How Dillon Francis Recaptured the Golden Age of Moombahton
If there’s one thing Dillon Francis knows for sure, on a recent morning before his first cup of coffee, it’s this: the early days of his career, sleeping on friends of friends’ couches and working on music whenever he felt like it, are so totally long gone.
Just a blurry day or so before, the 27-year-old L.A. DJ-producer presided over a mass of finely honed, plucked and tanned bodies at a fancy day party at Las Vegas’ Encore Beach Club. He dropped beats for club kids, high rollers and actual world champions; Women’s World Cup winner Christen Press paused for a photo op in the VIP section with Brazilian soccer megastar Neymar.
Still, he’s just weeks away from releasing a collection of tunes that harks back to simpler times. Due out August 14th, This Mixtape Is Fire, a tidy seven-track EP, hums with a sweet nostalgia for the heyday of moombahton, the 110-bpm, low-end-favoring genre that seemed poised to take dubstep’s spot in the EDM mainstream five years back.
Just in time for loose, late-summer vibes, the EP locks into vintage moombahton’s laid-back, groovy vibes, full of dembow-inflected, reggaeton-inspired beats and overlaid with house flourishes. It’s the kind of thing for which Francis was almost exclusively beloved at the start of his ascent.
Just don’t shoehorn This Mixtape Is Fire into a boring “return to roots” story line, OK? Sure, Francis’ club and festival sets have long ago expanded beyond moombahton — these days, they draw heavily from various strains of house and, yes, trap. But moombah’s always remained in there, even as options for new tunes continued to shrink.
“I hate that language so much,” Francis says, perking up, sans coffee, at a mention of the return-to-roots angle that early press on This Mixtape has bandied about. “If you listen to my last record, Money Sucks, Friends Rule, there are three or four moombahton songs on there. I’ve always been doing it my whole career.”
Where Francis might have stuck with moombahton, though, many of his other early peers didn’t. Lest you’ve forgotten — and if you have, it’s cool, because the dance-music hype cycle moves fast — moombahton threatened to become the actual It Sound around 2010.
The name gives away its origins. As legend has it, Washington, D.C. DJ-producer Dave Nada, spinning a high-school-aged family member’s party, slowed down a Dutch house record, DJ Chuckie’s “Moombah,” to please the diverse, reggaeton-loving teen crowd. They ate it up, and a hybrid genre appeared, with few rules other than that general 110-ish-bpm, reggaeton-style tempo.
That standard speed was just about the only genre convention. “At the time, moombahton didn’t have rules like drum-and-bass and house music, where you need to use this type of snare or this type of kick. Trap music, it’s really now ingrained with the certain snare, the certain 808s you have to use,” Dillon recalls. “Moombahton was always really easy, and nobody had made those rules yet.”