Maine musicians combine forces to form beat-driven juggernaut

Two heads are better than one. I’ll scratch your back and you scratch mine. Or how about great minds think alike?

Cliches aside, all those sayings are true about Jason Hjort and Marc Shepard, aka jhjort and Moshe, two Portland-area musicians, producers and label heads. Hjort’s electronic and experimental record label, Brick City Media, and Moshe’s hip-hop label, Milled Pavement, recently agreed to join forces to create a kind of beat-driven, electronic-based juggernaut of danceable awesomeness, if you will. At least, that’s what I’d call it.

“We were doing all the label stuff individually, so we finally said, ‘Why not combine forces and have that much more power to get stuff done?'” Hjort said. “I was looking to get more distribution, and Moshe’s got connections all over the country and in Europe, and he wanted more diversity on his label. It just made perfect sense.”

The pair led remarkably similar career trajectories over the years – Hjort is a longtime southern Maine DJ, guitarist and electronic composer; Moshe is a producer and New England underground hip-hop scene staple. Both work in Web design. Both started their record labels in 2001 as a way of releasing their friend’s music, as well as their own.

And both are passionate about supporting their respective scenes. They’re so into it that in 2006 the two, along with fellow musicians Todd Richard and Mike Clouds, started We Push Buttons, an organization devoted to fostering the electronic and hip-hop scene in Maine. The last Friday of each month, WPB hosts a night of electronic and hip-hop at the White Heart Lounge, a downtown Portland bar.

“The whole idea for We Push Buttons is to get electronic artists and hip-hop artists to work together,” said Moshe. “It seems like Maine is a rock state or a pop state, but there are plenty of DJs and rappers and producers around too. And we’re all doing the same thing, though the sounds coming out of the speakers might be different.”

Moshe and Hjort both specialize in dark, minimal electronic music – it’s just that Moshe comes at it from a hip-hop producer’s perspective, while Hjort spins in clubs and composes house music.

Moshe’s released several solo albums, including the brooding, intelligent “L’Chaim” and “Tending to the Sheep,” as well as countless collaborations, such as “Project Dark,” his new album with Portland rapper Syn the Shaman. Hjort’s stuff is sleek, sexy electro, the kind you hear coming out of Europe these days, which is heavy on the synthesizers and the funky beats.

A testimony to the diversity of both labels is the brand-new, extremely cool double-disc compilation album “Goosebumps,” released by Milled Pavement last month. It’s got plenty of artists from Maine, sure, but also from Japan, Italy, Germany and France, and it spans the gamut from straight-up hip-hop to ambient electronic music.

It’s easy for scenes to fracture and splinter, but if there’s one thing you can learn from the happy cross-pollination of sounds that is Milled Pavement and Brick City, it’s that you can’t go forward if you don’t work together. And that musicians, regardless of genre, have a lot more in common than they might initially think.

“When we all started writing and DJing in the ’90s, people weren’t really together. There was a lot of feuding and knocking people’s scenes. Maine’s not big enough for that,” said Hjort. “What’s great about it today is that it’s like, ‘I don’t care if it’s breaks, techno, house, downtempo, hip-hop, whatever. Come and be a part of it. It’s all electronic-based music.”

For more info on Brick City Media and Milled Pavement, visit www.myspace.com/milledpavementrecords, or www.myspace.com/brickcitymedia. Emily Burnham can be reached at eburnham@bangordailynews.net.