Zeds Dead sampled a century of sound to create their new sci-fi bass odyssey“Ideas? I got a million dreams. That’s all I do is dream. All the time.”
A Million Dreams by Zeds Dead begins with these wondrous sentences spoken by the piano legend, Duke Ellington.

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“This is not piano, this is dreaming,” he continues.
Ellington passed away in 1974. In order to include his whimsical oration on their new album, Return to the Spectrum of Intergalactic Happiness (RSIH), Zeds Dead, consisting of Zachary Rapp-Rovan and Dylan Mamid, had to find a sample…one they almost didn’t clear.
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“It was difficult to get in touch with [Ellington’s] people about it. We thought it wasn’t gonna happen. Then his grandson responded and apparently liked the song. We were really stoked,” Rapp-Rovan tells MusicTech.
“It’s hard to clear samples. We would get to these places where we’d have something in the track, and then we would have to take it out and replay it, and it wouldn’t sound as good.”
The bass-fueled production duo didn’t just splice in Ellington’s voice, though. In the video they sampled, his hands float around on the piano, providing a brief aural glimpse into his dreams. Zeds Dead took an instance of his playing and built a serene drum & bass track around it.
As two producers who started their music careers making hip-hop, sampling is their lifeblood. But over the years, they faced many frustrating cases with the opposite outcome of A Million Dreams.
“It’s hard to clear samples. We would get to these places where we’d have something in the track, and then we would have to take it out and replay it, and it wouldn’t sound as good,” Rapp-Rovan says. For a while, they enjoyed the challenge of creating music from scratch, but on RSIH, they renewed their affinity for the historic production technique. “In the last three years, we’ve been sampling like crazy, and for this album, we just said, ‘Let’s just have fun with it and try to clear it at the end.’”

RSIH is Zed Dead’s first LP in nine years, and sampling is at the core of the album’s multi-layered artistic concept. The fictional “spectrum of intergalactic happiness” is where the sound and light waves from all the TV shows, music, video games, and movies have been living after they left speakers and screens and floated out into space. Each song on the album represents a channel on an old-timey TV cruising through the cosmos, transmitting these frequencies as sound and visuals, with the samples serving as the most direct connection back to the original source.
The full breadth of the concept exists in the album’s accompanying film, which is filled with visual samples. Everything broadcast after 95 years of copyright protection enters the public domain. So, with the help of visual director Callum Gillies, they combined their chosen clips from the massive public library with found footage to create a psychedelic visualiser that pairs seamlessly with each song.
“We were playing around with those kinds of ideas. Where could the channel be changed to?” Rapp-Rovan says.
The next layer of the concept is the live show. Zeds Dead project clips from the film and display the videos associated with the samples on-screen during the live set. From Al Pacino’s threatening speech in Scarface that fuels their hard-hitting house cut, Bad Guy, to Ella Fitzgerald performing her soaring vocals of Summertime by George and Ira Gershwin. Zeds Dead morphed the latter into their gripping dubstep track, One Of These Mornings.
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“The live show is a representation of musical culture over the last 100 years through the lens of bass music,” Rapp-Rovan says.
This historical exploration goes back to Mamid and Rapp-Rovan’s earliest years together. When they were first breaking through, they’d remix songs from pop artists into their bass-heavy signature to bring familiarity to the audience (a technique they still recommend to younger producers trying to get noticed).
“Early on, I thought remixing a popular song was a cool way to showcase your style and creativity, because if they know the original, then they’re like, ‘Oh, that’s kind of clever,’ versus a song that comes out of nowhere,” Rapp-Rovan says.
This instinct proved right when their 2009 dubstep remix of Eyes on Fire by Blue Foundation catapulted them into popularity. The track was an unofficial bootleg at first, then Blue Foundation eventually permitted them to release it. It remains Zed Dead’s highest-streamed song on Spotify with over 63 million plays, and the UKF YouTube video has over 174 million views.
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Remixing and sampling are two sides of the same coin in repurposing a previous work, and both Eyes on Fire and Ella Fitzgerald’s iconic voice are united in the inspiration they provided to Zeds Dead.
“[Sampling] gets your juices flowing. You might hear something, and it might move you in a certain way. We might make something based around the sample, and the sample might not even stay in at the end of the process. But it could have sparked something or inspired something,” Mamid says, leaning into their interest in musical history. “You’re connecting to a different era. You’re bringing something back; connecting to a real moment.”
“There’s some sort of magic in the studio those people were in at that moment, and it’s sometimes intangible. You’re honing in on something that they didn’t necessarily even see,” Rapp-Rovan continues.
Zeds Dead created a framework for the album by visiting different moments throughout time via samples. Each moment was populated by different kinds of artists, whether it be musicians, actors, or anything in between. Then each of those moments created a framework for a track.
“Focusing on individual songs is zooming in heavily to a micro level, and then zooming out and thinking about everything else conceptually was really interesting,” Mamid says. “Once you open this rabbit hole, you can keep going down. It led to a lot of discussions between us, thinking about the overall project as one thing. It’s not that we hadn’t done that before, but we definitely went in more on this project.”
Image: Press
As they went deeper into the rabbit hole of the concept, production served as a source of light. Shifting away from the magical and the mystical and towards the technical, in the modern era, where there are thousands of plugins, modules, and synths, it was samples that helped them lessen choice paralysis.
“Once we figured out the concept, it helped to get our heads around what it could be and what made sense for it,” Rapp-Rovan says. “We wanted to make an album like some of the classic albums we listen to, where you listen to the whole thing. They all have some sort of criteria. That’s always been a big part of our whole thing: the challenge of taking some source material and flipping it into something that’s interesting and unique.”
However, the inspiration from that source material also led them down endless roads. Every song on RSIH has multiple versions in different tempos and drum patterns on a hard drive somewhere (ideal for switching things up during their live sets).
“The options are still overwhelming sometimes because not only are there so many choices, but we are also passionate and make so many styles of music. Even with a sample, we might try to flip it into 10 different styles,” Mamid says.
In their quest to follow their endless creative interest, they approached every track with a new set of plugins, hardware, and other pieces of tech. One dictum that guided the process was simple. They wrote on a whiteboard while they were making the album, “fuck shit up,” and one method of doing so was resampling.

They took a sample or an original piece of audio they created and manipulated it until they landed on a version miles beyond where they started. Not only did this create a unique sonic palette, but it also added to the gritty audio aesthetic related to the concept of frequencies coming through retro TVs.
“One thing I’m a big fan of is removing a lot of high and mid frequencies from a sound, using distortion to add back in harmonics, and then continuing to do that over and over and over again to bring certain things out of sounds,” Mamid says. Beginning this process with another sample adds a unique flavour to the final product, no matter how mangled it may be, or even if the sample was at a low bitrate. “The characteristics of the sample are something that you can’t necessarily get through synthesis.”
“This album went through many phases,” Rapp-Rovan says. “It ended up being remixes of ideas and remixes of those ideas, which I think was interesting for us because remixing is something that is very much like sampling, and something that we’ve done our whole time making music. So it was an interesting journey,”.
Zeds Dead would quickly shirk the notion that they are on the same level as a legend like Duke Ellington, but RSIH was the product of a million ideas coming together in the same way Ellington had a million dreams. The duo would certainly encourage artists sampling their ideas 50 years after their time.
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