Who the Fuck Does Dirty South Think He Is?

Dirty South isn’t exactly household name, but with a residency at LIGHT Las Vegas, following one at Marquee, he was on his way. Then, last year, something happened on a packed night at the club.

“I was told it wasn’t commercial enough and I had to get off the decks,” the DJ says calmly. “This has never happened and it’s pretty embarrassing. I was told to get off and was replaced by a local DJ and his first track was a Top 40 track. If you book a house DJ to play you know what they’re going to play. I wasn’t even playing underground techno music because that’s not what I do.”

“I walked away from a lot of money because I felt like this is not what I want to do,” he adds. “It didn’t feel right. It’s not about the money, sometimes you have to draw a line.”

Leaving that hefty paycheck behind, Dirty South retreated to his adopted hometown of Los Angeles and hunkered down in his studio tucked inside a non-descript building on the west end of Culver City in Los Angeles. Surrounded by production hubs for infomercials and anonymity, his multi-room space is a pocket of colorful beats that would be virtually impossible to find if you didn’t know what to look for. It’s as if the DJ/producer, born in Belgrade as Dragan Roganović and formerly based in Melbourne, could have chosen any strip mall in America for his studio except for one not insignificant thing that makes LA a natural fit.

“I fell in love with cinema about twelve months ago,” he says. “I bought a camera. I just wanted to understand what makes people tick—the images and the music together. You watch something and it makes you feel something. Why?”

Like so many others who arrive in California, Dirty South has, indeed, been bitten by the movie bug, albeit in the least Hollywood way possible. His self-financed debut as both writer and director, With You, is a visual accompaniment to the album of the same name and is decidedly more arthouse opus than blockbuster. Roganović’s confidence in his ability to succeed as a first-time filmmaker is a combination of confounding and irritating, particularly in a city whose streets are practically paved with the broken dreams of aspiring Hollywood wannabes. It’s not as if Roganović is unaware of the naysayers and the doubters, he just doesn’t care. In fact, the producer is so indifferent to what anyone thinks about him, he’s perfectly comfortable admitting that it was his own work that inspired him. The idea to make With You first came to him after listening to his own then-unfinished album late last year.

“I played it back and was like ‘wow, this sounds like a soundtrack to a love story,” he recalls. “It’s a little twisted but it’s a love story. I think subliminally I was making it anyway.”

Roganović shared his idea of making a film with his team, most of whom, he says, didn’t think he was too serious. “People were like ‘ok, cool,’ and I was like, no, were going to put a team together and we’re going to do it.” With himself at the helm, Roganović assembled a crew and crew to embark on a seven month process (a blink of the eye by Hollywood standards) to make the short. When asked about the pace of this, Roganović concedes: “I’m a little bit crazy.”

If Dirty South is, indeed, crazy, then he’s working with the right people. Managed by Amy Thomson of ATM Artists (known for her work as Swedish House Mafia’s behind-the-scenes mastery) and co-managed by Nima Nasseri, Roganović has been encouraged to follow his passions, regardless of how risky the venture. In the same way Thomson pushed SHM to think beyond the traditional business model of success and pursue a career built on touring rather than record sales (an unheard of move for an act with a major label deal), Dirty South has taken the bold move of passing on the 2014 festival rounds to instead focus on finishing With You. Earlier this year, he signed to Astralwerks, and though the album’s recording was self-financed, the venerated electronic music label is releasing the album this November with the film dropping on September 23 through iTunes.

Perhaps in an effort to pay for these expensive projects, Roganović has returned to Vegas, with a residency at LiFE, the new club inside SBE’s SLS Las Vegas. Still, it’s clear that Dirty South is more driven by the challenges he’s chosen for himself in making movies inspired by electronic music soundtracks than in DJing. The mere fact that he so freely admits this ambition at a time when most DJs are careful to stay in their lanes as producers and road warriors makes Dirty South an outlier. That he actually follows through on his goals makes him exceptional.

“I started at clubs, I’ve played the festivals, and now it’s movies,” he says emphatically. “I’m already starting the next album. A lot of things don’t get finished but I’m the kind of person that finishes things.”

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*This article was updated to correctly indicate the artist’s former residency at LIGHT. We regret the error.

Zel McCarthy is THUMP’s Editor-in-Chief – @ZelMcCarthy