Oakenfold (L.A. mix)

PAUL OAKENFOLD and his well-worn passport are rarely home, but when he does put his empty suitcase away it’s at a house perched in the highest strata of the Hollywood Hills.

When he stands at his kitchen sink he stares at the Hollywood sign, and when he takes a dip in the pool he can hear bands performing at the Hollywood Bowl. “The best was when the Stones and Dead Can Dance played the same week,” the electronic music maestro said with clear homeowner pride. During the last Academy Awards, he watched the show on his big-screen television and, just by tilting his head a bit toward, he could look down through a window that gave him a view of the limousines queuing up for the red carpet.

For Oakenfold, who grew up revering American films, all of this is cause for giddy excitement and the topic of many phone calls back to his mum in London. “Never in a million years did I ever imagine I would be looking out on these things and be part of them.” Oakenfold spent five months in L.A. in 2000 while laboring on his first film score with the movie “Swordfish.” It was a bit of a rickety ride (“I had no idea what I was doing,” he says), but Oakenfold knew he had found a new home. So, four years ago, Oakenfold left his native England and his outsized fame there as one of the world’s most celebrated DJs and traded all of that for a chance to go Hollywood.

The change in his life should not be understated -- an elite dance DJ is like a Manchester United hero who jets here from Heathrow and instantly goes from a traffic-stopping superstar to something of an imported curiosity. But Oakenfold has no regrets.

“This is where the most exciting things are going on, in music and film and culture and the dance scene; this is the most interesting place in the world right now,” Oakenfold said. “Los Angeles is the place I want to be. This is home to me.”

In Europe, Oakenfold is famous for pioneering the dance genre known as trance but also for grand-scale moments for DJ culture, such as his opening for Madonna and U2, playing to stadiums and on the main stage of the Glastonbury Festival for an audience of more than 100,000. Here, meanwhile, for years, despite a now established dance culture, he finds he still has to explain to people exactly what he does. And now that people are finally getting a grasp of that, he is changing his entire job description. “Yes, yes, it’s true. It’s funny, isn’t it? I’m always explaining to people.”

For many Southern California fans, the snapshot of Oakenfold in their mind is from the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in 2002 when he became the first (and last) DJ on the main stage of the desert affair. What they saw that day -- Oakenfold working vinyl on turntables, creating pulsing, uplifting music with a headset around the nape of his neck -- is only one aspect of his current persona. He still plays live, such as his show last month aboard the Queen Mary in Long Beach.

But his focus right now is his new album, “A Lively Mind,” which was released June 6 and marks his second collection of original music. It features a gallery of guest stars, among them actress Brittany Murphy in a vamping Nancy Sinatra mode, Grandmaster Flash and Pharrell Williams. And, shock of shocks, the album also features a vocal by Oakenfold.

“I know, I can’t believe it, either,” he said with the expression of a seasick tourist. “I’m still not sure it was a good idea.”

The vocal is a fairly limited snippet, but Oakenfold is clearly uncomfortable with the entire premise of using his voice anywhere in his work. Unlike Moby, another icon of the electronic music scene who has tried again and again to weave his voice and face into his music persona, Oakenfold is more comfortable as the man behind the curtain. His music is all over television commercials (“There’s a car one right now, a beer one, um, no, two car ones....”), television shows and, most notably, film. There’s a stack of movie scripts in the corner of his living room for movies both successful and abandoned.

Since 2000, Oakenfold has become a staple presence in composing music for film, and his resume already is crowded with movies that put a premium on the cosmopolitan or tech-immersed vibe that his compositions evoke, among them “The Matrix: Reloaded” and “Collateral.”

For a man accustomed to art made alone, the collaborative film world presented a new challenge. He says performing on stage is all adrenaline thrill; scoring, though, is storytelling with sound -- and it’s someone else’s story.

Filmmakers who come to Oakenfold do so for music of pulse and emotional swell -- that’s because he is a brand name for his great innovation in electronic music. In the early 1990s, Oakenfold was already a noted name in British music circles for his remixes of music by U2, Snoop Dogg, the Doors and scads of other tracks he bent and broadened for dance floor consumption. But instead of being known for this studio revamp work, Oakenfold would soon be labeled the father of trance music. He had pulled the sound from the beach scene in Goa, India, blended it with British house music and sharpened the emotional sweeps of both to usher in a sound that became all the rage in the burgeoning rave scene.

Trance still informs Oakenfold’s work -- his live shows are, without exception, buoyant and affirming. He doesn’t go into the darker sound or ominous vibes of some other electronic acts.

“For me, the show has to build to something big and positive, and if I go off toward something dark, it takes too long to get back and it takes it away from what I want from a show and from life in general. “

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Enter trance

THE 42-year-old Oakenfold was born in London and grew up mesmerized by American music and film. School was a struggle because of dyslexia; in pop rhythms and movie fantasy, the youngster found a world far more welcoming and inspiring. A trip in the mid-1980s to the Spanish island Ibiza changed Oakenfold’s life. The head-rush and sweat of the dance scene there was more than an escape for him, it was a template for a lifestyle.

Oakenfold would go on, through trance music, to become arguably the most influential figure in club culture of the last 15 years.

He is a figure in great demand, especially in Europe. He declined to discuss numbers, but promoters said that booking a DJ of Oakenfold’s stature for a few hours of spinning music will cost $10,000, a pair of first-class round-trip airplane tickets and the expenses of meals, a posh hotel and car service.

Asked if the DJ life is like it seems from a distance -- a fellow shuttling between far-flung gigs with a box of vinyl and bags of cash -- he said, “No, they wire the money first. I don’t go if they don’t pay in advance. You learn that early on. And I use CDs now, not vinyl.”

In the video for his new single, “Faster Kill Pussycat,” the track featuring Murphy, Oakenfold is a glowering figure in the background, shuffling vinyl on and off a turntable as dancers writhe in a gritty nightclub. Oakenfold chuckles at that conceit.

“That was the first visual, you know; it looks good for the video,” he said.

Mainstream American music audiences have been less enthused than their European counterparts about attending a live music event where the star in the spotlight is fiddling with buttons and CDs or a computer console instead of playing an instrument, singing or dancing. Europe has long been open to the tribal aesthetic of a performance by a dance-scene DJ, but some American rubes shrug and ask, “How do I know that guy is actually playing anything?”

His answer is a laugh and a nod. “It’s true you don’t know. And sometimes they aren’t, believe me.”

Oakenfold has shaggy, shoulder-length hair these days and he isn’t classically handsome, but in person he comes off as a high-spirited fan of music himself. “I can’t wait to hear the new Red Hot Chili Peppers album,” he said. When he is home, he spends a considerable amount of time shopping at Amoeba Music on safari to find the newest beats, the overlooked sounds, the forgotten anthems, all of which might fit into one of his live concoctions.

In making his own music, surprisingly, he sits down with an acoustic guitar. The man known for shimmery walls of sound and rapid beats starts out with a simple twang. His new album actually shows the imprint of simplicity. His first original CD, “Bunkka,” in 2002, was jammed at every corner with special effects and dense music.

“On that one, it’s true, I tried every trick and wanted to show everything I could do,” Oakenfold said. “But here, now, it’s more relaxed, and I think the songs have more space. People feel things more when you give it some air in there. It can get overwhelming and a bit numbing when you do everything, all the time. It doesn’t have to be perfect all the time, either. At first, you try to do everything. Then you learn.”

The sound of a jazz show at the Hollywood Bowl came up and through the windows of Oakenfold’s house as he gave a tour of his home and proudly showed his collection of handmade crosses and folk art from Latin American nations. He was asked if he found that living in L.A. was difficult because, as conventional opinion goes, the city is without a definable center to its distracted sprawl.

“No, no, that’s just it. It’s getting a center now. Here in Hollywood and in downtown you really have something special happening here, something new and different. That’s what’s so exciting. I think this is the place to be. I know it’s where I have to be right now.”