Even though Lance De Sardi has the skills to twist knobs with the best
of ‘em, he’s just as happy sitting with pen and paper writing songs.
Not willing to claim any one genre as his “style”, his musical output
always teeters somewhere between Techno, Industrial, & House, but
always highly electronic. At 28 years old, living in San Francisco, his
music embraces all of his influences to the fullest, creating a unique
juxtaposition of styles, with a definite slant towards a harder edge.
These days, with the party in full swing in SF, Lance has his grubby
fingers in almost every aspect of music. He’s just started a label and
coinciding club night called Bang the Box, turned his alter ego Land
Shark into a full live band, and is even working on a live performance
for his solo material. “Whatever you do”, he says, “don’t pigeon hole
me. Aren’t those things rats with wings?” In his hometown of Dallas,
Texas he got into music at an early age; and not the sounds of the
honky tonk you might expect. At twelve a friend introduced him to
industrial and dance music, listening to bands like Nine Inch Nails,
Nitzer Ebb, LFO, and 808 State. As he dug deeper, the raw energy in
music from Detroit and Chicago started to pique his interest. He
couldn’t get enough. Next thing he knew, he was at the local record
store every Wednesday, waiting for the twelve inches to come in. Once
he grasped the DJ thing, he started to mess around with samplers and
keyboards, trying to emulate the records he liked. Knowing that
production was a means to help get DJ gigs, the combination became an
obsession. Hearing his records played to a crowd brought him a whole
different feeling than mixing other peoples music, and he couldn’t live
without either of them. Not long after getting his first few songs on
wax, he uprooted and moved to California. Having had enough of the dry
plains of Texas, he wanted to put the “small fish in a big pond” theory
to the test. It proved to work in his favor, and he quickly became a
mainstay in the house music community, releasing records on labels like
Classic, Naked Music, Coco Machete, Seasons, and PIAS, to name a few.
With his 2003 underground hit “Tie Me Up”, under the moniker Land
Shark, or his huge remix of Zap Mama’s “Rafiki”, he solidified his
place in dance music lore. Now you know some pertinent musical
information on Lance’s life. But if you’re ever in San Francisco and
want to see what he’s really like, look him up, maybe ya’ll can get in
to some trouble...
