I am originally from New York City, but I moved with my family to London in 1991. At the age of 15 I fell in love with dance music, with jungle (as it was then known) being the main vector of infection. A year later, having saved feverishly, I got my hands on a set of Technics 1210’s (in fact the same pair I still have in my bedroom), and, dreaming of glory, I set out to become a superstar dj!
Of course, the first problem was that I couldn’t mix and I didn’t have anyone to show me how. For years I stayed in my room blundering around, bothering the neighbours, irritating my parents, and scaring the dog. Occasionally I find a tape from that era and it’s not pretty!
Slowly but surely I figured out what I was doing, as much from standing in front of the dj booth at parties and staring as anything. By the summer of 1999, when I was 18, I figured that I had gotten to the point where I could go out and play in front of people without embarrassing myself too egregiously, so, armed with a bag bulging with banging acid techno, I hit the London squat party circuit.
That autumn I moved up to Edinburgh for university and I carried on my love affair with dance music there, becoming a regular at the infamous Studio 24 and playing at a couple of different nights before I started up a monthly club called Rampage with my good friends Phil Zero and Rob. We ran on a monthly basis for a year from February 2001, and we had guests such as K90, Medicine Man from Havok Records in Manchester, DJ Kultcha from Wasa-B in Vancouver, and Mark Tyler of No Entry Records (although that party was a total disaster!). We played acid techno, hard trance, hard house, and all other types of banging face-twisting gubbins. Although we had some brilliant nights we stopped when the management of The Venue changed and booted all of the nights that didn’t sell much booze. For some reason, that included us! For a long time I’ve been meaning to write up a proper nostalgia piece about it, but I’ve been lazy. Hmm.
After I graduated from Edinburgh in 2003 I moved back to New York, but, disliking the scene there and being less interested in going out clubbing, I stopped buying records and stopped trying to hook up dj gigs. After all, there’s only so much ass-kissing you can do, and if the scene for the music you like kind of sucks, what’s the point? Anyways, the final result was that when I moved back to London two years later my interest in being a dj was pretty much gone.
Recently though my interest in mixing has picked up again, which has meant that I have recorded several new mixes and I am planning on doing a whole range of other ones. I don’t really buy new records, so everything is now cobbled together from my old tunes in my record collection. Even so, I hope you enjoy the mixes!
