Not willing to claim any one genre as his “style”, Lance De Sardi's musical output always teeters somewhere between house and techno, and is always highly electronic. At 30 years old, living in San Francisco, his music embraces all of his influences to the fullest, creating a unique juxtaposition of styles, deep to jacking and back again. 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...
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