J-Punch

This supersolid EP is a candy-coated daisy chain of genre splicing. Hook's debut commences with the progressive breakishness of Temple, laden with fuzzed-out synths channeling under the splendid vocal: "You cannot escape, because you're already free." It then gallops a gauntlet of disco, downtempo, drum & bass and abstract. Straightforward and very pretty. 5/5 - Mantis Pilate

Hook. He's the pants.

That's the word on Washington, DC's Hook The Captain (AKA Justin Katz, who also records under the moniker J-Punch. Confused yet?). Sure, it's an oblique sort of superlative, but once you hear this self-produced album, you'll be thinking he's the pants, too. Hook The Captain is carving out a niche among his peers in the progressive undergound, and the music on this CD hints at greater, more mainstream conquests to come.

Hook's music is a blend of dope beats, synth atmospherics and a firm grasp of melody constructed as a seamless whole. The songs (like the superlative opening track) take their sweet time and unwind lazily, and before you know it you're completely sucked in. Hook understands the fundamentals of groove and how to build airy yet solid tracks that would be at home on both your radio and your friendly local dance floor. The moods change nearly inperceptibly over the course of a song - most of a track will drop out, leaving you with no more than an insistent beat and a treated vocal or bass snippet to build from. But build it does, and while it's a device used often on this album, the tracks are compelling enough that you'll fall for it every time.

Hook's got a melodic sensibility that pays as much attention to jazzy slow-jam aesthetics as state-of-the-art sonics, and that's what keeps this album interesting from beginning to end. Small wonder that underground trend-spotters like Kiss-FM's John Digweed and German uber-DJ Deep Dish have been playing Hook for months now.

At this point, with Hook's stylistic and underground cred well-established, you may ask 'But do you hear a single?' The answer is of course, there's a single - the CD's fifth track (one minus here - no titles to be found). This track is the perfect soundtrack to The Summer Of 2002 - bright and friendly, with dark undercurrents that appear long enough to let you know they're there before letting you get back to dancing.

The CD's 6th track veers back and forth between a shambling lo-fi beat and musique-concrete elements and some of the most sparkly, uplifting pop you may have ever heard. That Hook is able to mix and match with such deftness is an indicator that he could drop hard-core underground dance or mega-platinum pop at will and whim.

I could go on all day here, but you get the idea. This stunning CD is a tantalizing warm-up for the full-length Hook The Captain CD that's on the way by end of year, and I suggest you grab it while no one's looking (yet). Hook The Captain may not be a household name quite yet, but believe me when I tell you that you'll be hearing the name everywhere before long. The tsunami of critical praise is beginning to build, and you'd do well to check it out. Hook is the pants, and the world will know it soon enough.
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Deep Dish
A Grammy, international tours, their own record label, a booking agency and a music store--not bad for a couple of Iranian immigrants who don't play an instrument.

By David Segal
Sunday, November 3, 2002; Page W16


The inner sanctum of the Deep Dish musical empire is a recording studio in Georgetown perched near the corner of Wisconsin Avenue and M Street, a mid-size room with a couple of chairs, a computer and a seven-foot recording console. The place is waiting-room neat--no ashtrays, no beer, no mass tangle of wires, no day-old food.

Deep Dish--a duo composed of 31-year-old Ali Shirazinia and 32-year-old Sharam Tayebi--has been here almost nonstop for the last three days, tweaking and tinkering with a single song. The two were in the studio until dawn this morning, went home to sleep for a few hours and now are looking at another all-nighter.

"We like to set deadlines for ourselves," says Sharam, in lightly accented English, sipping on coffee. "Otherwise we'll just work on something for days and days."

Deep Dish can't afford to dally. The studio is just one part of a musical conglomerate built from scratch over the last 13 years by these Iranian-born immigrants. Some 30 employees are working at Deep Dish subsidiaries in an adjacent building, a townhouse that has the hip, modern air of a SoHo loft. There's a booking agency called Bullitt Bookings, a Web site and a record

label that releases dozens of vinyl 12-inch singles every year under the self-

consciously exotic name Yoshi Toshi Records. Down a flight of stairs from the studio, there's a retail store called Deep Dish Records, specializing in dance music.

Then there are the tours--quick and exhausting jaunts, usually to Europe--in which Ali and Sharam might play four events in four cities, spread out all over the Continent, in four whirlwind days. Their fee for these gigs, which usually start at midnight and end around 8:30 in the morning, has been as high as $50,000, Ali says, but usually it's somewhere between $7,000 and $10,000, depending on the size of the crowd.

Deep Dish, in sum, is a franchise. Pop music, of course, has always been a combination of artistry and marketing, filled with business plans and carefully timed product rollouts. But a management staff and a scrum of label executives typically handle the revenue side, leaving the performers to cultivate an audience. Deep Dish represents a different kind of pop entrepreneur--one who is both CEO and star, producer and product, one part band and one part brand.

"We realized a long time ago this is a business and we have to treat it as such, if we want to make this a lasting and fruitful career," says Sharam, who is the beardless, shyer half of this team. "You have to approach it from a business standpoint."

Except that DD is not really a band, not if your idea of a band includes amplifiers, bass, piano and electric guitars. What's really odd about this M Street studio isn't that it's so tidy, but that, aside from a rarely used acoustic guitar, it's instrument-free.

Deep Dish's songs are mostly fabricated from beats and sounds culled from other records, turned into digital bytes and then stretched, chopped and transformed through gadgets and software. That's the rough, working formula for most electronica, a catchall term for the pulsing, machine-made music that is the house sound at thousands of strobe-lit clubs around the world. Though never a force on the U.S. charts, electronica--or techno, as it's also known--has a dedicated following among clubgoers, and it has fermented in a subculture of fashion and designer drugs that has nearly gone mainstream in recent years, courtesy of MTV-approved artists like Moby and Fatboy Slim.

Deep Dish stands among the most durable enterprises in this quietly expanding universe. Notably, Ali and Sharam have become the go-to guys for pop bands trying to lengthen the chart life of singles by remixing them into thumping, bumping dance tracks that can be played in clubs. Deep Dish won't discuss fees for its remix services--but top remixers can earn $30,000 per track. And over the years, Ali and Sharam's clients have included the Rolling Stones, 'N Sync, Michael Jackson and Madonna, who wanted danceability added to the title track of her last studio album, "Music."

In February, a remix of Dido's "Thank You" earned Deep Dish the Grammy for Best Remixed Recording, a relatively new category. Ali and Sharam never made it to the stage that February night to collect their trophy--they were stuck in traffic on the way to the Staples Center in Los Angeles, where the Grammy ceremony was held--but the prize has been good for business. Clubs are calling for shows, and remix assignments are pouring in.

"We spend a lot of time together," says Ali of Sharam. "Sometimes I wish he was a really good-looking woman instead of a dude."

Dee - David Segal