DC Salas: 'We are all benefiting from the success of Roméo Elvis and co'

Producer DC Salas may spend most of his time in his compact home studio, but live he prefers to bring all his friends along. 'The Brussels electronica scene should take a leaf out of the hip-hop community’s book and appear together more often.'

You can take the designation “bedroom producer” literally in Diego Cortez Salas’s case. At his apartment in Etterbeek, there is no door between the space where he sleeps and the office where he works.

Until recently, the 29-year-old electronica artist and radio host was still working in advertising full-time. As a social media strategist, he was responsible for increasing the online visibility of brands like Maserati, Barilla, and GrandOptical.

But last year, his own name-recognition boomed. Thanks to his music. In the wake of the release of his album debut, The Unspoken (2017), he was nominated for no fewer than six Red Bull Elektropedia Awards. It became increasingly difficult to combine his day job with his nightly activities as a producer, remixer, and deejay.

“My lifestyle was going to start taking its toll soon,” he tells us honestly. “I had conditioned my body so that it no longer knew what tiredness was. When I recently became a freelancer and didn’t have to get up early after a very short night, I suddenly realized how much fatigue I had accumulated.” Not that he has any less on his plate these days, but the number of steps to his desk has decreased considerably.

After gradually working his way up as a DJ and producer of minimal techno, DC Salas’s first album was rooted much less in beats than in older EPs. “That was a conscious choice,” he explains. “The album was actually more aligned with my more melodious first EP, Peru (2010), which focused squarely on my roots” – Salas’s Peruvian father met his Belgian mother at the birthday party of a mutual friend in Brussels when he was working in Italy.

“I didn’t just want to make a clubbing album. I wanted to tell a story. I wanted to show that electronic music could be more than four to the floor techno. But I had to revert to myself and my own story.” A break-up brought solace: worrying about the reasons for the break-up and the friends who helped him to process it became the biggest sources of inspiration for The Un­spoken.

Sense of community

“Music was the best way to express my emotions, my therapy. When I told my friend Joy Adegoke, the singer in Joy Wellboy, about the break-up, she was surprised, but she also told me that ‘Everything happens for a reason’. That helped me to start going forward again and take some decisions that I wouldn’t have dared to take before.”

The title of the album refers to things that went unsaid in the relationship and led to its demise. So that he would never forget it, he immortalized the message in his first tattoo: “Non Dit”.

To help him get over the break-up and because it can be very lonely to spend hours shut up between a computer and a Prophet 6 synthesizer, the producer wanted to involve as many musicians as possible in the album. “So even though Joy Wellboy had moved to an even smaller bedroom studio in Berlin, I absolutely wanted them to be part of it. The single ‘Cala Falco’ is the result of intensive digital traffic between Brussels and Berlin.”