Adventures in DJing: Drop the Pressure at UndergroundSF

Last night I learned a very important lesson about DJing with burned CDs: don't burn your precious tracks to cheap CDs, because some CD players won't read them.

I was leading off for the premiere of Drop the Pressure at UndergroundSF last night, and I had it all figured out ahead of time; a little Heiko Voss to start off, then into some fun, loopy techno from the likes of DiFi and Thomas Brinkmann. The Voss track, "I Think About You," was on vinyl, so as the needle moved across the record I slotted my next track in to the CD player - and nothing came up on the display. I hit eject, blew on the recorded surface, and slotted it back in. This time it came up, but showed the track as being 1.59m long. I hit play, and there was nothing in the headphones. Uttering a long chain of expletives I tried another CD, same problem. Now the needle was fast approaching the dead zone just before it would start scraping against the label. I reached into my record bag, pulled out another vinyl, not even caring what it was at this point, got it cued and started it up just as the other track was ending but not, unfortunately, before everything went to dead air.

Now that's a way to start the first set of the first night of your weekly. I put the same CDs into the other CD player, and all was well. Suspecting that the first CD player, an older, probably first generation CDJ-800, didn't like MP3 CDs, I ran a test with another MP3 CD supplied by DJ Candy. All was fine. Conclusion: the CD player was being finicky about the cheap, generic brand CDs I was trying to feed it.

I made it through an hour since I had, fortunately, brought records with me, but I had planned on using those just here and there instead of as the backbone of my set. I went for the stuff that was pretty mellow and with long, easy intros, like Luciano and Melchior's "Father" and a Pig and Dan remix of Underworld's "Play Pig" (I love that spoken word opening), and in between I was able to use the one CDJ that would accept my CDs to play some of the stuff I had originally intended, but overall it was a pretty disconnected mess, made more so by my own anxiety-induced slop mixes.

Fortunately the rest of the night went really, really well, and everyone else turned in great sets - we even had a dancefloor going at the end of the night, something I wouldn't have believed possible on a Thursday night in the Lower Haight. And now, before next week, I guess I'll have to spend some time re-burning all those CDs.

Here's the Drop the Pressure myspace if you'd like to come by and be our friend, or have a drink with us one Thursday night.

Last FSLD at Deco/Pup and Lord Kook on the Playa

Hi everybody,

breaking radio silence briefly to remind you all that Lord Kook and I will be hosting the last Fuck Shit, Let's Dance (FSLD) at Deco Lounge next Friday, August 22nd, from 9PM - 3AM, and this time it's FREE! It's been a lot of fun, and real learning experience, so we hope you all will come out and party with us at this location one last time. After Burning Man we have some plans in the works to start up another night in a location that's a bit more central and well-known, all of which will be revealed in good time.

Then on Saturday it's off to the Playa! We'll be at 7.30 and Alicante, with the Pixel Zombies camp if anyone wants to stop by and say hi. We're a camp of four people, but you'll be able to find us by the giant television we're setting up. Starting on Tuesday we plan on having a great line-up of programming for anyone who wants to contemplate media and the American Dream. Lord Kook and I will also be doing some DJing. On Monday night Lord Kook will be spinning synthpop at Camp Lustre, and then on Wednesday we'll be running all over the place: from 6-8PM we'll be tag-teaming at Space Elevator, then from midnight to 1AM Lord Kook will be at Lustre again, followed by another tag team matchup from 1-3AM at Camp Zoom, which will be hosting the Homo Depot party. Hope to see you on the dusty dancefloor!

Upcoming Event: Fuck Shit, Let's Dance! (FSLD) at Deco Lounge, Friday, July 25

After our month off for our Pride parties, FSLD returns to Deco Lounge this Friday with yours truly and Lord Kook spinning a night of techno for adventurous faggots who want to get down!

Fuck Shit, Let's Dance!
with Residents Lord Kook and DJ Pup
FREE before 10, $5 after
Deco Lounge, 510 Larkin x Turk

Pink Saturday Set List

As I mentioned in my post about Pride, DJing at Pink Saturday was one of the very best experiences I've had in a long time. It was my first time on the decks in public in almost six months, and the first time I've played a set that was exclusively on CDs. Since a couple people have asked, here's what I played:

Time to Jak - A Guy Called Gerald
Magneto - Reference
Modus Operandy - Original Mix (Digital Only) - Roland M. Dill
D-Day - Original Mix - Marc Antona
Back - Original Mix - Ben Klock
Nebula - L.exx Aurel
Unbreakable - Exercise One Fragile Mix - Sweet N Candy
Hold My Hand - Dubfire Dub - UNKLE
Krook - Hugg & Pepp
Ask Your Druggist (Lutzenkirchen Remix) - Andreas Henneberg
Half Truth - Original Mix - Arne Michel
Beautiful Life - Gui Boratto

I hope to have a recorded version of this available in the next week or so.

I'm really looking forward to the upcoming Fuck Shit, Let's Dance (FSLD) on Friday, July 25th at Deco. it's going to be just me and the Lord Kook this time, and we're really, really gonna do the techno night we've always wanted to do. Sooooo, if you see stuff in here that you like, come check us out.

Adventures in DJing: The 20 goto 10 Gallery

This past Thursday Lord Kook and I were invited to play a gallery opening for a friend of ours, Doghood, who, with his partner worthless, create amazing op-art; worthless creates the patterns and colors on the canvas, while Doghood programs the LEDs that animate the images. It truly has to be seen to believed, so you should go to the gallery and check out their stuff.

We had no idea what kind of set-up the gallery had beyond the fact that there were two turntables and some kind of two-track mixer, all hooked into a home stereo amplifier. We took along our CJD-800s and a Pioneer DJM-300 mixer, which turned out to be a fortunate idea since the entire set-up at the gallery looked like it had been put together by a hip-hop DJ, with a two channel scratch mixer and turntables set up “battle style;” this means they were set-up sideways, with the tone-arms at the top of the case, rather than on the right side. This drove me crazy all night, since I had to reach across the tone-arms to move the pitch slider, and on several occasions bumped the tone-arm out of the groove in the process.

We each played a two-hour set, and despite the fact that I didn’t have a monitor and had to rely on what I could hear of the master channel through the headphones, everything mixed together quite nicely – nothing like a little crowd noise to cover those moments of high-end dissonance. I went for pretty deep techno on vinyl, including tracks like Martin Buttrich’s “Hunted,” Luciano and Melchior’s “Father,” and then into slightly harder territory with tracks like Larsson’s “Automat” and some Dominik Eulberg, winding up with Gui Boratto’s “Experiment in the Lab.” It all went over very well, and made me think more about how much I prefer going for a deep, psychedelic listening experiences rather than dancefloor bangers.

Lord Kook took over from me and played his set on the CDJs, and regretted that, although he had brought all his minimal CDs with him, he hadn’t listed out the tracks on them, so he had no idea what was on them. He wound up playing stuff that was perhaps more dance-oriented, though his set was also very well received.

All in all it was a great DJ experience, despite the somewhat sketchy audio set-up, and taught us both a little bit about our own ability to adapt to a situation. We were really happy to contribute what ambience we could to the event, and I hope we may have turned some people on to music that they otherwise wouldn’t have a chance to hear.

Mix Download: 022608 from DJ Pup

So here's my first new mix in a very long while; and, even more special, this is my first entirely on CDs using my new Pioneer CDJ-800s. Almost all this music was acquired in the past two weeks, and though I really need to listen to it and live with it more, I am pretty pleased with how it all came together. The only thing I would change is mixing in Lawler's "Courses for Horses" against Deadmau5's "Secondary Complications;" this was the first time I tried it, and now listening back to it I think it's too busy, but that's why we do these things, right? Koehncke's "Weiche Zaune" is also a somewhat different genre than the rest of these tracks, but it's such a beautiful expression of disco utopia I really wanted to use it to make a statement. Similarly, the remix of "Lazy Eye" by Silversun Pickups is a bit different, but I think it leaves the listener with a lasting impression and some lyrics that echo through your head long after the track has ended.

As usual, feedback and comments are welcome.

Mix 022608 from DJ Pup

Track List

Weiche Zaune (The Modernist Remix) - Justus Koehncke
Supernova - Gabriel Ananda and Dominik Eulberg
Time to Jak - A Guy Called Gerald
Secondary Complications - Deadmau5
Courses for Horses - Steve Lawler
Mantrakoma (non-vocal version) - Dusty Kid
Hunted - Martin Buttrich
Tomographie (Spektre Remix) - Andre Crom
Hold My Hand (Dubfire Remix) - UNKLE
Lazy Eye (Jason Bentley Remix) - Silversun Pickups

Upcoming Event: Fuck Shit, Let's Dance! Friday, January 25 2008

Last night the boyfriend and I plastered the Castro with flyers for the debut of our club night at Deco Lounge, Fuck Shit, Let's Dance! Though we've gone back and forth over the flyer design, I'm particularly pleased with the way our logo stands out among the other flyers posted around; we still seem to be the only promoters in the gay scene who don't feel it's necessary to put an image of a guy on our promo materials, but we do have horses rampant, as they say in heraldic circles, so I'm sure that counts for something.

As for the details:

Fuck Shit, Let's Dance!
Friday, January 25
Deco Lounge, Turk @Larkin
9PM - 3AM (and maybe a tad later if it's really bumpin')
FREE before 10, $5 afterwards

DJs: Pup (yours truly) at the opening, Lord Kook (the boyfriend) as resident, and DJ6 (Lucky Pierre, Bender), laying down electro techno minimal disco-punk grooves for your boogie pleasure. We may not have a show, wet jockstrap contest, or go-go boys, but we will do our best to make sure that you dance your ass off.

BTW, if you're on myspace, hit the link in the first paragraph to see our profile and become our friend.

Fuck Shit, Let's Dance!

Mix Download: DJ Pup on Modyfier

Waaaay back in June Rayna, the author and artist behind the modifyer blog, asked me to make a contribution to her Process series. Given that the other contributors included folks like apendics.shuffle, Philip Sherburne, and popnoname, it was a slightly intimidating invitation. And, as it turned out, an excruciating process that lasted more than three months. You can read all about it on modyfier, and download the mix, but the result was about an hour of minimal techno direct from my turntables to the CD recorder (no Ableton for me, kids!). Check it out, I'd love to hear what you all think.

Track List:

Dominik Eulberg and Gabriel Ananda - Schieder Kreisl
Styro 2000 - cremeschnitte
Jason Emsley - P.H.I.A.P.O.S.
Yapacc - take this away
Lurifax - Lobo rmx
Fletcher Mundson Syndrome - Lauter Leute
Carston Jost - divide et impera
Serafin - Starship Discotheque
Sascha Funke - I love this tent
Kontakt - Music Gewinnt Freunde

Event Review: Lord Kook, Pup, and Aaron Neonbunny Spin at Naughty

Naughty at the "undisclosed SoMa location" on Friday night was a great little bit of fun, though in our room, the crowd quickly thinned after they'd had enough of using the St. Andrew's cross, and I learned a little bit about what kind of music does and doesn't work in a tag-team situation.

Our DJ appearance at Naughty set a number of firsts - first time that their new DJ rig was used, first time to have live DJs in what was basically the dungeon room, and the first time that I have played in a tag-team situation. As with all firsts, there were some unforeseen complications and outcomes. With the DJ rig, it seemed that no one had considered that turntables need to be grounded, and when they're about two feet away from the mixer on either side, creative solutions need to be found - in our case, scraping some paint off an electrical conduit and affixing the grounding wire with some tape. I guess that turntable DJs are a rarity in this particular venue, since I couldn't reach the turntables themselves while standing at the mixer, a situation that makes it a little difficult to adjust the platter speed while you're mixing in or out. The mixer was a Behringer of a type that I've never used before, and I found the feel of it to be a little clunky.

We were set up in what amounted to a side room, with a double St. Andrew's cross on a stage across from us. The boyfriend and I broke one of them in while Neonbunny took a turn on the tunes, and they got pretty steady usage up until about midnight. We had been told by the promoter that having DJs in this room was something of an experiment, and though we tried several different approaches throughout the evening, it was hard to move the crowd from hanging out and watching the on-stage action to actual dancing. By midnight we had clearly lost the vibe, with some folks stopping by to look in but then heading out into the main dance area, where Shatter was spinning the kind of things he might play at Bondage-A-Go-Go or Substance at The End Up. As with parties of this sort, there are many people who arrive early in the evening to play, and then head out around midnight or so to go home and have actual sex (though there was some real sex action going on in our room as well). I had hoped to bring in a stronger, harder vibe that I thought would appeal to the industrial-oriented crowd, but it was also pretty clear that, in our room at least, it was much more about playing, with less interest in dancing. As long as we could put down a steady beat that you could flog to, the audience was satisfied.

I've not tag-teamed before, and I discovered that much of the music I had brought with me, and my concept of how it worked, depended on my having long stretches of time in which to play it - switching over after three tracks to a different DJ who plays music in a different genre is not conducive to creating the deep techno groove that I usually try for. My first half hour on the decks felt like my best, since I was mixing electro tracks like Solvent's "Radio Ga Ga" and Rex the Dog's "I Look Into Mid-Air" that went well with both Lord Kook and Aaron Neonbunny's music, but later in the evening, when I tried going into Cristen Jost and other artists on the Sender label for a darker, deeper mood, it felt very incongrous and frustrating. I think I played a number of really great tracks, but not being able to get into a consistent sound with the other DJs played a role, I think, in our having such an empty room at 2AM when the party began to wind down.

At the end of the night I enjoyed the chance to come out and DJ, but was disappointed that we had not done a better job of holding that space. The original offer for us to DJ had included getting paid for the night, but, given the lack of energy in our room, plus the fact that the even was also set up as a benefit for one of our acquaintancaes, we declined to take any money for what we had done. Things went over well enough that I think we'll be invited back again, but this time I hope we'll be able to do a better job, now that we also have a better idea of what the venue and crowd are like.

Upcoming Event: DJ Pup and Lord Kook Play Naughty, Friday July 27

Yes, that's right, this weekend the boyfriend and I will transform into our superhero identities of DJ Pup and Lord Kook to spin five hours (yes, five hours!) of tunes for Naughty, a regular occurence of decadent behavior and lascivious lounging at "an undisclosed SoMa location." There's a dress code ("What exactly would you wear to bed if you were dressing to impress a special guest?"), a dungeon (whee!), a bar, and, well, naughtiness. We'd love to see some queer boys there so we can have some fun too, so come out and check it out - haven't you been dying for a chance to wear that ensemble from Mr. S?

Naughty
285 9th Street
$15 in advance, $20 at the door
10PM - 4AM
Dress Code Enforced

Mix Download: DJ Pup "Real Bad Chill Room" Audition

Okay, yours truly had a very quiet weekend since I had to get up at 9AM on Saturday and Sunday for a class that lasted eight hours both days. Urgh, and right when we had some nice weekend weather for a change as well. However, I did put Saturday evening to good use and recorded an audition for the chill DJ slot at the upcoming Real Bad party for this year's Folsom Street Fair. Though I suffered from the usual assortment of technical problems as a result of having a kinda sketchy recording set-up, the end result is, IMHO, pretty good, especially when you consider that it is recorded live, straight from vinyl (no Traktor trickery here, mates). Check it out for yourself and let me know what you think.

DJ Pup's Real Bad Chill Room Audition Mix

Mix to Download: DJ Pup Goes TechnoPop

This the first set of music I've recorded in a while, and it feels good to be back in the saddle again even if this isn't quite as crisp and clean as I'd like. It's a short set at 45 minutes, a reflection of the amount of time I had set aside for working on it, a desire to have something that would download quickly, and the feeling that people sitting at their desks or listening on an iPod as they get around probably don't have the attention span for more than 60 minutes of music.

Here's the track list:

* Solvent - Radio GaGa (Schneider TM Mustang Remake)
* Rex the Dog - I Look Into Mid-Air
* Moritz Piske - Ein Kangaruh im Clubraum
* Hot Chip - (Just Like We) Breakdown (Book Shade Vocal Mix)
* Mylo - Muscle Car (Alex Smoke's Rippling Mix)
* Hugo - Phone Call
* Reinhard Voigt - How We Rock (The Modernist Mix)
* Scratch Massive - Girls on Top

The first two are already on my ElectroTechno mix, but I love them so much I wanted to record them again. The rest of the tracks are an attempt at a harder dance mix, but one that I think is both humorous (esp. the Moritz Piske track with its nitrous vocals) and sexy. If I could play for a gay club night, this is what I would try. It's called TechnoPop because I'm interested in the way that techno producers are starting to look at poppier club music and producing these neat hybrids. These are all tracks, though, that I like to dance along with as I play them.

A word on the technical set-up: this was recorded all live, in my bedroom, from vinyl using a Pioneer DJM-500 with the RCA master output going straight into a Sony cd-recorder. You will probably notice a few odd things. First, my turntables aren't balanced in terms of output; one puts out a considerably stronger signal than the other. I also normally use two JBL EON 10s for monitors, but one of them is blown. So, to compensate for my output problems and only having the left channel for the master volume, the mix is in mono. Also, though this helps equalize the output to a large degree, it's still a bit off, so you'll probably notice that the levels vary a bit as I try to compensate with both the Master output and the trim. Finally, since this was recorded in my bedroom, a space on the bottom floor of an old Edwardian, I can't actually turn up the volume as much as I would like to hear what's happening without my annoying (Italian) neighbors thumping on the floor (another reason that this mix is so short is that I wanted to be done by 9PM to avoid incurring their wrath). So, the finer detail stuff like the high-hats tend to be kinda messy as I bring in the next track, mainly because it has to be pretty well in before I can hear it well enough to get it all together.

So here's the mix: DJ Pup, TechnoPop. If anybody wants to send me some cool "album art" to use as an image placeholder here, feel free, I'm not much of a graphic designer.

Mixes to Download: Puttin' My Music Where My Mouth Is

It's been a while since I got behind the decks, due to a variety of factors including illness, death, depression, the passing of my favorite record store (BPM Records), equipment problems (Oy!) , lack of time, and lack of motivation since I only get to play out once every six months or so. However, it seems that I should put some mixes out there so you all will have a better idea of where I'm coming from, musically speaking. I have a WaxDJ site that contains some things I've done over the past 18 months as DJ Pup, though nothing very recent. There is a recent "electrotechno" mix that I really like, along with two chill progressive trance mixes that are recorded versions of sets I played at Burning Man and at a Drunk and Horny New Year's Eve party. Everything is on vinyl, recorded in my lil' bedroom set-up. Check them out and let me know what you think, I could use some inspiration and encouragement these days.

Here's the track list for ElectroTechno:

• Solvent - Radio GaGa Part I (Schneider TM Mustang Remake)
  
• Rex the Dog - I Look into Mid Air
  
• Mylo - Muscle Car (Tiga's Nightmare Chords Mix) - Breastfed
  
• Scratch Massive - Girls on Top Original - My Best Friend
  
• Grandmaster and Melle Mel - White Lines (Elite Force Mix) - Future Retro compilation
  
• CirezD - Re-Match - Mouseville
  
• Oxia - Domino - Kompakt Speicher
  
• Rocco Branko - Kapital (Einmusik Remix) - Platzhirsch
  
• South Union - Stage 1 Taho Remix - Adrenogroov
  
• The Hunter of Sounds - Dope Jam - Surface Records
  
• Axel Bartsch - Was Bleibt ist die Musik - Kompakt Extra
  
• Filterheadz - Endless Summer - Love Distortion