RJD2

Ramble John Krohn, also known as RJD2, listens to so many new albums in a week that he uses Post-it notes to keep track of what is useable. Krohn, a former club DJ, is now a composer-producer and a laptop artist.

“Then I rank them using exclamation points,” he laughs. “When I was doing Deadringer,” he recalls of his 2002 release, “I won’t say that I had a photographic memory, but I was very good at cataloging things in my mind. But it wasn’t as efficient as the new method.” Krohn loads everything he likes into a digital sampler, and that’s where the real work begins.

“It’s not like traditional songwriting, where you have a blueprint. You don’t have a goal; it’s an exploratory process. You don’t know where the song’s gonna end up going.” That is dictated, he says, by the elements that are sampled and by his frame of mind at the time. “Paramount to me is to make sure the process of making music and recording it is fun and enjoyable.”

These new composers rerecord music into new, albeit recycled, compositions that bear little resemblance to their origin. In the case of RJD2, the finished product moves and pulses with energy not unlike that of chase-scene music from ’60s television flicks.

As for his prolific output? “One of the things I consider to be a contributing factor to the fact that I record a lot is that I don’t do any drugs. I don’t like to be inebriated. I’m not a big-time waster. You’d be amazed how much time there is in a day if you’re not wasting it doing dumb shit.”

RJD2: Casbah, Saturday, Monday, April 5, 8:30 p.m. $20. 619-232-4355.