Less than a year ago, Ryan Anderson and Matt Madonna were hard at work landscaping lawns and delivering mail in Reno, Nev. Now, they're jetsetting across the U.S. as full-time touring DJs, cultivating classic rock songs and delivering bass-heavy beats to a national audience.
"I was born and raised in Reno, and I haven't gone too far outside of Reno," said Madonna, calling from an airport in Houston en route to Louisville, Ky.
Performing as Love and Light, Anderson and Madonna will make their first trip to Athens tomorrow night for a show at Jackie O's Pub & Brewery with Columbus-based dubstep duo niceFingers.
Love and Light's winter tour is a chance to deliver electronic dance music to a wider audience, especially in places like Athens where the DJ scene is just starting to heat up, Anderson said.
"Our idea of dance music is music that's really poppy and gets people in the groove," he said. "It's more like hip-hop speed, but electronic."
Because Love and Light's tracks are "mid-tempo, chunky and funky," Anderson said fans of hip-hop tend to gravitate toward the duo. But rock fans have also responded to remixes of songs such as The Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby" and "Unintended" by Muse.
"We make sure we do the song justice," said Madonna, who spent three years working on the "Eleanor Rigby Remixx," now one of the duo's most popular songs. "I've heard people say stuff like, 'We're really happy you preserved the originality of the song.' People really respect that and want that."
Best friends since 2003, Anderson and Madonna - who are also known as Probiotik and 4centers, respectively - have learned to feed off each other during live shows, Anderson said.
"Two of us gives us more mobility to do more things with all of our songs," he said. "We don't just play songs, we have individual parts of our songs that the two of us can intermix and intertwine off of each other."
"It all just kind of flows really smoothly. We have a general idea of what we want to accomplish and we just make that happen."
Since quitting their day jobs in October, both Anderson and Madonna said they are enjoying the opportunity to positively affect people with their music. Even off days as a professional DJ aren't so bad, Madonna said.
"It's definitely challenging, but it's really hard to consider it work," he said. "We're having fun doing what we're doing all the time."
al106606@ohiou.edu
