Interviews by Todd Burns
Photography by Pete Deevakul
T-Shirts by Gabriel Milord (BAM),the airbrush artist of Underground Quality

House music. Perhaps you’ve heard of it? Apparently it’s back (although it’s hard to say it ever really left). But if you believe us media types, Connecticut’s Underground Quality is one of the many labels to blame. Headed up by DJ Jus-Ed, the imprint has doggedly pursued a sound that they call “innovative deep house music.” What that means in practice is something right around 120 BPM, something with a little bit of soul and something raw.

Over the course of the past four years, the label has grown to become a worldwide network. As it was in the beginning, it’s still largely a home for the productions of Ed himself, but producers from Moscow, Oakland and Montreal have all contributed their visions of house music. Most notable of all, though, is the coterie of producers situated in and around New York City. Levon Vincent, DJ Qu and Fred P have all released some of their best work on the Underground Quality imprint. Along with Anthony Parasole, who helps throw The Club House party along with Jus-Ed in New York City each month, they represent a new collection of house producers that draw inspiration from the city and its vaunted dance music history.

These are guys that played clubs that spawned Michael Alig, the Party Monster himself; clubs where Lisa Lisa danced in anonymity; clubs where dancing to house music became house dancing. The five weren’t stars back then. Far from it, in fact. Jus-Ed could hardly get a gig in the city, coaxed out of retirement by a friend. After Giuliani came into power, few of them played at all due to the outdated cabaret laws that were suddenly enforced by a New York police force that had nothing better to do with their time.

Like the similarly successful Wolf + Lamb label, Underground Quality holds a healthy reverence for the past. Wolf + Lamb artists use it as musical fodder for their Black sub-label; Underground Quality embraces the ideals embodied by house music past and brings them into the present day. When asked about the type of party that they want The Club House to be, the answer from Ed and Parasole inevitably find some way to reference how things used to be.

But while we spent time talking largely about the past with each of these five DJ/producers, it’s worth mentioning that the music fits remarkably well in clubs today. Levon Vincent’s otherworldly tunes effortlessly meld dub techno’s sound design with tough techno, Fred P’s deep house journeys are sublime examples of the genre. The stuff coming from DJ Qu – perhaps the most underrated producer of the bunch – sounds like nothing else around. It’s woozy, trippy house music that’s informed as much by the swelling chords of Chez Damier and Ron Trent’s Prescription as it is by the avant-garde ’80s experiments of Chris & Cosey.

Parasole is just getting started, and Ed is no slouch as a beat maker either. But as Ed tells it, the UQ fam is all about the DJing. The following hopefully goes some way towards describing why.

JUS-ED
Jus-Ed is just back from tour. He’s been to places that, a few years ago, he probably hadn’t dreamed of going. But there he was, playing house music – Underground Quality music – to people and they were eating it up. That’s commonplace in cities like Berlin, where Ed puts on label nights. In September 2009, for instance, he brought Levon Vincent, DJ Qu, Fred P and the UQ Russian posse (Nina Kraviz and Anton Zap) to Tape in the German capital for an epic night that cemented my love of the imprint. After the five played back-to-back for a number of hours, each artist did a one-hour set, showcasing upcoming material and favorites from their voluminous record collections. I wasn’t around in New York City to see the halcyon days of house music, but it felt a little bit like that.

Obviously everybody talks about Europe and New York City, but you were recently in Japan and Australia. Was there a strong base of Underground Quality fans there?
Yeah. What I’m learning on my world travels is that househeads are the same everywhere. No matter what country, what ethnicity. They’re free-spirited, they enjoy themselves. In Japan, I saw the devotion. Once they embrace you, that’s it. It’s amazing. You wouldn’t believe how much they love Theo Parrish over there. He’s a god. They know Jus-Ed, they know Underground Quality. I was able to play b-side tracks from my catalog, and they knew them all.

I was interested to talk to all of you about your clubbing histories. You started probably earlier than everyone else associated with the label in Connecticut. I remember you saying in an interview that those parties were all over the place musically, not necessarily just the deep house that UQ puts out.
Exactly. It’s a very satisfying thing to have your art understood. I knew a lot of people wouldn’t understand what my music is saying, or what it’s about. A lot of times it’s too emotional, so it’s disturbing to people that aren’t open-minded or music lovers. It’s always industry, musicians and dancers that get what I’m trying to do first. We’re on that same level. Other people have gravitated to it in the press, and I think that’s a big factor for the numbers increasing. But I still have this apprehension when clubs or promoters want to book me, because they’re still not sure if it’s going to be a good turnout or what they should expect from my DJ set. But, as you know personally, when I get behind the turntables, it’s a wrap (laughs). All of the people that I’m connecting with on the label are excellent and superb DJs. And that was part of the mission that I’ve been on since I started making my own music. To get the emphasis back on the DJ, not on the producer.

That’s an interesting perspective these days, because you have a label that needs to have producers to have material to release. There are very few people that make their living on simply producing. It’s very much about producing to get gigs at the moment in the dance music world. Obviously you like producing on some level. But do you also regard it as a necessary evil?
I once had dinner with Kevin Hedge in Miami, and I was asking him why I was having so much trouble getting recognized as a DJ. I was really kind of salty about it at the time. He said, ‘Ed, look. I’m not a DJ. I’m a producer. I get DJ gigs because I have records out.’ I didn’t want to hear that at the time. Because that meant the DJ no longer had a place in a nightclub. He was clear about it, though. He told me that if I wanted to travel, I needed to put a record out. I had a CD out at the time, but I wasn’t serious about it yet. My first love, though, it’s DJing. That’s my shit. I love to play for the people.

When you got back to it – you came out of retirement in 2001 – was it like a rush for you?
Sort of. Vic Money talked me out of retirement. I was content at the time to make cassettes for myself in the car. My first residency was at Ludlow Bar, (laughing) and my second time playing there, I was DJing and there was about 10 people there. It was either a Monday or Sunday. I can’t remember. There was this beautiful Latina woman. She was thick, and she was dancing. It gave me a lot of energy, so I kept playing to see her dance, you know. She got closer to the booth, and I was like ‘Man, she looks familiar!’ In between the sets, she came up and said, ‘Thank you.’ I looked closer and asked, ‘Lisa Lisa?’ She kinda nodded her head. I couldn’t believe it (laughs). After that, I knew I had to stick around again for a while as a DJ again.

Did you go out very much in New York in the ’90s?
From ’92 to ’96, I did a lot of going out and dancing. We’d come up to the city a lot. One of my favorite spots was Erika’s. Around that time, you used to have to have a suit jacket. There was a dress code. It was R&B from 10 p.m. to 12 a.m., and then at midnight it would change over to house music.

Would a new crowd come in at midnight or was it the same people?
Oh no. That place would fill up, you’d have to get there to get a spot. That track “Hot Music” [by Soho] was the bridge. They’d always play that to signal the change.

That Pal Joey tune. Under the name Soho.
Yeah, that’s the one. That was the call to the floor. And you’d just dance until about 5 a.m. I remember dancing with some girl for three hours straight, and she finally tapped me on my shoulder and said, ‘Are you going to ask me what my name is?’ (laughs) In the later ’90s, I remember listening to the radio. They said they were broadcasting live from The Shelter. I drove around for two hours trying to hone in on where this party was. Finally, I found it. At that point, I was home. I’d do The Shelter every other Saturday. I’d go to Body & Soul on every other Sunday. I was out every weekend dancing. Our Underground Quality party at Tape last year was a reinvention of a memory of what those parties meant to me.

DJ QU
Listen to a DJ Qu track, especially from his own Strength Music label, and it’s hard to figure out exactly where the guy is coming from. Yeah, it sounds like house. Classic stuff, even. But then there’s a piano chord that comes in and you say to yourself, ‘Well…that’s wrong’. And you listen to it for a while, sheltered under that ever-present 4/4 pulse and it becomes right. It’s a bit uncanny.

The same goes for his DJ sets. In the middle of a label showcase at Panorama Bar – Berlin’s house mecca at the moment – the guy pulls out a track by former Throbbing Gristle members Chris & Cosey. I can’t say that everyone was into the track. But those that were into it went a little bit bug-eyed and found themselves up at the decks afterwards, asking to find out what it was. Or maybe that was just me.

You were born in Jersey. You were raised in Jersey, but you spent quite a bit of time in clubs in New York City. When did you first start venturing up to Manhattan?
Oh man, I’ve been clubbing since I was 13 or 14 years old.

You were getting into clubs okay back then?
Yeah, it wasn’t like it is today as far as the laws were concerned. The clubs that I was going to, there was a little bit of leeway. Nowadays, it’s very strict, and you have to have ID or you won’t be able to get in. It wasn’t really that bad back then. I was pretty fortunate.

What were some of those clubs that were letting you in?
The biggest one for me was the Wild Pitch party. It was a traveling party, so it was never in the same spot. It’d be in the same place for a few months or a year, but then it would move to a different place. I was listening to house music before that, but that party really opened me up.

Was it about the DJ, or was it simply about the party?
Both. The DJ knew the dancers at that time. It’s not like today at a club when most of the people going might not know the person playing. It was a unity thing, a neighborhood thing.

Who was the DJ playing at Wild Pitch?
Back then you had Camacho, Disciple, the list goes on. The Wild Pitch parties would bring in a DJ every so often, so you’d get to hear a lot. Some mainstream DJs, some local talent too. It was cool.

Were they DJing in a different way than you see today? Or was it very much the same thing?
Nah. In the early ’90s for me the whole breakdown of genres wasn’t quite clear. Now that I look back to it, you heard techno records with house records with vocal records. It was all mixed in the cut. Hip-hop, reggae. It’s definitely different. You can find some parties like that, but back then that was the norm.

Do you feel like you’re carrying on that idea? Or are you focusing on the deep house style that you produce with your DJ sets? I assume expectations play a role in all of this.
The expectations are probably different, sure. Nowadays people go to a party looking for a specific thing. As a DJ, I like to think that I keep that tradition alive. I’ll never be able to do it the way that they did it, because that was their personal style. I like to think that I’m expressing that, but with my terminology.

You came up through this tradition of house dancing, a style of dancing that I guess is akin to breakdancing with hip-hop. And you’re part of this House Dance Conference thing that’s keeping it alive. Did that start with the Wild Pitch parties? Was there a crew there?
The people that started The House Dance Conference were people that I met back then, definitely. But generations came in, generations went out. A lot of people that I came up with I don’t see anymore. But it’s nice to see that the tradition is living on.

Do you see changes in how the new generation of house dancers approach things?
It has changed, but it’s not a change that happened in the last couple of years. It’s a change that happened in the past 10 or 15. Back then – even before I was going to house clubs in New York – so many people were into it. I didn’t even realize it was coming from New York; it was so popular in my local neighborhood. It’s like it is today in the States. It’s more of a small community now, whereas people were more open to it a while back. Something happened in the States with the whole electronic music thing. I really don’t know what.

You don’t know what it was, but do you remember when you realized it had changed?
Yeah. I mean… it just changed. Even the music itself changed. As time goes on, it develops into something else; it’s kinda tough to pinpoint things. It’s just part of life. Everything changes. But at the same time, nothing is new. It’s all the same thing again. I don’t know. It’s just something that developed naturally. It’ll never be the way that it was when I started, but I’m sure the [Paradise] Garage-heads would say the exact same thing about my clubbing experience.

You say that it’s all the same thing again. I wonder if you’re hearing some of those old tunes coming back again in clubs at all?
Yeah, I mean you have a lot of people going back and playing records that were mainstream records back in the day. Records that the generation now doesn’t know. Records that were huge for us back then.

Who are some of the DJs that are playing those records nowadays?
Everybody. Even if it isn’t an old record, it’s a new one with old-style influences. There are people from the U.S., Europe, Asia. There’s just something in the sound today that’s replicating the old, but giving it a new form.

Do you think your own music does that as well?
Definitely. I mean, I pretty much make music. Anything can come out when I’m in the studio. I don’t say that I’m going to make this kind of record or that kind of record. But I see what people are saying, and they seem to think that I have that style in my records. That old essence.

FRED P
I had to turn my recording device up to hear Fred P. talking. It wasn’t malfunctioning. The man is just that soft-spoken. You lean into to hear what Fred is saying. But you do so because, often, it’s pretty important. Fred’s music as Fred P. or Black Jazz Consortium works in the same way, finding uncommon depth in as few elements as possible. The tracks from his breakthrough collection, Structure, are almost comically simple until you find yourself new things on your 14th listen. Lean in; it’s worth the effort.

Of all the UQ-affiliated guys I’m talking to, your club history seems to be a bit less pronounced. You were more into hip-hop in the mid-’90s.
That’s right. I was going to clubs a bit in the late ’80s, early ’90s, but then I stopped. From about 1992 to 1995 I was really heavily into hip-hop production. That’s really where I cut my teeth production-wise.

Was it a case of the stuff that was getting signed more easily became the stuff that you focused on production-wise?
Yeah, at the time, I stopped going out. I stopped dancing. And I got deep into underground hip-hop. Back then, it was really good. It was the start of the golden age; you had guys using jazz breaks, doing really abstract stuff. It was really interesting. It wasn’t like I was producing to get signed, but I had a partner, and one thing lead to another and we really started focusing deeply on that.

It seemed like someone who was bridging the gap in New York between house and hip-hop quite a bit was Pal Joey. Is he someone that you were familiar with?
I had a couple of his releases. But, you know, it’s not like it is now. Back then, all music was in the same soup. You had your Chicago acid, your deep stuff, your techno. Everything was played in the same place. And records reflected that. If you bought a Strictly Rhythm record, you’d have house cuts on one side and raw beats on the other side that were slowed down and more hip-hop styled stuff. You can’t forget hip-house either.

Do you miss that idea of putting out a record that can be that diverse? It seems like with the slowing of record sales that distributors almost demand a certain sound all throughout a record because they won’t be able to shift it otherwise.
Forget about it. It’s unheard of now. You might get a slower, trippy track, but you’d never hear a guy rhyming on something. Back then, it was common because it was all still very underground. Hip-hop, house, all of it.

When you were first going out to clubs – before you started making more hip-hop inspired cuts – you were hearing everything in a night.
Absolutely. And that was the draw of it. You had this melting point, you had dancers, you had partygoers and you had DJs. And everybody got something out of it. At the beginning, you had your connoisseurs that came to hear what the DJ really liked, then you had the partygoers doing their own thing, the dancers had their circles. At the height of it, then, the DJ would change the pace – play a few hip-hop tunes, a few breaks records – to change the mood. Then he’d go right back into the mix. That’s what I was used to. The DJs understood the rollercoaster. Nowadays, everything is so fragmented.

I was recently listening to a YouTube clip from your new album, and it’s quite hip-hop.
Yeah, it is. For the past few years, I’ve been focusing more or less on danceable stuff that’s more up-tempo. Not so much the head-nodding kind of thing. I’m putting a lot into the album, and I want it to reflect more of my personality. It’s a lot of hard work putting an album together, if you want it to tell a complete story. I’m attempting to show a little bit more versatility with this project. That’s why I put the clip up on YouTube. I don’t want any tomatoes thrown at me.

Will it be a Fred P. album or a Black Jazz Consortium album?
It’ll be a Black Jazz thing. It’s going to be the last thing I do under that name for a while. I’m just going to focus on being Fred P. for a while. As of late, I did a few outside projects as Black Jazz, and I don’t want to saturate the market with that name. It’s all going to culminate with the Deep Things album.

Obviously you’ve focused quite a bit on deep house recently with your productions. What’s the appeal? Why are you getting so much out of that genre as opposed to hip-hop or something else?
I’m really attracted to things that are at that tempo, 120 BPM, because I feel like it’s a wide open space, and there’s a lot of freedom for interpretation. You can put as much stuff or as little stuff as you’d like. As long as you do it correctly, it’ll be understood. The pace is the thing for me.

As long as you do it correctly. Do you know when a track is done immediately? That you’ve done it correctly?
I know right away. Because when you start, you always start with a structure, the bones and then you flesh it out. As you’re fleshing it out, you can tell immediately what direction it’s going in, what it needs. Or, you get to that midpoint and you’re not nodding and you know that it’s not there.

Are you throwing a lot of stuff away?
Nah, not really. I’ll get to a certain point, I’ll hit a wall and I’ll just step away. I have a lot of stuff like that (laughs). But I keep it all because I know that it reflects a certain mood or point of view that I had that felt important at the time. So, depending on how you feel when you come back to it, you might be able to finish it. When it’s there, and I’m ready for it, I can go straight through and complete it. If it doesn’t work, I just leave it alone until the next time.

LEVON VEINCENT
Levon Vincent hurt his back a few years ago. It was the best and worst thing that ever happened to him. He spent all of the money he had on hospital bills, but it meant that he had to move out of New York, which led to Indiana. There he hunkered down, produced music full-time for nearly a year and came up with some of the most moving house and techno of the past two years. After striking up an E-mail friendship with Vincent, I used to send him messages every time I heard a track of his played out in a club. Soon though, it became so often that I simply stopped. One of the last times that I went to [Berlin’s] Berghain, the DJ there played three of Levon’s productions in one three-hour set. It should tell you something about how good – and how diverse – those productions are. What it won’t tell you about, though, is how we got to talking about alcohol-based enemas. For that, you’ll just have to read on.

Of all the guys centered around Underground Quality, you seem to have one of the most obvious club histories. I remember you telling me once you were going to play at Peter Gatien’s Limelight the night he got arrested.
I did play there that night, actually.

Was that the first time you had played there?
That was my first time as a headliner, but I had played there plenty as an opener.

The light guy there was famous for sort of enforcing his taste on the DJs.
Arthur Weinstein. I mean, he was much more than just a lighting guy. He owned The World. He passed away recently, and a lot of people from New York club history put up a Facebook page and Myspace thing to talk about what he’s contributed to the scene.

What would he do as the lighting guy?
He’d kill the lights. You’d look over to him, and he’d be saying, ‘I don’t like this, I don’t like this.’

Did he have good taste, or did you think he was unfair about it sometimes? He only killed the lights with good reason.
Yeah, he definitely did. He was an elder, not at all a dickhead. He was a really cool guy, really lovable. One thing I do remember about the Limelight specifically was this party where they would drop cash from the ceiling. They’d drop thousands and thousands of dollars. You wouldn’t know when it was coming, but once it happened people went crazy. It was a snowstorm of cash. It was all twenties too, not just one dollar bills. I saw drag queens
take turns giving each other alcohol-based enemas witha turkey baster. That’s the old New York right there.

Were you playing those parties?
No, I didn’t play either of those. But I did play around a lot. I had a successful run when I was about 18 or so. But then Giuliani really fucked us. Once he came into power, the first thing he did was kill nightlife. The cabaret laws were used to stop parties from happening – laws that were from the early 20th century which were originally used to close jazz clubs. The economy was strong enough, and the crime rate was low enough that the cops didn’t have as much to do so they took time to mess with people dancing. Nowadays, things are getting better. The economy tanked, and the cops are busy trying to make sure people don’t get robbed. The whole electroclash scene came out of this whole thing. The reason New York spearheaded [electroclash] was because all of the sudden we weren’t allowed to dance. That shift towards performance art and stuff other than dancing. People had to improvise. When Giuliani came around, though, I never got a gig again. It was literally overnight.

How long had you been playing out in New York before that?
Not long. Two years maybe. I had a little experience when I was 15 or 16 years old. My first job was at this restaurant/bar called Sugar Reef. All kinds of people worked there, like Lady Miss Kier and Dmitri [of Dee-lite]. They did a party around the corner called Sugar Babies at CBGB’s.

There were house parties at CBGB’s?
Yeah. On Monday nights. That was my first experience on turntables in a nightclub environment. They liked me, I think. I started as a dishwasher, and then they made me a busboy.

Who were you looking up to as a DJ when you first started?
Prozac, Zachary Vietze. Frankie Knuckles when he was doing his first stints at the Sound Factory. Chicago has a style, Detroit has a style. But New York has a style too, which seems to be forgotten. Lately when I play those records, people bug out. It’s this street style with an elegant tone. It’s classy and street-wise. Eric Kupper, Todd Terry, Masters At Work. I got a lot of my house music education from the gay community. I was living over on the Lower East Side.

Why do you think this New York sound has been forgotten?
I don’t know. I think it’s back for sure. I have always lamented the loss of that era, because it fell right off. You couldn’t even say you liked it. The music got so corny, with tribal house and stuff like that. It was always really mature – the themes – when it was good. And once it got shallow, you didn’t want to be associated with it. And then of course you weren’t even allowed to dance. You know, I bet that’s what happened. People couldn’t even preserve that style because you weren’t legally allowed to.

I recently read someone describing your DJing style as very American. What do you make of that?
I do a lot of cuts and edits, and Europe is more into a seamless thing. But I don’t think I have an ‘American’ style of DJing, really. I think that is what a couple of Europeans might have said because my playing style was different than what they are used to. I’ve put a lot of work and practice into developing my own playing style. I can’t say I have learned any of my little signature tricks or playing style from being mentored or from watching other DJs. It’s just practice, practice, practice, and a lot of time alone, and memories of watching guys play in the heyday around ’91 or ’92.

ANTHONY PARASOLE
People don’t talk about Anthony Parasole much when they talk about UQ. That’s fair; the guy hasn’t released a record on the label. But as a party thrower and top-notch DJ, Parasole is just as important as anyone to the label’s success. Anthony was part of the crew behind the House-N-Home event, which helped mix European and American house styles for a New York audience ready for something other than techno. Nowadays he runs The Club House along with Jus-Ed.

Lately, he’s also been getting interested in production, releasing his first track in collaboration with Fred P., a remix of DJ Qu’s “Party People Clap”. The 12-inch is dwarfed by Levon Vincent’s masterful remake, but the Parasole/P. collaboration is remarkable as well, an epic number that earns every second of its nearly 13-minute length.

What was the first club you went to in New York? Do you remember?
I do. It was the Palladium.

When was that? Why was it so memorable?
Nineteen ninety-four or 1995. I’m not sure, to be honest. If you’re young, a club like that is overwhelming. Just the bass. You could hear it blocks away it seemed like. It was pretty surreal.

How many people were able to get in there?
Thousands. It was bigger than Berghain.

Who was playing there?
They had mainly house nights. They had New York residents on Fridays. Junior Vasquez on Saturdays. Some hip-hop on Sundays.

Was Junior one of the first DJs that caught your ear?
Yeah, definitely. Junior’s early Sound Factory days were pretty unbelievable. I’d hear mixtapes that were mind-blowing. But I eventually got into [Danny] Tenaglia, because he was a little bit darker.

Where was Tenaglia playing that you were going?
He was playing at Roxy and Twilo, and then he became a resident at Tunnel. That’s when I would go to hear him all the time. He would play the whole night, eight hours or so. Yeah, eight to 10 hours or so. It wasn’t just Danny that was doing that, though. That was pretty much the norm in New York City. If you went to a real party in New York, every DJ began the party and ended the party. No opener, no closer. There weren’t 40 DJs on the bill. If Masters at Work were on the bill, that’s who you were going to hear all night long.

Would you end up going all night to some of these things?
Not early on. When Tenaglia moved to Vinyl, though, I would go the entire night. I really enjoyed listening to the opening and the closing, almost more so than the middle of the night. Both would be really special. His closing would be a four or five hour breakdown.

It’s amazing to think of a closing as four or five hours, when you’re lucky to see a DJ in most cities these days for two or three hours.
Yeah. What was so beautiful about it was that he would go from peak records to slowly stripping them away and then ending up at ’80s dance records on a breakdance tip. Jazz records, David Bowie. He would be playing stuff that you’d never hear on a rig that big normally.

What was he playing to open things?
Really spaced out, really deep. It would be a slow build-up.

I was lucky enough to interview him once in his loft apartment in Queens, and he played me Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon on those speakers that he has, the ones that he got once Vinyl closed down.
That’s exactly the type of stuff that he’d play. I’ve heard him play everything from Debbie Gibson to The Beatles. When techno was really starting to hit in New York in 2001 and 2002, he did a closing set where he didn’t play anything after 1988. I remember him saying, ‘Now this is techno!’ As though he was making an example or something (laughs).

Who else were you seeing around that time that was a big influence on you?
The Shelter, of course, was a big influence in the deep house vein. People danced really hard at those parties.

Were you going to see certain DJs specifically or were you going to the club because you knew you could trust that they’d put on something good?
Both. With The Shelter, it was Timmy Regisford, but you’d catch Kerri Chandler or Dennis Ferrer. Those names are now iconic, whereas then they were simply up-and-coming guys.

What were they doing DJ-wise that you picked up on?
The story, the long set, crafting a picture. That’s what I’ve learned the most. New York City DJs definitely mix in a way that is like nobody else in the world. I think there’s a particular style that comes from a New York DJ.

I was talking to Levon Vincent about this a little bit as well. There was something online that said that he was a very ‘American DJ.’ What do you mean when you say that there is a particular New York style?
I don’t want to hurt people’s feelings or whatever, but most DJs overseas are mixing by numbers. This isn’t a bad thing at all. But in the States, it’s more by feeling. It’s more like creating new records by mixing over here. Sometimes it might be an utter disaster, (laughing) but sometimes you’re creating something really special.

Does it feel strange when you’re playing overseas, then? That there is a different expectation from you as a DJ?
My experience when I played overseas… we played a really long set at Berghain. In New York, you can be heady and fucked up on a really big rig – they trust the DJ. Overseas, though, I felt like all they wanted was to be continually hit with the 4/4. That was my first experience in the difference between both places.

You’ve recently started producing, right? What do you have coming up?
I’m working with Fred P. on something called The Analog Diaries. It’s the two of us jamming live – no arranging on the computer – so it’s a completely different vibe to anything else we’ve ever done. We have done about seven tracks. And I have some stuff that I have coming up under my own name on Novel Sound.

What stuff do you have in the studio?
I have a Dave Smith Evolver, a Juno, a 909, ER-1. I’m really excited about working on more stuff.