When Crystal Method’s Ken Jordan and Scott Kirkland first told the dance kids to get "Busy Child," they listened.
Even though the duo had been releasing music since 1994, their 1997 full-length debut, Vegas, was a beast, boasting five singles out of its 10 tracks, and infiltrating every club, desert party and warehouse all-nighter from coast to coast. They've since released three additional studio albums, picked up a couple of Grammy nods and did scoring work for both film and television.
"And we're actually working on the new album right now," said Jordan recently from Crystalwerks, the band's recently constructed Los Angeles recording studio. "We're looking for it to come out at the end of this year."
It's difficult to believe that claim, with all the other things they have going on. The pair is concurrently working on a big, hush-hush couple of scenes for an upcoming blockbuster, remixing things like songs from Tron and Tom Morello tunes, and gathering prospective vocalists for the next album. (Not to mention continually DJing -– including tonight at the big Mardi Gras celebration in the Gaslamp.
"We do keep all of the outlets open," Jordan said, "but we also always focus on our own albums the most."
While that may be true, the band is not one to shy away from pursuing opportunities. From ads to video games to television to movie previews, they're happy to put a soundtrack on a lot of different things. And the band is now releasing music on their own label, Tiny e Records, as well.
"We actually came up with that a long time ago," Jordan said. "We needed a way to release music for things like iTunes in different countries, and things like that. It was just a necessary detail that we had to do, originally. But when we decided to release music on our own, we already had the label in place. It worked out very nicely."
That's kind of been the M.O. for the band as of late, with things like the 10th anniversary of Vegas coinciding with the record going platinum and scoring opportunities coming in by the bucketload.
Jordan is aware of both the band's good fortune and of the significance of the milestones it's hitting along the way.
"2014 will be the 20th anniversary of our first release," he said. "And that's coming up faster than you think. The 10th anniversary of Vegas was a big deal for us, but 20 years as a band is huge. We're definitely celebrating that one."
But for Tuesday night, it's all about getting back to basics and making sure that the Gaslamp's Mardi Gras crowd keeps moving and shaking until it's time to go home. Jordan said that, no matter what other projects they take on, it will always be that way: "We'll never stop making music that people can dance to."
Blogger Scott McDonald covers music in San Diego for a few different publications and is the editor of Eight24.com
