Dirty South at Empire Ballroom January 19, 2013

Dirty South caught the technically transmitted disease of DJing long before he even owned his first set of turntables. He taught himself mixing skills on his NEC tape deck, utilising nothing more than its twin cassette players and a pause button to recreate the sounds of club DJing in the safety of his own bedroom. By the time he got his first decks at the start of the millennium he’d already honed the techniques ready to take on the world of his heroes. At the same time he was mastering the concept of DJing, Dirty South was also readying himself for a future in studio knob-twiddling.

Spurred on by the megamixes that filtered through the radio waves into his disco den, the devious young man hotwired the family computer (once the domain of innocent school projects) with illicit music software smuggled to him by sympathetic allies. Soon he was jacking out his own remixes and edits of sordid club anthems and nasty chart hits.

Wallowing in the grime of his secret life, South soon slid into the murky world of mash-ups and bootlegs. It was only a matter of time before his treachery became notorious around the global underworld and his tracks seeping out of the local clubs and infecting the airwaves from the Australian radio networks to Pete Tong’s Radio 1 playlists in the UK. It was only natural that Dirty South was embraced by the twisted, like-minded crew at Vicious who fuelled his perverted pastime with remix duties for some of the biggest artists including Depeche Mode, Chris Lake, Fedde Le Grand, Roger Sanchez, Cicada, Midnight Star and TV Rock. In between remixing, Dirty managed to score two ARIA nominations, Pete Tong’s Essential New Tune and numerous number one chart positions around the globe.