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"I'm stoked," says Z-Trip. "That's so dope. I'm just waking up going, 'Holy shit! What the fuck?'" The veteran DJ's single "Walking Dead," featuring vocals from Linkin Park frontman Chester Bennington, has cracked Billboard's Modern Rock Top Twenty, and his artist album Shifting Gears (which received four stars in Rolling Stone) hit stores this week. "I've worked years and years to get to this point. I hope this kicks the door open even further."
Long known for his ability to cleverly drop rock cuts into hip-hop numbers as the king of mash-ups, Phoenix native Z-Trip (a.k.a. Zach Sciacca) spent a year with his legal team trying to clear samples for a remix album. Finally, he realized he needed to do things a little differently. "In an entire year, we cleared one or two things out of 400 attempts," he says of the record's original content. "The industry just wasn't set up for it. So I decided to change it up and make a production record. Midway into my project, I had to make things up on the fly."
Z-Trip then began calling his friends to collaborate, including Whipper Whip from Fantastic 5 (on the track "All About the Music"), Jurassic 5's Soup ("Listen to the DJ") and Public Enemy's Chuck D (the politically charged "Shock and Awe"). "That's such a big deal for me," says Z-Trip. "To have any of those people on the record is a blessing, and to have Chuck D, I'm overwhelmed. Here's a guy I learned a lot about black culture from, and he's on my record spitting lyrics. It's just wild."
Though most of Shifting Gears' fifteen tracks reflect Z-Trip's heavy hip-hop background, his collaboration with Bennington is a tribute not only to Z-Trip's rock roots, but to his breaking out of his hometown. "I just wanted to collaborate with another guy from Phoenix who was successful," he explains. The two sat down together and recorded "Walking Dead" in very little time. The resulting track, says Z-Trip, proves both artists' range. "Everyone's stereotyped him as the guy who screams on every song; everyone's pigeonholed me as the rock/hip-hop guy," he says. "That song is a perfect example of us shutting all those people down and going, 'Look, he can really sing, and I can really produce music. So whatever you guys thought, you need to double-check yourself.'"
"Walking Dead"'s radio play already has the offers coming in. But the DJ/producer says that, while he's interested in working with acts like Alicia Keys, Robert Plant or Deftones, he'll have to pass on those calls from the pop world. "A couple people have been like, 'Yeah, man, we'll get you to remix a Hillary Duff song, and it'll be great,'" he says with a laugh. "These people know me as Mr. Right Now. I appreciate people coming to the party, but the party's been going on for years. Sometimes people need to check the history before they jump to conclusions."