Deep Dish

Nasdaq is not necessarily the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about dance music, but Sharam Tayebi — partner with Ali Shirazinia in the Iranian-born, Washington, D.C.-based DJ duo Deep Dish — recently told DJ magazine of his ambition to list their record label, Yoshitoshi, on the stock exchange. Was he kidding? “Nope, dead serious,” Tayebi insists. “We’ve always been hands-on with the business side of this. We’ve gone through a lot of ups and downs, and we’ve learned a lot.”

Since the October 2001 release of the two-CD set Moscow on the Global Underground label, the Deep Dish outlook has been decidedly up. Combining deep grooves and butt-shaking backbeats with nonstop touring and no-nonsense ambition, Deep Dish is poised to extend the reach of electronic music. “Recognizable songs [are] one of the things this music needs to grow,” Tayebi says. “People need to know the songs, and the only way that’s going to happen is to have structure and vocals they can hum to. We’ve always been about that. Just throwing 20 tracks together that people won’t remember is pointless.”

Deep Dish has plenty of pop experience, having remixed hits for the Pet Shop Boys, Everything but the Girl, Tina Turner, and Jackson siblings Michael and Janet, among others. But that doesn’t mean they shy away from riskier ventures. “We hardly get excited about anything,” Tayebi laughs. “To us [whatever we try] is just going to work. People around us seem to get more excited than we do. It’s not that we don’t care; we just have bigger ambitions and are always thinking about the future.”

This article appears in Jun 4-10, 2003.