The proud Canuck DJs in Team Canada ponder the recipe for their patented Canadian Club

If Opposition leader Stéphane Dion ever pulled his bespectacled face away from his policy plans for a night, or if the noted federalist ever left his backpack at home and decided to hit the clubs, he would very likely be shaking his ass at a Team Canada party. The Montreal DJ duo of Grandtheft (Aaron Waisglass) and D.R.one (Raph Kerwin), noted federalists themselves, are flying the Maple Leaf all over North America, Asia and Europe with their genre-bending brand of mash-ups and distinctive club music, dubbed Canadian Club.

“We’re Anglo-Quebecers,” Grandtheft says of the moniker. “It’s all about unity. We’re nationalists.”

Three years ago, when the hockey-mad DJs chose the name, there were a lot of cultural issues bubbling up in Quebec, Grandtheft says. One look at the reasonable accommodation hearings currently going on in La Belle Province shows little has changed. The decision to wear their nationalism so proudly made an immediate impact both in their home province and in the U.S. “We had a stigma within Quebec, and we definitely had a stigma in the States when we first started going there,” Grandtheft says.

A lot of New York industry bigwigs and labels — Grandtheft declines to name any names — loved what Team Canada were doing, but told them they would need to change the name if they ever wanted to make it stateside. “Now we’re fully in,” Grandtheft says. “We’re signed in L.A., we have gigs all over the States and now we’re just ‘those Canadians.’”

Four years ago, the two DJs, who both came up in Montreal’s hip hop scene, started throwing parties in their hometown and in cities in southern Ontario. At a time when few DJs in the urban scene were playing anything other than Sean Paul, Beyonce and Jay-Z, Team Canada began pushing the boundaries by cutting in rock records and ’80s classics, making live remixes and mash-ups.

“Every time we would go into an event, whatever kind of event, we would just do our thing,” Grandtheft says. “And it was so different at the time that people had a great time with it. Everyone else calls what we do 'mash-ups,' but when people see us DJ live it's not really about mash-ups. It's about playing every kind of music and rocking a party with complete diversity.”

It’s hard to imagine now how different that sort of a club night was back then. This was around the time that a little-known Philadelphia outfit called Hollertronix — Diplo and Low B — dropped Never Scared, the mix tape that would eventually launch a thousand open-format club nights. In 2004, Team Canada put out their own groundbreaking mix tape, Classic Material Vol. 1. It was a pure party-rocker that blended the Beatles with Notorious B.I.G., Frank Sinatra with The Clipse, Radiohead with The Pharcyde. It was a great time to be a DJ and to go clubbing. The possibilities of what could be done on a pair of turntables seemed endless. But, as is always the case, things got stale.

“The mixed-bag thing is so commercial now that we're on some other stuff,” Grandtheft says. A producer before becoming a DJ, Grandtheft is now custom tailoring tracks for the Team Canada sets, making something he's calling Canadian Club.

“We have a new thing going on. It’s not Bmore [Baltimore club, a blend of hip hop and house] because it’s not using those drum loops. It’s not just electro and it’s not necessarily house,” Grandtheft explains. “We’re just making unadulterated club music, which is what mash-ups were five years ago.”