Outro: Jorge Jaramillo

Jorge Jaramillo

Outro

SHINy disco Jorge!

interviews, outro, February 2007, COMMENTS

Jorge Jaramillo, who along with partner Alex Alicea produced the famed house track Shiny Disco Balls, is back with a new album and a record label of his own. As one half of Who Da Funk, Jorge and those famous disco balls pretty much dominated the clubs and charts in 2002, and he has since been either touring heavily or beavering away in his Pensylvania ranch, producing killer cuts for Erick Morillo’s Subliminal label. NIGHT talks to him about the new aces up his sleave.

Did you know that Shiny Disco Balls features on the ‘Dance, Dance Revolution’ arcade dancing game?
Yeah, that’s that game where you have to dance in time to score points, right? I heard about that. That’s hilarious.

Have you and Alex Alicea played it?
No way. We’re DJs so we don’t have to dance. Alex is too chubby for that. But it would be cool to find out who is the better dancer after all these years of arguing. I’m chubby too so I don’t think I’d be too great at it.

“Bad-ass Vegas hoes, late night booty calls.” Lovely. Where did the inspiration for such haunting lyrics come from?
From living in Miami, and spending most of my time on the beach, and seeing the beautiful half naked women in the clubs. There was a lot of what I call ‘booty music’ around and Shiny Disco Balls is my take on that. Originally I was rapping on it, and it was just this stupid cut that I came up with in five minutes. Then Jessica [Eve, a long term Subliminal collaborator] did the lyrics and we knew it was dynamite. The rest is history.

Your new album, Girlz Rock Da House Music, is full of ‘booty music’, do you see it as a ‘girls in house music’ concept album?
Yeah, it’s mainly female rock musicians that collaborate on my house tracks. I love the female voice, and there are a lot of great artists producing sexy, grimey music, so I wanted an album that caught on to that vibe. The album is full of collaborations with great female artists that I’ve come across. My favourite are two Columbian girl punk bands, Atomic Brain and Bloody Marys.

This is the first album from your new Lektro Chic label. Is Girlz Rock Da House Music reprasentative of where your taking the label?
Yeah. It’ll be very girl oriented, and will have massive bass lines and electro rock vocals. I think the crowds respond to hot looking girls behind the decks or behind the mic, but there’s also an ‘I don’t care’ mentality about some of the rock and punk bands I work with that’s relevant to house.

How does it feel to be breaking out with your own label having been on Subliminal for so long?
Subliminal’s my home and always will be, and Lectro Chik is really an on the side project for the different sounds I want to feed into it. I don’t have any plans to reunite with Alex from Who Da Funk yet, but who knows? Maybe in the future.

Words: Leo Batchelor

From: FEBRUARY ISSUE 2007

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