Megatrax Blog

l-r, megatrax’s jc dwyer with eric cunningham & chris lang

Catching up with Chris Lang and Eric Cunningham, the Producers behind Megatrax’s LA Riot catalog.

In 1992, Chris Lang and Eric Cunningham created the brand LA Riot, naming it after the riots that had just left bullet holes in the door of their original studio. In 2006, the Chronic Music and Killer Edge founders signed the LA Riot catalog with Megatrax, and the urban, youthful tracks in this high-energy catalog have turned the volume on Megatrax’s offerings up to eleven.

We managed to grab a few moments with Chris and Eric recently to talk about LA Riot and their history in music and as partners. Here’s what they had to say:

Megatrax: Tell us a little about your professional & musical background, and what brought you to where you are now.

Chris Lang: I started out in a band and transitioned into starting to produce records. I worked with Giorgio Moroder, the disco king, on a couple of Elton John records—the “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” record he did with RuPaul, and the remix. I messed around in that arena for a while, and started doing production for hip hop artists in Los Angeles. I started making drum beats for them with a sampler when sampling was kind of new. Eric and I met through my making beats for hip hop producers back in the day.

Eric Cunningham: I moved to Los Angeles and went to school here, studying guitar. Then I hooked up with sort of an avante-garde cabaret world here from about ’87 – ’92, when I met Chris. Towards the end of that project, I started getting into electronic music, and I bought a sampler, and I needed sounds for that sampler. I looked in The Recycler for guys that did sounds, and I found Chris, and that’s how we first met.

Once I discovered the whole world of sampling and hip hop and everything else, I got more motivated by it, and then had the idea to suggest to Chris that we start a series of sampling CDs, which were just starting in the early 90’s, because the artists sampling were stealing music from records at that point, and people were starting to get sued.

CL: I had done four independent CDs for other companies, so I’d already been working on the beats when Eric and I met. The LA Riots had just happened. Our studio was in the ‘hood with bullet holes in the door.  We decided to call the brand LA Riot, and that was the first incarnation of what became our Megatrax-distributed LA Riot library.

EC: It started as a sampling product in 1992. We discovered the world of production music, and (after starting and selling a couple of labels to BMG), we chose what we thought was the best independent distributor in the country, which is Megatrax.

It started urban, but then quickly moved into other areas—like lounge and surf, and house and techno.

CL: Back in the early 90s and late 80s, there was this hugely burgeoning hip hop scene in Los Angeles, and the technology was there {the sampling technology}, but it was expensive, so not a lot of the bands in the ‘hood had the gear, so I would strap my sampler on my old Harley and ride down to these sessions and go in and provide them with a whole hard drive of beats at a time when it was kind of a really new thing.

Eric and I just kind of took that same composing and beat making and all that and just kind of swung it over to the (production) music side.

EC: We’ve always focused on production music being our record company. We were way ahead of the curve because we realized that record sales were going to disappear once the Internet hit, and we realized that licensing was the wave of the future. We were able to get in there early with a lot of content.  We’re passionate about film and TV music.

CL: Like Ron and JC (Ron Mendelsohn and JC Dwyer, founders of Megatrax), when we first got into this business, there were not 700 cable channels and 2500 satellite stations. There was a small group of cable stations that were just starting.

EC: We came up with it.

MX: The LA Riot catalog has a really youthful vibe, and it covers a variety of genres. Is there a unifying philosophy behind the tracks that you create for this catalog?

EC: Authenticity, right?

CL: Yeah—that’s exactly what I was going to say. I would say that instead of making production music, keeping in mind that there’s a format to production music, our philosophy was “make albums”—make records—and do it real. You know? We specialize in loungecore music. We have a good bit of that kind of content—and some more exciting things to come into our LA Riots library—but that’s one of the areas where we work with people who are able not only to recreate the feel of a track from a time, but we actually try to make (the tracks) sound like they’re from the time. We’ve done that for a long time, including when we do old soul music. We actually sound design some of our stuff to get authenticity, and it’s not too hard. You just put your amp next to a loud refrigerator, or something, and there you go. {laughs}

MX: What are some places you’d love to hear your music in the future?

CL: We would like to participate in promos for networks and those kinds of things. High profile things on network television would be wonderful and exciting. We look forward to Megatrax being able to get us in markets that we traditionally haven’t been represented in. One of those would be the promo market.

EC: And what we could do, hopefully, is bring Megatrax into our world, too.

Look for more CDs in the LA Riot catalog in Q2 of 2011. You can sample the LA Riot catalog (and other Megatrax catalogs) on our website’s preview library. Contact Music Supervisor atmusicsupervisor@megatrax.com or call 866-349-0276 / 818-255-7196 to find out about using tracks from this adrenaline-charged library in your next project.

This piece originally appeared in Megatrax’s quarterly newsletter. To subscribe, click HERE.