DJ Dust

By Selena Lawson

Photo by Biluxi

DJ Dust, AKA Nathan Corrona, is more than just a DJ. He’s a collaborator, a studio owner, a producer and a graphic designer. And though he’s been spending time producing for others in his studio, Dust found time for his latest album, Back to Dust, a collaboration with Sev Statik, a rhymer from Albany, New York. The record dropped in October and was picked up by Rawkus Records for The Rawkus 50.

“It’s more than a guest producer and a guest rhymer together,” says Dust. “We really did create a new sound.”

Sev and Dust are both artists with Deepspace 5, a group of DJs and rappers. They formed a friendship through the group.

“Sev asked me for some production for one of his other projects and I gave him four or five beats that were okay. It’s what I had at the time, and I read on some website, ‘Sev Static and Dust are doing an album together.’ I was like,’ What?’ So, I called him and said, ‘I don’t know, Sev, those beats aren’t good enough for a full album. Let me do some real ones.’ It kind of turned into this full blown project.”

The collaboration took the artists two years to complete, and Dust says that it is unlike any of the other albums the two artists have worked on. But although this album sounded much different than any of his other work (he’s also the DJ for Mars Ill), the process followed his pattern for making music. Dust says that his process of forming an album starts with laying down beats. For Back to Dust, he would send these sketches to Sev, who would give input on which sketches he found interesting. Then, Sev flew to Georgia to record his vocals for Dust to continue the album. Dust used his turntable and started layering Sev’s recordings to complicate the sketches. Dust said that this is where the song goes to production. He can only imagine what the song needs once the vocals are present.

Conceptually, the album stays with the classical elements of hip-hop. “I’m a firm believer in the traditional style of production that the founders of hip-hop based their production on, like sampling and breaks,” says Dust. He worked with those classical elements and morphed them to make them fresh.

This is not to say that this project conformed to the previous styles of either artist. On the contrary, “this record came out with a little more edge to it,” he says. “It’s kind of a melding of my idea of rock ‘n’ roll, which is not like heavy guitars and what most people think of as rock ‘n’ roll. It’s ‘70s rock twisted up and mangled. I really like stuff to sound heavy, and then incorporate the stuff people love about hip-hop, the real heavy drums and the sequence. You end up with this melding of worlds.”

Though Dust admits all of his productions from Mars Ill to this newest album tend to be gritty and dark, this album emits a raunchier and darker sound than is typical for either artist. Even the album title is a play on this feeling, Back to Dust being Dust and Statik’s reminder that life is temporal and everybody’s headed back to the dust one day.

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