On the 30th anniversary of my marginal DJ career

Quick note about the music in this post: I have several classic rave tracks and mixtapes from the 1992–94 era embedded throughout, and others linked in the text. I also made a Spotify playlist of the records I played in that era, embedded at the bottom of this article, but here’s the link if you don’t want to scroll. Also at the bottom of the article is a list of more classic tracks with links that don’t exist on Spotify. So many amazing classics are hard to find now except on vinyl or on Youtube! I’ll keep adding to both lists as more tracks occur to me. And by the way, if you appreciate the content, consider buying me a coffee!

This year I’m celebrating the 30th anniversary of moving to New York and the start of my life as a DJ. I moved to New York on July 10, 1993. It’s strange that I can remember the date so well — or maybe not so strange considering what a pivotal moment it was in my life and how it changed everything for me in an instant.

My DJ career started 30 years ago, but I haven’t been playing for 30 years. I’ve taken numerous hiatuses, some of them for years, for different reasons: burnout, frustration with the scene, mental-health struggles, all of the above. I haven’t played out for some time now; even before the pandemic, gigs had pretty much dried up for me. With all the shortcomings in my knowledge and experience some might not even consider me a professional DJ.

I’ve written before about the regret, sadness and even anger I feel about the litter of wreckage that is my music career, if “career” is even the word for it (I detailed some of that wreckage in my review of Meet Me in the Bathroom last year).

I’ve been a marginal DJ for 30 years. I’ve never managed to be in the inner circle in all that time, for a bunch of reasons: too awkward, too anxious, too autistic maybe. But I’m actually proud of that fact.

One of my favorite Instagram pages is @sceneinbetween, run by author Sam Knee and based on his book of the same name, where he compiles photos from the underground music scenes of the 60s, 70s, and 80s — garage, proto-punk, psych, postpunk, indie, and more. It’s like a People’s History of Underground Music. Almost all the photos are of unknowns — bands of young people playing music in their basements or at school dances, who might have been together for a year or a few years before whatever else life had in store for them. All these faded images of unknown musicians from half a century ago are a powerful reminder that the music scene of any era is not just made up of the big names and the icons. For every big name there are ten thousand unknowns who contributed something — the same way folk musicians have contributed to music for centuries, just by picking up a guitar or fiddle and playing for their communities. The ones who play week in and week out, in small clubs and back rooms and house parties, and get none of the glory. They aren’t failures because you’ve never heard of them. Most of music history has taken place on the margins.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. It gave me an epiphany about my own music career and how I define success. I was never able to make a living out of DJing, eventually I walked away from it, and certainly I made a lot of mistakes.

But still, I contributed something to the music scene in New York during the 90s, a decade that’s considered epochal by younger generations. And as bad as my self-esteem was and still is, I was repeatedly told I was good and that my style was unique by people who knew house music and knew what the hell they were talking about. Those are things to be proud of.

However marginal my career is, or even if I never play another record in public again, DJing is still so important to me and so central to my life, and always will be. Becoming a DJ changed my outlook on everything — for example, how I listen to all kinds of music, not just dance music. Listening to the bass and the rhythm first will change the way you listen to even country or classical.

It will also change your outlook on music history: thinking about how so many kinds of popular music started out as party music, underground music, music for the people, music for moving bodies, before they became commodified under capitalism. There’s something enlightening and inherently political about that.

Becoming a DJ changed how I hear sound in cinema. The same semester I bought my first decks and started DJing, I was a sound recorder and mixer on a fellow student’s thesis film. It was so interesting to see the overlap in those art forms at such a formative time for me.

In fact DJing changed how I hear the sound of anything — a room, a public place, the ocean, someone speaking.

It’s even affected me in more abstract ways. It’s shaped how I perceive the “flow” of a baseball game or a novel, or the flow of something I’m writing; or how I perceive any kind of gathering of people, from a dinner party to a protest — the mood of a crowd, their dynamics, and so on.

And collecting and mixing music has brought me 30 years of joy (along with frustration and heartache too).

Before I get to the start of my career in New York over that long hot summer and fateful fall of 1993, I have to rewind a bit, to the fall of 1992 and my senior year at the University of Southern California, where I attended film school.

In fact the first party I ever played was Saturday October 31, 1992. It was a friend’s Halloween party at a student apartment. It came only a few weeks after I bought my first pair of turntables and a few months after I started collecting dance records. I still remember the party and the set I played pretty well.

That first private gig on my brand-new decks was the culmination of a year in which dance music took over my life. I attended my first rave in September of 1991, in Long Beach, California. It was a life-changing experience (and I wrote an essay about it two years ago for its 30th anniversary). I spent months after that transformative night going to raves and warehouse parties around L.A.; watching DJs like Doc Martin, DJ Dan, Barry Weaver and Ron D. Core in rapt fascination; obsessing over and studying their mixtapes; and reading about them in URB magazine. Almost inevitably I made the decision that this is what I wanted to do. It was a logical step, really — though it had an unfortunate impact on my film studies.

I started collecting dance records in the summer of 1992. I didn’t really have anyone to guide me. Several times that summer, when I should have been preparing for my senior year in film school or looking for a place to live, I took the bus by myself from University Park, where I was staying with my girlfriend, to Melrose Avenue in Hollywood. Not many USC students rode the RTD bus line in L.A., which was colloquially known as the “Rough, Tough and Dangerous,” but I was undeterred. I was always eager to avoid being a typical insular white SC student, and anyway my quest for vinyl was worth any risk.

Tentatively I ventured into DMC Records, Street Sounds and Beat Non Stop, three of the best-known destinations in L.A. for dance-vinyl shoppers, to look for some of my favorite records — and in a larger sense make the plunge into a lifelong habit.

It’s really nerve-wracking shopping for vinyl at a specialty store for the first time if you’re on your own, you don’t know anyone in the scene, and you don’t necessarily even know the titles of the records you’re looking for. Especially if you’re someone like me who has a hard time fitting in or approaching the staff — usually DJs themselves and sometimes a bit aloof or too cool for their own good.

But I eventually found my footing and started learning the ancient ways of digging in the crates. On my first trip I bought six records:

• Joey Beltram – Beltram Vol. 1 (a repress of the Energy Flash EP)
• Coco Steel & Lovebomb – “Feel It”
• The Prodigy – “Charly”
• 2 Bad Mice – Hold It Down EP (which included “Bombscare”)
• Moby – “Go” Remixes
• Ravesignal – Ravesignal III

I didn’t have anything to play them on yet but I was very proud of my little collection! To this day these six records still form the inner core of what I consider the rave sound of that era.

Ironically, at the time most of them were already considered played-out. With the exception of the 2 Bad Mice record, released earlier that year and still huge in the warehouses that summer, they were all from 1990 or 91 and already sounded dated. That’s how quickly electronic music changed and evolved in that era. I remember a friend around that time dismissively referring to those rave standards from one or two years before as “classic rock.” Ironically, if possible they sound less dated now than they did then — because that early rave sound is now considered timeless and there’s no more reason to be jaded about it.

The next step was owning turntables, which was a huge, almost unimaginable step for me because I had never owned anything in my life and I had no idea how to even go about doing it. There were some ads for audio retailers in Orange County that appeared in the back of URB every month, with tantalizing little black-and-white images of decks, mixers, speakers and other gear. I had no car, no way of getting down there, and it was all so expensive.

My friend Jason and I had been hanging around with this guy Casey Storm, a fellow SC student and a rapper who was quite talented and had a bit of a name for himself in L.A. He was in this group called 4 Step Plan and they had actual demos and actual gigs around town. In later years Casey became a well-known costume designer on films (he did the costumes for Her, Zodiac, Being John Malkovich and many more). A couple of years ago when I read Beastie Boys Book, it made my day when Casey was mentioned prominently in one chapter; he got his start as a designer when he was assigned by his friend Spike Jonze to source the vintage fashions for the “Sabotage” video. No surprise at all to me that Casey ended up running in those kinds of circles.

I haven’t seen Casey since the SC days, but I have fond memories of him because he was a crucial figure in the start of my DJ career. He was always really cool with me. Though I imagine he thought I was really naive, he was always willing to help and answer questions.

A couple of times we hung out in Casey’s music studio, which was a granny flat at his parents’ place (his dad, Howard Storm, was a famous TV sitcom director, known for his work on Mork and Mindy and countless other iconic shows). Casey noticed that I gravitated towards the turntables and he let me mess around with them a bit. When I told him about my hazy plans for owning a pair, he offered to drive me down to Orange County and help me shop for some gear.

All of a sudden it was happening and I just needed the cash. The solution was easy: my financial-aid money. What is struggling to pay your rent or buy groceries as a student on a scholarship at an expensive private university, compared to owning your first pair of Technics 1200s?

Casey and I spent a warm October afternoon driving down to the OC. I remember the drive well because we talked a lot; he told me lots of stories about the music business and DJing in hip-hop clubs around L.A. He wasn’t a techno fan at all but he respected my passion for it, and I think he had an idea of what I wanted to do as a DJ and wanted to help. When I look back on it, he really didn’t have to do all this, and I’m eternally grateful.

I don’t remember the name of the dealership we went to. I’m really glad Casey was with me because I’m sure I would have gotten ripped off or bought the wrong gear. With his advice I bought a pair of 12s, a Gemini Scratchmaster — a basic but really solid two-channel mixer designed for hip hop — and some Sony headphones. I didn’t have enough for an amp and speakers but my place was too small for them anyway.

When we got back there (a dark depressing little room in a shitty old dump of a sharehouse on Adams Boulevard, far from campus) Casey helped me set up the system. We set up the decks and mixer on the top of the room’s big, heavy, old-fashioned dresser. I plugged the Scratchmaster into the boom box I’d had since high school — which must have seemed so ghetto to Casey; it seems ghetto to me looking back on it. The boom box had a Public Enemy sticker on it, just like Radio Raheem’s in Do the Right Thing.

Away I went! It felt like owning my first car, even despite the cheap boom-box speakers. It was so exciting to have a new skill to learn, brand-new equipment to learn it on, and all the passion and motivation in the world to learn it.

Again, this was to the detriment of my film studies, which were at a really crucial phase then, the first semester of my senior year — learning how to edit sound on a prototype Avid system (one of the advantages of attending a top film school), pulling allnighters on film sets, being part of a film crew with a lot of responsibility and pressure.

I basically made a choice to favor music over film, which wasn’t exactly the best decision given I was on a scholarship. I’m sure someone who had their shit together a little more would have been able to balance both, but that someone was most certainly not me. And maybe I should add: that hypothetical someone would probably not have had undiagnosed autism, as I did.

My final, abortive year of film studies: it was a really tense, confusing, awkward and messed-up time in my life. I let some of my classmates and fellow crew down, and I let myself down. Which is true of a lot of 21-year-old students who are about to be hurled into the real world, even if they don’t have the mental-health issues I had.

There was a lot of joy and discovery too, of course.

Despite how new it all was, there were certain things about DJing that seemed so familiar to me, like it was meant to be. The stroboscopic dots on the 1200s’ spinning platters were exactly like those on my grandpa’s record player in the early 80s. The headphones were pretty much the same as my dad’s headphones that I’d listened to music on throughout high school. As for the records themselves, though they were already considered a dated format in the early 90s with the dominance of CDs, I’d grown up listening to and playing my dad’s pretty substantial record collection, and, when I was old enough, collecting my own vinyl.

So, none of it was new technology for me, except for the mixer, which wasn’t hard to figure out on a mechanical level. It was almost funny to realize that the monumental, futuristic, world-changing, and sometimes deafening sounds I heard at raves were made by a needle on a record that was exactly the same size and shape and function as the country and rock records I’d grown up on.

But some of it was entirely new. I still remember how challenging it was to hear two different tracks in the headphones and try to sort out which one was the incoming track and whether it needed pitching up or down. That’s the one essential skill of DJing, and you can’t really explain to someone how to do it. It’s just something you have to feel out, do over and over, and screw up a lot, while developing new and counterintuitive aural instincts, before you can do it right. I imagine it literally involves growing new neural pathways — well, anything you learn does, but this feels like it involves more neurons than most! — and it’s painful and headache-inducing at first before it suddenly makes sense.

Working out the differences in the feel and flow of different tracks — why “Energy Flash” might not be such a good one to mix with “Bombscare” — was a new challenge too. And then the more subtle challenges of learning how to work it all into a set that has a flow and tells a story, which took months and years. That’s something a lot of DJs never figure out, even some successful ones.

When I look back I’m proud of how much I learned in a short time, especially since I had no one to help me that first year. I didn’t have any kind of mentor or any kind of a crew until I moved to New York in the summer of 1993… but more on that in a bit.

My style of mixing is still very much how I learned it on that Scratchmaster: using the crossfader to blend instead of the volume levers, a style I picked up from the hardcore DJs I observed at raves, and which is based on hip-hop mixing. Most modern house DJs’ mixing style is based on disco or garage — back in the day, disco DJs mixed with volume knobs on rotary mixers, and either ignored the crossfader or didn’t even have one. I can handle that kind of mixing if you put a rotary mixer in front of me, and once I got into nu-disco and garage in the late 90s I became more comfortable with it, but it always feels a bit foreign to me and not dynamic enough. I like having the option to crosscut quickly and drop a beat in like DJ Dan used to do at L.A. warehouse raves in 1991.

The Scratchmaster didn’t have channel EQs, nor any effects, so it was either sink or swim with the mix as it was while I rode the crossfader. Which eventually taught me a lot about finesse and really listening to records while I was mixing them — but of course my mixes were very bumpy in those first couple of years.

Now that I had decks, I started making more forays to the record shops in Hollywood to expand my collection. For a while that fall I was still into the hardcore rave sound of 1990–92 that was my first love, and I bought more hardcore records by artists like the Prodigy, Altern8 and Force Mass Motion. The latter’s incredible four-track EP on Rabbit City is very special to me because it was my first white label: plain white paper sleeve; no tracklisting or any other information other than the hand-stamped “Rabbit City * 004,” and every track so incindiary it felt like it was going to melt my headhones or detonate my bedroom.

Some of the records I bought around this time very quickly seemed dated to me, especially the hoover-ish ones like Messiah’s “There Is No Law.” Dated or not, they contained the seeds of the jungle explosion, which was just months away and would prove to be one of the dominant sounds in dance music, and popular music more broadly, for the next decade and then some.

Either way it wasn’t long before I started moving away from that style. In the fall of 1992 the sound of progressive house was starting to make its influence felt and its slower tempo, euphoric melodies, surrealism and musical sophistication were exactly what I was looking for. I bought my first records by Orbital (the Mutations remix EP) and the Future Sound of London (the Papua New Guinea EP), which quickly became two of the most important and beloved records in my collection, and still are to this day.

Orbital’s “Chime Crime” (I hadn’t heard the original yet) defined what I wanted my music to sound like: tough, funky acid-house beats and hypnotic bassline taken into orbit by melody-saturated synths and ghostly echoing vocals. Later Paul Hartnoll told me those vocals were illegally sampled from Madonna’s “Material Girl,” thus the “Crime.”

I still remember the first time I listened to Andrew Weatherall’s epic remix of “Papua New Guinea.” It’s eleven and a half minutes long; I sat in that dumpy room one gloomy October afternoon and listened to the whole thing without mixing it with anything else, and when it was done playing I was a different person.

I also bought the Aphex Twin’s Didgeridoo EP, which was so transformative for me in how I heard techno, and how I heard everything really. I loved the sleeve art, with its gorgeous digital abstraction of a boomerang and Uluru, many years before I even thought of moving to Australia. It was also before Aphex decided it was necessary for all his record sleeves to be pranksterishly grotesque, which is one of his calling cards but I just find it irritating.

It’s hard to believe, but less than one year later I would be on tour with the Aphex Twin and Orbital, when I was hired by Moby as part of his touring show.

I had only been the proud owner of a pair of decks for a couple of weeks when my friend Rex — a fellow film student — invited me to play his Halloween party. Even though it was just a house party at an undergrad student apartment, I was nervous as hell. I planned and rehearsed my set obsessively, writing down the tracks on a legal pad in the exact order I intended to play them, and even writing down the cue points. The cue points were pretty important because in such a short time I hadn’t learned how to beatmatch very well or very consistently yet. At that point I was still relying on fading tracks in quickly, often in just a few bars during breakdowns, not always quite in sync. Which is how hip hop, R&B and reggae are mixed a lot of the time anyway, so there’s no real shame in that; and it’s a mixing style that’s especially forgiving with early-90s hardcore rave music with its many breakdowns and dramatic changes.

Later in the 90s, when I was gigging regularly in New York and had a lot more confidence, I laughed to myself whenever I looked back on this anxious planning for my first gig. In those later years it was all about improvisation and flow for me. I would have never planned a set down to the last record.

But now, 31 years later, I think it was actually a sound and rational approach. Any DJ worth their salt does some set-planning when they have a high-pressure gig (which is what this was for me, since it was my first). Writing down the order and the cue points was just a low-tech version of what digital DJs do nowadays with software like Rekordbox anyway. I was doing my best with the minimal experience I had to make sure I didn’t fail.

The night of the party came. I set up my decks on a card table in Rex’s living room and plugged into his home stereo (so, a considerable step up from my boom box!). Rex was and still is a guitarist — he’s now a pro musician and co-owns a successful independent rock label, Big Stir Records — and looking back, I realize his musical expertise was a factor in making sure I was set up properly and felt comfortable. One of many people who’ve been there for me throughout my life as I struggled with audio gear, which is a shortcoming of mine as a DJ.

By the way, I spoke to Rex about it recently, and he reminded me that he was dressed as Kurt Cobain for the party, and his girlfriend came as Courtney Love — pretty cool for the fall of 1992 if you think about it.

I started out by just playing the Happy Mondays’ Pills n Thrills n Bellyaches LP in full — a classic of Madchester rave-rock, and a favorite of both mine and Rex’s. By the time the album was done playing, the room was full and bustling, and it was time for me to start mixing. I was tense when I put on my first track, Return of the Living Acid’s “Get Funky” — mixing it into the Mondays’ loopy, psychedelic “Harmony,” pitching the latter way up before backspinning it to create a dramatic effect as the breakbeat acid kicked in. To my delight, the reaction in the room was almost instantaneous, the inebriated students surging onto the makeshift dancefloor as Rex turned the lights out and the strobes and lava lamps on. It gave me an adrenaline shot of confidence, and as I worked my way through my set, my meticulous planning paid off. The dancefloor didn’t clear for hours and I experienced for the first time the joy, the thrill, the power of moving a roomful of people to dance.

I was keenly aware that playing the most basic rave records on a card table over a home stereo wouldn’t have been much to underground heads. But this is how every DJ gets their start. I smiled when I saw Mia Hansen-Løve’s 2015 drama Eden, about the French house scene in the 90s, and it showed the protagonists, including a thinly fictionalized Daft Punk, getting their start playing in the living room at a house party.

None of the students at the party were ravers, as far as I remember, and this was years before rave and electronic music had gathered any force in the mainstream, so there was a real mystique about what I was doing. I could tell the more curious among them were really impressed, and that was a nice little ego boost. At the same time, I had the function of being the house band, as it were, and it didn’t matter what I played. It was my job to keep the beats going so the college kids could party, and not many cared what beats they were.

By the way: Rex took all of the photos of me in the first part of this article, for his photography class at SC. I hadn’t actually seen them until Rex sent them to me this year, and it was a trip to check them out. They were taken in October of 92, the same month of his party and the same month I got the decks. Since I’d only had my decks for a couple of weeks and was still very raw as a DJ, it goes to show you that a good photographer can make someone look like they know what they’re doing!

Fast forward several months: a tumultuous time in my life as I limped out of my senior year without a degree, suffered prolonged and crippling dissociative anxiety — to the point that I wondered if I was having some kind of mental breakdown — and made ill-advised plans to move to New York with no money to my name.

Throughout the spring semester, my last months living in L.A., I’d been collecting more records. Under the influence of DJs like Doc Martin, David Alvarado, Taylor, Steve Loria, Eric Davenport, and Tony Largo, I was getting more into UK progressive house, and also taking my first steps into deep and soulful American house from New York, Chicago and Miami.

The above-linked DJ mix by Largo, recorded that year, perfectly captures the sound of proper deep house played with that dubby, trippy West Coast feel that was so influential for me at this time, and would become my framework for the rest of the decade. Aside from that it’s just a dope mix and guaranteed to lift your spirits.

Around this time, all-time classics by Cajmere featuring Dajae (“Brighter Days”) and the Murk boys (“Reach for Me” and “Some Lovin”) were added to my collection, along with lesser known but still timeless examples of the house sound of that era such as Jack and Jill’s “Work It Girlfriend.”

The latter was my first record on New York’s mighty Strictly Rhythm, and noteworthy because of its up-front LGBTQ pride, with four hilariously raunchy spoken-word snippets from drag queen Franklin Fuentes leading into each of the four tracks. Honey, I’m Vanessa Williams, Catwoman, and Jessica Rabbit rolled into one. I’m all that and a bag of chips, too! It was a glimpse of the fierce gay and trans New York house vibe that would blow my mind and change my life at the Sound Factory in a couple of years.

My crash landing in New York and my struggles during my first few years there is a longer story for another day. It was hard. I felt completely lost, like I was trying to tread water on the open ocean. Looking back, now that I’ve been diagnosed with autism, I don’t know how I made it. Going from a collegiate environment that had a certain amount of structure and stability and support (even though I could have used a lot more support, and I still flailed about terribly) to such a vast and relentless and unforgiving place. I had no money, and a very fragile support network that was made up of my ex-girlfriend, Nayeli, and some teenagers on the music scene I’d just met. All the help they offered meant the world — not to mention the surival skills they taught me — but the burden shouldn’t have fallen on them. I had such a limited ability to cope or function in the adult world. It was not a healthy situation.

The result is that I was destitute for years, often literally homeless. All I had were those decks and those records, and I clung to them like they were salvaged from a shipwreck and essential to my survival in this place.

I don’t want to claim that these struggles made me a better DJ or a better person — that I was somehow forged in the fire. I used to think that way but not anymore. It’s not a good outlook on mental health. No one should have to worry about where they’re going to sleep next month, or that night. No one should have to rely on acquaintances they met at a nightclub for their survival. And your development as an artist or as a person shouldn’t be graded on the trouble or trauma you’ve suffered.

And yet, just about everyone I knew in New York in those years was going through some shit. The underground music scene has always been a refuge for the working class, the poor and the oppressed — a refuge from a world of inequality, brutality and hate. There’s a reason the friendships you form on those kinds of scenes often last a lifetime, and make you feel like part of a secret band of rebels out to save the world.

Not long after arriving in New York I had my first real gig in public. The crew I’d started running with, Digital Konfusion, threw an outdoor party on a handball court in Washington Heights, all the way uptown under the George Washington Bridge.

DK were introduced to me by Nayeli. They were mostly kids from uptown and Brooklyn, along with a few from New Jersey. They were a loose network of DJs, dancers and graffiti artists; most were high schoolers — years younger than me. Many of them had known each other since childhood, but in large part they coalesced at NASA, New York’s legendary rave weekly which took place at the Shelter downtown.

Though it was a multicultural crew, most of the DK members I became close in the early days to were Black and Hispanic, and they were crucial in shaping my view of the music scene in New York. For example they educated me about the fundamental influence of hip hop on rave music. That was an easy pill for me to swallow since I’d always loved hip hop — in fact, hip hop is what led me into rave music originally. And I know most of this essay is about house and techno, but moving to New York in the summer of 1993, when hip hop was at the apex of its golden age and inescapable on every corner and in every club, was a massive influence on me. More broadly DK taught me so much about the long legacy of Black and Latin dance music, from funk to disco to house to Latin freestyle.

My perspective from then on was fundamentally an uptown perspective, even when I lived downtown in later years. I’m grateful for that to this day — for example, it’s so common for music writers or fans to carry on like acid house was invented in England in 1988, and erase the music’s roots in Black clubs in the U.S. And in my review of Meet Me in the Bathroom, I talked about how both the book and the film are based on the misguided rockist idea that nothing was happening on the New York music scene in the 90s because the punk scene had dissipated. My experiences living uptown and partying with these kids forever armed me against those kinds of errors and distortions in dance-music history.

My friend DJ Odi, who was 16 at the time, was one of the founders of DK and one of its main driving forces with his boundless energy and passion for the rave scene. Despite his young age he was already an experienced DJ, and he became a mentor of sorts for me during that first year in the city. He schooled me in many of the finer points of track selection, mixing, and flow. The lessons Odi taught me have stayed with me all this time.

Though his primary love was hardcore and the nascent sound of jungle — in later years he became one of the U.S.’s most respected junglists and he still is to this day (one of his classic jungle tapes is embedded below) — Odi loved all kinds of music. He taught me that whatever record it took to keep the crowd moving was the right record to play, whether it was hip hop or disco or reggae or classic rock. He taught me that “practice makes permanent” — that I shouldn’t stop my set and start over during a practice session; if I was struggling or out of a groove, I should just keep going and mix through it.

He taught me that a DJ ought to be able to recover from anything that goes wrong during their set, whether it was equipment failure, a drunk partygoer yelling at them, or whatever. Once when I was practicing with him he abruptly unplugged my headphones and demanded that I keep mixing without cueing, because, as he said, that is going to eventually happen to you. Your headphones are going to break down and you have to keep going. This seemed frustratingly pointless at the time, but sure enough he was right. I’ve had to mix without headphones several times over the years. Whenever something goes wrong during a set I think of Odi.

I’m always thankful for those lessons, though I’m sure I was a difficult student for Odi — I was stubbornly fixated on the progressive-deep-house fusion sound I had in my mind, and probably didn’t seem interested enough when he was trying to school me on, for example, Todd Terry, his hero. Because of the terrible time I was having adjusting to life in the city, I was frequently depressed and unmotivated. I’ve never been much of a hustler. I was also pretty hopeless with the technical aspects of audio equipment — still a weakness of mine to this day.

As for partying, I went to NASA until they stopped running weeklies later in 1993, and to Sound Factory Bar, the house weekly where Little Louie Vega was resident and where I got an education in New York house. I went to the famous superclubs of the era, including the Tunnel and the Limelight. I didn’t enjoy the superclubs so much compared to the raves — I found the music generic, the culture more elitist and the club kids annoying (though I learned to appreciate their impact on art, fashion and pop culture in later years).

I shopped for records at Discorama, Eightball Records, Sonic Groove (owned by Brooklyn hardcore legend Frankie Bones) and Liquid Sky, the famous rave boutique in Soho that had a record store in its basement. You may have heard that Chloë Sevigny worked there back then. I never got to know Chloë personally but she was a familiar face at the store and it was a trip when she became famous in later years.

And of course I attended many of the raves of the era, which were often enormous and pulled in kids from all up and down the East Coast.

Of all the DJs I heard in that first year, the one that blew my mind and became a permanent influence on me was Philadelphia’s Josh Wink. He was one of the few East Coast DJs who played with what I thought of as a West Coast style: deep, dubby, smooth, stretched-out, slow-burning, but intense and euphoric. I also liked him as a person: I met Josh later that year and he was lovely.

I was also hanging out with Moby a bit that summer — he was interested in Nayeli, and I think he befriended me to get closer to her. The result was that I ended up being hired as part of Moby’s stage show on the See the Light tour, the seminal rave tour of North America that fall that also featured Orbital, the Aphex Twin, and Vapourspace. Meanwhile, my sister and I, along with a bunch of other DK and NASA heads, ended up in the video for “Move.”

The Moby tour is a much longer story, which I’ve told before in a pair of widely-shared articles for inthemix in 2013. Those articles have since been taken down (inthemix was shut down in 2018), but having just reread my saved copies of them, I’ve decided to republish them later this year, which will coincide with the 30th anniversary of the tour. I think that story needs to exist online for a bunch of reasons — watch this space.

I felt lonely and out of sync on the New York rave scene — the music styles, the club-kid fashions, even the way people danced seemed off-kilter compared to what I was used to in L.A., and I was a solid five years older than just about anyone else I was partying with. That made me feel old and jaded though I was just 22 and had been raving for less than two years.

My mental-health struggles made all this worse, as did the brutal heatwave New York endured that summer. After four years in the blissful dry heat of L.A. it was my first experience of the special misery of New York in the dog days of July and August. I pined away terribly for L.A. — to the point that I annoyed my new friends. If there’s one thing New Yorkers don’t want to hear, it’s how great things are somewhere else. I think I developed a reputation as some kind of lost California rave hippie.

Even the way I talked made me feel out of step — I just couldn’t talk as fast as New Yorkers, couldn’t get a word in edgewise, and my West Coast accent with the typical stoner mannerisms sounded goofy to them.

The reality is I needed help and support but I didn’t know how to ask for it, so I mostly just came across like I was complaining a lot. Los Angeles represented not only nice weather and a great party scene, but also the safety and security I’d suddenly lost. I don’t think I fully understood that until later.

At one point in the fall of that year I felt so lonely and overwhelmed that I resorted to self-harm. Alone at the kitchen table late at night I calmly and methodically started cutting parallel lines in my shoulder with a chef knife. I don’t think I realized how serious this was until I told my friend Lauren about it the next day and she reacted with alarm. It didn’t leave scars, so I must not have been too committed, and that behavior has never been repeated, thankfully (my self-destructive tendencies took other forms); but I shudder when I think of it now.

In later years I learned to love New York — I just want to make that clear because this story is heavily focused on the awkward early days — and I also learned that a lot of people struggle there, it’s not just me.

Back to my first gig, which took place in July of 93. The lineup for the party on the handball court, which was the first in a series that was eventually called Defying the Tribes, included other DK DJs playing house, hardcore (or proto-jungle) and hip-hop, reflecting the crew’s diverse influences. I played a one-hour set relatively early in the evening.

I definitely wasn’t ready. I was nervous, my set was over-planned (which backfired on me this time) and I was out of a groove for the entire length of my set. Just days after making New York my home, I was overwhelmed by the crowd, the brutal humidity (still hanging over the city like a pall even though it was nighttime), and the vastness of the bridge and the Hudson and the rest of the urban environment looming around me.

And I don’t remember impressing any of the punters at all. I think that’s because it was an early set, not any particular fault of mine — though I was a long way from being the kind of DJ who could really elevate the vibe in an opening slot. And a long way from figuring out how to combine the progressive house, deep house, techno and trippy psychedelic stuff that I loved with equal passion into a cohesive set.

I felt like such an interloper. What the hell was I doing here, on this handball court — a film-school refugee, a white kid from Oregon, playing music for these city kids who’d grown up on hip hop and house and freestyle?

Still, I’m proud I hung in there and played a set, and it will always be my first. To be able to say you played your first set at an illegal outdoor rave on an uptown handball court in New York in 1993 is pretty cool.

I don’t remember very many of the records I played, but I know that “We Got a Love” by the Jason Nevins Experience was part of my set (the epitome of the the type of New York hard house I started favoring in that era, and such a banger to this day); and I’m pretty sure I played the appropriately titled “Uptown” by Hustlers Convention, my first disco-house record (after 1996, nu-disco and related forms would be huge for me and for the whole scene I was part of). It seems likely that X-Press 2’s stomping “London Xpress” was in my bag too; that record was so huge that summer, on so many different danceflooors all over the world, from superclubs to raves to underground house parties.

There were more such nights in my near future. However stiff and unprepared I was for that first set, DK kept inviting me back to play at their parties, including a break-in warehouse rave in Williamsburg one brisk fall evening. This was years before Williamsburg was hipster central; for most New Yorkers in the early 90s, it would have seemed really remote and forbidding. It was quite a brave move to throw an illegal party there, even if it didn’t pull enough brave souls to pack it. I have to hand it to DK for their adventurous spirit and sheer determination in those years.

One of my most indelible memories of that era is an improvised party that took place on a chilly October afternoon at the decrepit lower Manhattan bandshell universally known as “Wild Style Park” — because the climactic scene of the movie had been filmed there. I remember Odi mixing jungle with my copy of Wham’s “Careless Whisper” (originally my dad’s), George Michael’s crooning over the insanely chopped-up breaks blaring across the bandshell while a throng of raver kids hung out and rolled blunts. It sounded brilliant but it was so surreal sitting in the bleachers in the cold New York dusk, looking out at the East River and wondering how the hell I got to this place.

That kind of hangout session combined with urban exploration is really such an underrated feature of that era for me and for anyone on the party scene. You leave a party at seven in the morning and then you just roll all over town getting into spontaneous adventures for the rest of the day. Things like sleep and where your next meal is coming from become secondary, and you see parts of the city and experience things you never would have otherwise. You even see society and the way it works differently. The Situationists would have approved.

I remember one grey Sunday morning not long after I arrived in New York, wandering around uptown with DK heads, and coming down hard from the rave the night before — I was not having a good time. Somehow we ended up in Riverbank State Park, the weirdly artificial park built on top of a sewage treatment plant that juts out into the Hudson; it feels a bit like if a park was built on a barge. I didn’t remember this until I just looked it up but the park had just been opened that year, 1993. This is what I mean about urban exploration — it’s like why not go check out the weird new park uptown at ten in the morning on no sleep? Believe me, I never made it back to that park in all my 16 years in New York.

My friend FTL had a boom box with him and he was playing an old Stretch Armstrong radio show that he’d recorded. I’ll never forget when Armstrong mixed in Kraftwerk’s “Numbers,” my first time hearing it — all of a sudden the hip-hop mix was electro, it was techno, it was avant-garde. And in my altered state of mind, I had the clearest realization that hip hop is all those things and more, and that the history of hip hop, electronic, and rave music are all tied up together. Blasting in our little corner of the park and putting smiles on all our faces that morning, those bubbling synths and babbling vocals and timelessly dope beats lifted my spirits after a long night, made me a Kraftwerk fan for life, and permanently transformed my outlook on music.

Back to the parties: it wasn’t all out-of-the-way handball courts and dirty warehouses: once they started making a name for themselves on the scene, DK also booked me in side rooms at superclubs like the Roxy, the Tunnel and the Shelter. In October of 1994 I played with them at Hammerstein Ballroom (then known as Manhattan Center) when they did a side room in support of Deee-Lite.

Someone else who really took the time to help me out in the early days was Junior Sanchez. I met him through DK, we hit it off because we shared similar taste in house, and he invited me to play with him at a midtown club one freezing Saturday night during my first winter in New York.

Another night, when I was playing with DK and decided to go hard with stuff like “Didgeridoo” and Vapourspace’s “Gravitational Arch of 10,” I remember Junior coming up to me in the booth and exclaiming, “Why is no one dancing??” At first I thought he was annoyed at me for playing stuff that was so edgy, but then it dawned on me that he was really impressed. Unfortunately the sparse crowd in the venue wasn’t feeling it at all.

On the Moby tour in October and November of 1993 I got to DJ several times, sometimes in the side room, but once in between the Aphex Twin and Orbital on the main stage. That was nerve-wracking, but I’d learned a lot since that first gig in July, I got a great reaction from the crowd, and it gave me a lot more confidence.

One of my favorite memories of all my years of DJing: playing in the side room in Chicago, I put on Orbital’s “Chime Crime,” only to look up and see Paul from Orbital dancing to it.

Another gig that boosted my confidence was a competition for up-and-coming DJs I took part in at Fever, a rave weekly in Baltimore, in February of 1994. After the promoters accepted my entry based on a mixtape I mailed in to them, my friend Lauren offered to drive me down, knowing how much it meant to me. That road-trip adventure was one of the best nights during those rough times; on my way to prove myself at a rave in Baltimore, I suddenly felt like myself, and felt a little bit of hope for the future.

During my little set (only 15 minutes for each constestant!) I really got the crowd in the back room pumping — not by pandering to them, but by playing my most wicked West Coast house and progressive, including records by Oricom Technologies and Freaky Chakra.

The judges told me I would have won if it wasn’t for how good this other DJ was, a young woman named DJ Neutrino, who played a great little set of disco house right before me. I often think of Neutrino, not only because of her delightfully nerdy name, but especially because in that era, women DJs were a much less common sight. She was really nice too. I hope wherever she is now she’s doing well and is still on the decks somewhere.

In August of 1994, a year after my first public gig, the sequel to that party took place on the same handball court uptown. By this time, Digital Konfusion had grown in success and influence and pulled a much bigger crowd. This was a great party, with the breakbeats, hard house and hip hop pumping and the court filled with ravers all the long humid night and well into the morning.

But it was dodgy too, with several partygoers robbed at gunpoint by neighborhood thugs when they stepped into the nearby park to pee or smoke a blunt. Though DK were mostly uptown kids, many of the ravers were white suburban kids from New Jersey or Long Island. Throngs of them milling about, many of them off their heads on E or acid, must have been a tempting target.

I didn’t see any of this and only heard about it later. I lived only a few blocks away, on 157th and Riverside (convenient for chilling out when I got fatigued over the course of the long night). I’d never had any problems and I didn’t consider it a particularly dangerous neighborhood, so it was unsettling to hear.

I played at seven in the morning, with the sunrise glimmering on the Hudson and a breeze finally cooling off the city. This time, I was ready, and much more able to integrate all my different styles into a set that flowed. I hadn’t felt so good on the decks before. Sunrise was an especially kind time slot for the trippy, euphoric sounds I was favoring that summer. The court had cleared considerably but the partygoers left were well into it and I took them for a ride. Later, my friend Will, who was just 16 and didn’t know me at the time, told me that set changed his life. Among the tracks I played were “June Project” by Berra; the incredible “Hardphunk” by Hardtrax (Richie and Matthew Hawtin), which became one of my signature tunes; and “Out of Body Experience” by Rabbit in the Moon. I was really into that early trance sound back then, but quickly moved past it as deep house became my focus, and I consider this track pretty cheesy now. That morning though, it seemed so epic, and perfect for the occasion.

Most of my early experiences were more awkward than those highlights. With my leftfield taste in music and my social anxiety I made everything awkward.

But bit by bit, they taught me so much about DJing — and about New York, and about people. Gradually I gained more knowledge and became more sure of myself. It wasn’t until the fall of 1995 that I felt on top of my craft enough to get on the decks and know I could kill it (I’m being specific about the time for a reason: my breakthrough moment was my birthday party in November of that year, at Bar XVI in the East Village).

Like I said, I don’t want to kick a toxically positive narrative and say all this made me who I am, or that I wouldn’t change a thing, or whatever. A lot of it sucked, certain things about it fucked me up for years, and if I could go back in time, I’d probably do every single thing differently, starting with making sure I had some proper professional support and counselling.

But still it was quite a journey, at a time and place that’s now considered a classic era in music history, and the more it recedes into the past the more it feels like a story instead of things that happened to me.

Like what you read and want to support? Consider buying me a coffee! You can also subscribe below, and be sure to share this article! Here’s my SoundCloud, if you want to check out some of my more recent DJ mixes.

More classic tracks I owned and played in the 1992–94 era that aren’t linked above and aren’t available on Spotify either:

• Eon – “Spice”
• Cola Boy – “Seven Ways to Love”
• Bump – “I’m Rushing”
• Route 66 – “Love Is.. (All Around Me)”
• Semi-Real – People Livin’ Today
• Transformer 92 – Pacific Symphony
• Eden Transmission – “I’m So High”
• High Lonesome Sound System – “Waiting for the Lights” (Mandalay Mix)
• DIY – “Washed Over by Mastemah”
• Hysterix – “Talk to Me” (Sasha’s Full Master Mix)
• One Dove – “White Love”  (Psychic Masturbation)
• Rising High Collective – “Fever Called Love” (The Hardfloor Mix)
• Pergon – The Deliverer
• Tranquility Bass – “Cantamilla”
• The Dust Brothers – “Chemical Beats” (I’m including this original version, which I bought when it was new in 1994 and of course before they were the Chemical Brothers, because they couldn’t clear the sample for their 1995 debut LP)