When you were a kid, what was the first thing that caught your attention with music?
To me it seems strange. Having done this my entire life, it still seems strange that it's a job or a career. There are no other professional music people in my family. I have a cousin who's an opera singer, and it's just the two of us. Music, however, was a thing that was always going on in my house. It was mainly Motown coming from my dad's side – I was probably the only five-year-old who knew all the words to every Sam Cooke song. The salsa records and Santana came from my mom. I didn't know what an engineer was until – I remember the very specific moment: I was in my older brother's car, and we were listening to “Kiss,” the Prince song. A lot of Prince songs famously have no bass on them. I was 10 or 11. I asked, “Chuck, what is that? Why is the drum doing that ‘padda-duhn’?” I was trying to mime it. He said, “Oh, it sounds like the engineer put a reverse reverb on it because there's no bass in the song, so they had to fill it out.” My brother was into music production and DJ'ing, so he had the language for it. I asked, “The who did what? What's an engineer?” I thought that music just happened. That was the first tangible time that I even knew that there was anybody involved in that process. It certainly was not a moment where I was thinking, “I'm going to be an engineer.” I was always a fan of music, and much at my brother's behest, listening to things that the average 10-year-old was not listening to. For every New Kids On The Block tape, he said, “You have to listen to A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul.” In high school, my taste evolved. It wasn't until college where I pivoted from doing mainly sports to caring about music in a way where I wanted to interact with it.
I heard you DJ’d. Would you consider that your official foray into music?
I DJ'd a lot when I went to NYU [New York University], at every little tavern, bar, or dive that would have me. All vinyl. I was seeing what music did, and how these things go together. People seemed to react in ways when there would be an unexpected thing blending in underneath. I would also have the challenge where I'd look around the room and think, “I don't know that guy, but I'm going to play his favorite song right now.” Or, “That person's not dancing. How do I get them to dance?” It was cool to not be responsible for being super social at the party. I wouldn't have to come up with small talk because I was DJ'ing. That’s when I got the bug, and the understanding of how music is this thing that we can describe and talk about the theory of and the DNA of, but at the end of the day it does a thing. That's when I started meeting a lot of people where, on paper, we probably had nothing in common other than music. Around that time, I also had a radio show on WNYU, which was an amazing privilege to be broadcasting on FM radio in New York City as a 19-year-old. I was interviewing lots of cool people because it was a pretty big college station. I remember spending a lot of my time on Friday nights after my radio shift in a record room that maybe held 10,000 records and CDs. I thought, “Well, somebody curated this.” A music director listened to it, and there was something in there that was given a production value of why this needed to be in the archive. I would sit there and think, “Okay, I'm going to go to the M's tonight.” I had my little laptop, and I would be ripping the CDs. I was trying to expose myself to music. “Mercury Rev, what the heck is this?" "George Harrison? Huh?” I saw this opportunity where I was thinking, “All I have to do is pay attention to it.” That's how I started thinking about interacting with music, whether it was broadcasting or DJ'ing. The first thing that I produced, like most people who are DJ'ing, was making extended edits. My mom got me a copy of Pro Tools LE for my birthday so that I could chop up songs, and my brother taught me how to use an [Akai] MPC so I could make extended edits. I did bootleg remixes and spent ungodly amounts of money pressing at Hub-Servall [Record Mfg. Corp.] in New Jersey – 50 or 100 copies of a vinyl to give out as promotion. That's when I first started making stuff, and people liked it.
Did you have a DJ name?
