Anime Toonz Vol. 4 hits physical and digital shops today, including iTunes, Traxsource, Beatport, and more. In celebration of this release we at NYT have reached out to some of the key contributors to this project to find out what makes them tick. We’ll be featuring an interview with one of four creators each week throughout the rest of the month and beyond.

First up is Proper Villains, a collective of NYC based producers led by Jon [S]. With releases forthcoming on Fatboy Slim’s Southern Fried label, east coast based Flamin’ Hotz and much more, the villains are quickly making a mark on the eclectic dance circuit. Hit the jump for our interview with Jon.

http://www.myspace.com/propervillaindjs

New York-Tokyo: How did you get involved in electronic music?
Proper Villains: I was 16, a guitar player in a terrible industrial/metal band called Brain Damaged Children. Our lead singer smoked 3 packs of Marlboro Reds a day, and our bass player we found out later was literally tone deaf. We didn’t have a drummer so we used a cheap PC computer with primitive music editing software to loop drum beats. Thankfully all audio recordings of our early endeavors have been destroyed to protect the guilty. When the band finally broke up I kept doing stuff with the computer. It was never late to practice!

NYT: What is the music scene like where you live now?
PV: New York City… is good, almost too good. New York crowds are kinda spoiled. You can go out any night of the week and hear a world class DJ or live act so people don’t appreciate the local talent as much. There are tons of incredible DJs playing to empty bars on weekday nights. It’s much harder to break through as an artist, but if you can move an NYC crowd, you can pretty much rock a dancefloor anywhere in the world. Did I just paraphrase Frank Sinatra?

NYT: When did you first discover Japanese animation? What was the first film or series that you saw?
PV: Well as a little kid, the first series I saw was probably Voltron. Although, it didn’t really register to me as “anime” at the time, just another action cartoon like G.I. Joe. I saw Ghost in the Shell when I was 14 or 15 and that made a HUGE impression on me. Just the idea of having an action film (let alone an animated one) with so much existential dialogue really blew me away and I really liked the “cinematography.” My favorite scene is of Motoko Kusanagi scuba diving were the “camera angle” is of her view while she floats to the surface of the ocean.

NYT: Tell us about your method for remixing an anime theme. What was your main focus?
PV: The original song was a very slow ballad, so my main focus was adding enough energy to make the song work as a dancefloor tune. First I tried speeding the vocal up to house/techno tempo and layering it over a 4/4 kick drum, but it didn’t sound right so decided to make the remix drum n’ bass. I don’t really write a lot of drum n’ bass anymore but it’s a great genre for remixing ballads and Rn’B because you can run the beats double time to the vocal without having to change the tempo of the original vocal as much. So tried the vocal over a drum n’ bass beat and things seemed to click. Other then that, it was mainly a process of simplification. The original song had a lot of complex harmonies, chord changes, and key modulations which doesn’t work very well in a dance music context. So I spent a lot of time rewriting the chord changes, choosing simpler chords and progressions that would still work with the vocal.

NYT: Besides yourself, who would you want to see do an anime remix and why?
PV: Todd Edwards. Because everything he remixes sounds amazing.

NYT: If you could remix any anime theme song out there, which one would you choose and what would you do to it?
PV: The Ghost in the Shell theme. I actually did my own VIP remix of it just to play out when I DJ.

By NYT