“I made Florida between a small apartment in Philadelphia and my
mother’s house in Florida. I was working late nights
and taking a bus through the city every night, smoking weed, putting on
headphones and just making things I never
heard before and could just imagine. Making this record created an entirely new
world for me. Now that I think back
it’s a very strange beginning and it’s crazy it’s been 10 years since
its first release, but really, this record represents my
first 23 years of life – what I had inside of me and where I came from so
I’m excited to revisit it.” – Diplo
Some time back in the distant year 2000, the Big Dada office received a package
from a young man calling himself
Wesley Pentz. Wesley was an American currently living in Japan for reasons
unclear and, in an English language music
magazine over there, he had read that Big Dada were looking for “avant garde
dancehall.” This he had. Along with the
scribbled note was a CDR with FORMDIPLO written in looping, marker-penned hand.
The CDR contained a series of
musical sketches which would eventually form the basis of the debut Diplo album,
“Florida.”
In some ways, ‘Florida’ represents Diplo’s most personal work, with less
thought for the dancefloor than for
atmosphere (not least because it was mainly mixed on headphones, with no money
for monitors or smart studios). You
can almost smell the swamps, but you can also feel a young man travelling on a
bus through a city and trying to work
out how to make his way in life. As such, to understand Wes Pentz, where he
comes from and hence where he’s going,
you have to go all the way back home—back to ‘Florida.’
So here we have it… the original album in full plus full disc of new mixes and
lost treasures from the 2004 sessions.
