Brian Jeffries has been DJ Godfather since he was a teenager, and the through line has never once left Detroit. He started out on Twilight 76, the label he set up with DJ Dick and Brian Gillespie, and the sublabels that came after it, Databass and Juke Trax, did as much as anyone to get ghettotech out of the city and into rooms that had no idea what had hit them. He brought Databass back in 2018. The new EP is DB-133, which tells you how the years since have gone.
Regular Transmitees will have seen him on these pages already. We took DJ Godfather’s ‘Get Back’ as a Single of the Week earlier in August, reviewed DJ Godfather’s ‘That’s Right’ back in the spring, and premiered his remix of Orlando Voorn’s ‘Detroit is the Name’ when Voorn made his debut on the label.
‘Blast Off’ opens ‘1000 Musik’, four tracks arriving on Databass on 4 September 2026. The unusual part is the method. The whole record was made on one piece of equipment: Roland’s TR-1000.
That machine deserves a paragraph of its own. Roland built it around 16 analogue circuits lifted straight off the original TR-808 and TR-909 designs, its first properly analogue drum machine in over forty years, then piled modelling, FM, PCM and user sampling on top with a TR-REC step sequencer running the lot. Handing that to a Detroit turntablist who came up on the 808 and the 909 is, frankly, the least anyone could have done.
DJ Godfather explains how it started in the release notes: “Initially, I wanted to challenge myself to make a full track using only this machine. After the first track I was having so much fun and ideas were flowing, I decided to do a full EP with it. I wanted to see how Detroit I could get with it.”
Godfather turns the heat up with this breaksy electro workout. Loaded with Detroit swing, the fact that this track was made using only one device is testament to his production chops. Fans of that old-school Detroit electro vibe are gonna be all over this funky-as-fuck little number.
It would seem, then, that the ghettotech pioneer has managed to achieve that 313 feel throughout the production. Listen to our exclusive world premiere above. ‘1000 Musik’ follows on September 4th.