Boiler Room

if i she loves this story so I'm going to make it very quick.

I used to live in Dubai and I lived in Dubai with five girls in a house.

And we used to have a projector and we used to watch Boiler Rooms a lot.

And I had this friend called Liz Wentlyn who was obsessed with Natasha already.

And she was like, you need to watch this girl.

Welcome to the Paths of Rhythm podcast, formerly once a DJ.

Today, we've got a double Mercury Prize-winning A&R director, former global head of music at Boiler Room, and the founder of an independent music venture, Don't Sleep, Dean Bryce.

How are you doing today?

I'm good, thank you, Adam.

But the album cut-off date...

The price cutoff date was after the album was released and they were thinking about how do we do it? How do we do it? Me with my retail background, I had an idea of releasing the import version earlier because back then you did the import version and the domestic version.

right and he liked my idea he's like great ended up giving me a job so i was then working part-time of the manager who managed mj cole and roots maneuver my dream was to be a lawyer a criminal lawyer i love music but it wasn't my dream i was like let me work in law not music that's my thing he was a lawyer turned manager and and he became a mentor of mine we're still friends to this day we spoke yesterday he's a really cool guy so i found myself working in the music business then which led to other jobs like ninja tune boiler room um bmg records and doing a lot of other stuff

so you must have been pretty good academically if you if you had aspirations to be a lawyer then

I think I just get a bit overstimulated.

And so I've been listening to a lot of Yosuke Yukimatsu's Boiler Room set.

I absolutely love that

one.

It was...

And I guess it was The Boiler Room probably at, uh, the Big Day Out.

I feel like it doesn't get as much credit as it should, The Boiler Room, right? Like, you know-

Yeah

... for me, Prodigy was what started my journey in electronic music.

Mm.

But same sort of similar kind of trajectories.

But yeah, I feel like Boiler Room doesn't get the, the credit it deserves for, like, how influential that was for dance music-

And when I finally did get to play there in 2022, it like popped off and still one of the most career defining sets that I've ever done.

So always forever grateful for the Deck Mantle lot for supporting me at a very specific time, especially after the Boiler Room.

So I think for me, I essentially was more or less thinking about that time in 2022 where we had only had chips and it's actually so embarrassing.

But it was a period where I was having a lot of fun after COVID and a lot of drinking, a lot of just like sleepless nights and genuinely only had chips and champagne for breakfast to play that set.

Good for the music and the DJ side of things because it keeps me grounded and I make sure that I make the best possible choices, I think, if you believe in Star Citizen.

do you feel there's a kind of voltage going through you that you have to try and like corral into good pockets of energy we'll get onto it in a bit but you've spoken about having up and down swings you've come straight out the gate in this interview talking about yourself in a very self-aware grounded way almost taking yourself out your own body to critique how you move through the world do you feel like an innate crackle within you that you have to really channel into the right places otherwise it kind of overwhelms you

Yes, I think I'd lost that for quite a bit, actually, especially after the boiler room.

That's been like seven years now.

Mm-hmm.

Was it Boiler Room that started that, where they just have all the girls behind you during the DJ set?

I don't know.

He wasted no time.

I can't, you know what I mean? A lot of people I'm looking forward to.

Now we're also going to the Boiler Room.

And man, B.B. Tripp, Benita Butcher, Maddie, Bix, Danny Brown, DJ Slink, DJ Snake, E-Spirit, Evil Game, Hopper, Enemy, you know what I mean? That's...

fucking,

I feel like that lineup's pretty good, too, for it to be a Boiler Room lineup, you know, I mean, once again, with this one, I do feel like it's not as good as last year's, where, you know, I mean, they had Yusuke Yukimatsu there, and some other just phenomenal DJs, Simone, Ben Wall, Daphne, I mean, just some straight, just Man, it was a phenomenal fucking lineup.

And in LA, like, you know you're going to a fucking savage show, dude.

Like, when you go and it's in like a fucking grungy fucking warehouse in the middle of fucking nowhere, you know what I mean?

That's an honest answer.

I was watching, uh, uh, uh, a Charlie's, uh, Boiler Room set, and-

Oh, I see.

Yeah

Of course, you can hear more from Chris on his sub stack.

It's called Boiler Room.