that we were part of when we first came out. We wanted to just get away from long drum fills and that kind of rave thing. We started to work with Tom Morello and came up with "Name of the Game" and Tweekend that was released in 2001. Then we went right back into touring and sort of blending the two worlds some more. At the end of '99 we did the Family Values Tour, where we were the electronic act on tour with Filter, Limp Biscuit, Method Man, and Redman. So we were playing in like, basketball stadiums and arenas.

Ken Jordan: Yeah, that was a lot of fun. That was the first time we'd ever gone out in a big way with all kinds of different artists, mostly rock, but Run DMC was on that tour. It was good for us to play in front of that kind of crowd.

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A teenage Scott Kirkland hanging out with AC/DC (Photo via The Crystal Method/Facebook)

You guys have been on an insane amount of soundtracks since '97—Gone in Sixty Seconds, Zoolander, Blade II, Entourage, Lara Croft Tomb Raider, Fast & Furious 6… you basically created a soundtrack for an entire generation's worth of popular media. How did that happen? And how do generally match the tone of the media you're producing for to get vibe right?
SK: Well, a lot of the early tracks and movies were stuff from our albums. It's just that our of writing, I think, has always been sort of cinematic and so it just worked well in movies. Back in the days of Napster, everyone thought we had done the Blood Rave track. Somehow it got misidentified, so we were actually always associated with that movie even though we didn't have music in it until Blade II.

"Keep Hope Alive" was in a movie called The Replacement Killers, which was one of Antoine Fuqua's first [films]. There was an opening action scene in the movie which was really cool, and quite a few other little things in there.

We did have an entire score of a video game and soundtrack to a video game, N2O, which was a lot of fun, but even for that we were on the road so much we didn't have time to do a full score. They just went and licensed a bunch of things and it was very quick, but it actually worked really, really well with the way the game played and a lot of people were turned on to our music from that.

The other big game that really got us out there was this game called FIFA 98 which was the big soccer game of its day. It sold probably 20 million copies a year and we had three tracks in it during the very sweeping entrance into the stadium at the beginning of games. It was fun tying it to sports—there's so many people that have told us that they found our music through that. It was like a big forest fire. It just kept spreading and spreading, and thankfully it didn't rain on us.

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Your latest releases have had really interesting guests. I recently heard the track with LeeAnn Rimes and really liked it. How do you select your collaborators?

KJ: Well, in the olden days, they use to come many ways, you know? Through agents, managers, record companies, or maybe friends. But now we just go the 100 percent organic route of someone we know, or that we really like their work, or they like our work. It always works out a lot better that way.

SK: Yeah, with [LeeAnn] there was this documentary called Regeneration that came out in 2012 and was put together by Hyundai. They had a really great director that took four or five different producers in the electronic world who are sort of modern producers, and then had them collaborate with five different artists in their individual genres. We worked with Margaret Reeves from the Motown days and went into Detroit and recorded with the remaining members of the Funk Brothers. It was really, really cool.

Skrillex worked with a couple members from The Doors, Mark Ronson worked with some really great jazz musicians in New Orleans and Erykah Badu. DJ Premier did classical so he went in with a composer. Pretty Lights did a track with a very famous old country guy but they brought in LeeAnn Rimes for the vocals. During the movie there were a couple moments where they were showing Pretty Lights and LeeAnn Rimes working together. They solo her vocal and when you take all that sort of instrumentation out, you hear her voice in a different way.

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So we just thought, "Wow, that would be really cool if we could…" Then we met her and many, many months later, we had a song and she happened to be in Denver at the same time as us so I gave her a copy, and about nine months later she called and said she had something. She came in with her producer and longtime songwriter companion, we played the song, recorded it, and it was a lot of fun.

Do you have anything special planned for Blade Rave this weekend? I know the audience is going to be getting doused with blood.
KJ: Yeah, there is a lot of cool stuff planned that we're working with them on our performance and I don't know if it's a secret or not, but it should be really cool.

SK: Yeah, we're going to have fun with it. That's what Comic Con is for: people to have a little escapism and take some time out from their normal, everyday lives and do something a little crazy. So we'll be happy to be a part of it and have fun with it.

Catch The Crystal Method at Blade Rave on October 9, 2015 at Terminal 5 in New York City. Get tickets here.

Kip Davis will be attending the Blade Rave in vampiric, period accurate, 90s raver kid cosplay. Follow him on Twitter