He’s a lively generator of electronic music

For more than a decade, Jason Bentley has been a virtual one-man promotional machine for dance and electronic music in Southern California. Perhaps no local figure has done more to expose these sounds -- often from the musical underground -- in so many different ways.

Bentley has promoted events by major electronic artists, co-founded the dance-electronic music magazine URB, headed his own record company, worked as a talent scout for Madonna’s Maverick Records label, worked as DJ at various clubs and events and operated as a music supervisor for a music sound design company helping to place music in commercials, television programs and films.

And that doesn’t include what Bentley is best known for: his role as an electronic-dance-music disc jockey at KCRW-FM (89.9) and KROQ-FM (106.7).

Since graduating from college in 1991, the Santa Monica native has worked weeknights at KCRW delivering tracks from the electronic and dance music worlds. In 1995, KROQ recruited him to host a similar late-night program on Saturdays.

Bentley’s “Metropolis” show at KCRW can be heard from 7:30 to 10 p.m. Monday through Friday. His “After Hours” KROQ program airs from midnight to 3 a.m. on Saturday nights.

But even though Bentley possesses a marquee name in the local electronic and dance club scene, he is careful to use his radio shows to promote the music that he loves and not his own personality. Both “Metropolis” and “After Hours” contain much more music and far less chat than the average modern music radio program.

It’s not as if Bentley has a personality deficiency. An articulate and engaging conversationalist, he’s very capable of turning on the charm, as he did during a recent KCRW pledge drive.

“I really want the music to be the personality [with the radio shows],” Bentley says during an interview at Machine Head, a Venice sound design company where he serves as a music supervisor. “I never envisioned myself as a radio personality or a [conventional] DJ or anything like that. To me, the most exciting thing is playing the new music and mixing the new music. I’ve developed a persona over the years, but it definitely takes a back seat to the music.”

“After Hours” and “Metropolis” both embrace electronic and dance-oriented sounds. But “After Hours” tends to lean more toward propulsive dance music that better mirrors KROQ’s alternative rock orientation and young demographic (largely 16-to-24-year-old suburban males). “Metropolis” is more likely to showcase artier or more ambient electronic music that appeals more naturally to the show’s older listeners, who include a healthy number of thirty- and fortysomethings.

Bentley says that his instincts for sniffing out quality music have become so sharp that it only requires seconds for him to pass judgment on a track. “It’s about looking for something new, something I haven’t heard before,” he explains. “It either touches you or it doesn’t. It’s hard to put that into words.

“But there are plenty of times when I’ve gone to a club and I’ll hear a DJ play something that interests me, and I’ll find out what record it is and it turns out I already have it in my collection. But I’ve never heard it like that before. So I’ll go back and listen to it again.”

Bentley grew up listening to KCRW, which is broadcast out of Santa Monica College. The summer after graduating from Santa Monica High School, he landed a volunteer job at the station.

During a two-year stay at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, Bentley worked as a disc jockey at the school radio station. His programming tastes were very much influenced by what he had heard at KCRW. He presented world music and even played tapes of Joe Frank, a dramatist who had a show at KCRW at the time. More significantly, it was during his collegiate days that Bentley became infatuated with house, a form of dance music that was a precursor to some of today’s modern electronic music.

After graduating from Loyola Marymount in L.A., the industrious young disc jockey nabbed his own dance music show at KCRW in 1991. At the time, he also helped found URB magazine, where he worked as a managing editor for several years.

Bentley eventually made a name for himself as a club DJ in Los Angeles. He also became a partner in a dance music promotion company called Bossa Nova, which has produced major dance music concerts by the likes of Fatboy Slim and Massive Attack. Bossa Nova currently promotes a dance night every Friday at Zanzibar in Santa Monica. Bentley is the night’s resident DJ.

In 1995, Bentley helped start a music label called Quango, which embraced electronic music as well as world music. Two years later, he left the label to take a job as an artists-and-repertoire executive at Maverick Records. He compiled the music for the soundtrack to the film “The Matrix” and helped sign noteworthy electronic artist Paul Oakenfold to the label.

But mostly, Bentley was dissatisfied with what he saw as Maverick’s conservative approach to music. Last year, he left the label, though he is currently assembling the soundtracks to the two upcoming “Matrix” sequels as an independent contractor.

“I came to Maverick with this whole attitude of being a music visionary, and the major-label environment was not into it,” he says. “Everything that I saw being signed around me at the label was derivative. If there was a Green Day that was successful, then we needed a band that sounded like them. I wasn’t going to create something for the lowest common denominator. So I just waited my contract out.”

Last fall, Bentley joined the staff at Machine Head. For years, he would get calls from people in the commercial, television or film worlds wanting help in finding electronic music for their projects. Now he has a base from which to fulfill such requests.

At the age of 32, Bentley clearly hasn’t lost his enthusiasm for music. But the self-proclaimed workaholic’s schedule will be scaled back soon anyway, he says. He is due to wed his interior-designer girlfriend in May, and Bentley says he’s anxious to start a family, which he knows will require spending more evenings at home.

Bentley appears agreeable to giving up much of his live DJ work at clubs. But he also seems resigned to eventually scaling back on his six-night-a-week radio schedule.

“It’s a bit of a shell game,” he says. “But I need to do something because I just want to spend more time with [my fiancee]. Part of the answer might be to prerecord the KROQ show or grooming someone else to take the reins when it comes to that.

“What I do at KCRW and KROQ really means something to a lot of people and I love doing it. I’m reluctant to just cut it off because it’s bigger than just me. But my fiancee’s will is bigger than me too!”