Their last album 'The Cosmic Game' took a psychedelic turn, and saw them working with Perry Farrell, David Byrne and Wayne Coyne. As DJs they have contributed several influential sets, including last year’s 'The Outernational Sound' and their famed contribution to !K7's 'DJ Kicks', an exotic blend of dub, bossa and spatial jazz. Added to this the duo own Eighteenth Street Lounge, their home and a residence for Ursula 1000 and The Karminsky Experience. With Rob Garza holed up in a UK studio, Notion seized the chance to find out what makes them tick, and to discover some secrets behind their adventurous treatment of musical styles from around the world.

Keeping up with the Thievery Corporation is an expensive but rewarding task. The trouble is they can't stop making music. As original artists, Rob Garza and Eric Hilton have made four multi-styled albums, and through these enough remixes to fill a small truck. It's a respected output that matches quality with quantity.

In keeping with the duo's approach to music, Rob had a colourful upbringing. "My mother's from Mexico, but I was born just outside of Chicago and grew up very close to Washington DC. I've spent my life mainly in rural areas, but my mother’s from Juarez in Mexico, which is a notorious border town that’s just short of crazy, the kind of places where the third world meets the first world and kinda anything goes, with all sorts of craziness. So I exist between the backgrounds, with some place very rural and nice and then some place like Juarez where I would spend my summers. It really raises a lot of questions, you know - who you are and all that - and for me, music was always an outlet of being able to express, trying to find an answer to that question."

Garza describes the Thievery approach as "using music from all over the world and in all of its various forms, and finding a way to incorporate it into what we do."

SO IS MULTICULTURAL A FAIR WAY OF DESCRIBING THE CORPORATION’S MUSIC?
"Definitely, Our record collection's hugely multicultural. You’ll find music from Ethiopia, from Turkey, Brazil, Jamaica and all sorts of different time periods as well. Our record collection is global, so naturally the music we do would also be influenced by that."

Currently Garza's preoccupation is "a lot of late 60s, more psychedelic kind of stuff - it changes week by week though, so you never know what's gonna come across your plate. It's a very interesting time musically, because there are so many people mixing styles with technology, creating all sorts of different textures."

The duo retain Washington DC as their base, and the city helps with their allembracing approach. "Oh yeah, definitely - I think in Washington we have about 600,000 people that live within the city, and yet for being so small it is vibrant and varied. You can hang out in the bars in Washington, and you know, it's one of the most concentrated multicultural places I've been to anywhere in the world. A few bars will have like African, jazz, afro beat, Jamaican, Brazilian, Argentinian, you're just going by these bars and it’s not really a novelty! For us it’s been a musically rich environment."

They don't perform much in their home city though. "Not so much in DC, we like to be inside the studio and working on our music, and we try not to wear out our welcome - we don't want to be DJing every Friday night and then when we have a special gig people are like, "oh yeah, I've already seen them, you know, five times," so we try to do DJ gigs just once, maybe twice a year."

From my own personal experience their influence as DJs is to urge people to go out and explore the styles and artists featured. Garza agrees, "because a lot of young people are growing up with electronic music. For them it's a doorway to discover other types of music, whether it's jazz or bossa or dub, and if we can do that then that’s just amazing, a huge side benefit of making music. A lot of people we meet are really still influenced by the compilation, and at the time it seemed that everything we did was omnipotent, we heard it coming out of bars and cafes. It was something really special."

The increasing use of chill-out in the UK spawned many a dodgy compilation in the early part of the decade, but the Thievery have managed to steer clear of the umbrella. "Yeah, for us chill-out never really meant anything. I mean, I consider something like Brian Eno's 'Music for Airports' to be my idea of chillout. For us, when we create our music, we came out of hip hop, chopping up beats and loops and incorporating them with musical tastes and countries from all around the world, places that we would like to visit. "I think we’ve always tried to keep an edge to our music."

SO HOW DO THEY FIND THE TIME TO PRODUCE SO MANY REMIXES?
"Over the past few years we've been in the studio a lot, and music is what we do because we love it, and we go into work every day and it seems like there's something to do, and we just really enjoy working - and for us to be able to work on other people's music like the Doors is just brilliant." When asked what other remixers he admires, Garza flounders. "Wow, erm... see I'm actually very out of it when it comes to memorising other people and what they do, because I’m kind of consumed in what we're doing so I can't think of anyone off the top of my head!"

Their live experience has also taken off, and Garza refers to a gig they did last year on a hot summer night at London’s Koko. "That gig was really surprising as our pre-sales were just 200, so we thought, "well OK, no-one's gonna show up", and then there was this huge demand just before and so many people turned out. It adds another dimension to what we do, whether it's remixing, playing live, DJing, making artist records, DJ mix CDs or compilations." At the moment the two are taking time off from Thievery for a couple of months, to do something in a different style. Garza's working with Brendan Lynch on "some rock stuff - it's nice to do something totally different, exploring other areas. Then I'm going back to DC, and Eric and I will start on the new Thievery album."

A particularly sad end to a chapter of their career occurred in February last year, when vocalist and long time collaborator Pam Bricker took her own life. For Garza, there is clearly still a gap she used to fill. "There were so many things we did, you know, thinking about touring, and she was such a vital part of what we did, she brought this beautiful light to everything and so when she passed away it was very difficult. I think at first you don't realise it, because being musicians we were travelling all the time, and we didn't see Pam all the time but when we toured she always toured with us. When we finally did this last tour she was just so missed, there was this space, and, well it's just more about her personality, her friendship and feeling like she was our sister - that's the main thing that's painful about the whole experience."

However he is grateful for their current roster of vocalists. "Yeah, you know we've got some really good singers, it's great we have so many different people, we've worked with some famous people, some who aren't famous at all. But Pam - she was the first one we brought in the studio so she'll always have a special place in our hearts."

Garza projects an easygoing charm, so it's good to end on an upper when talking about the duo’s sense of style, and in particular the lounge suits they've become famed for. "We're lazier these days though! We're not wearing the suits too much; we're a little more casual. Your wardrobe changes when you're in the studio all the time, it's not important. When you're going to some fancy party, yeah of course we might dress up, but we're just happy in the studio making music, everything's just secondary to all of that."

THIEVERY CORPORATION’S ALBUM ‘VERSIONS’ IS AVAILABLE NOW ON ESL MUSIC.