I stumbled upon an old track of mine someone posted on youtube, which always makes me chuckle. Unfortunately I don’t have an MP3 of it right now. What surprises me is that I don’t remember ever playing this out anywhere. It’s the second track on the same side as Bad Ass on The Bully double 12″ LP, so maybe it just got over-shadowed by the track that sold that album. I should do a Dirty McKenzie remix of this. Maybe, I should remix Bad Ass while I’m at it.
Aril Brikha - Groove La Chord (1998) Aril Brikha was born in Tehran, Iran and emigrated to Stockholm, Sweden at the age of three right around the time of the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979. He started playing keyboard when he was 7 years old and by the mid nineties was confident enough to shop some labels in his new Swedish homeland. Nothing developed from that, however. At the time, Swedish record labels had their own thing going on (i.e Dunkla, Plump, and Placktown). No one cared in Sweden but you know who did care? Muthafuckin’ Detroit, that’s who! And not just Detroit, but Derrick May aka god and pioneer of Techno as we know it today and owner of the legendary Transmat record label, that’s who! The Art of Vengeance EP was released on Transmat’s subsidiary label Fragile and Groove La Chord became a classic almost instantly. Part Techno, Part House, this track is timeless and still one of my favorites to crank up while cruising to and from work everyday.
Zak Khutoretsky aka DVS1 moved to Minneapolis from Bronx NY in the mid nineties. He immediately started getting involved with local Techno parties and promotion and has not stopped since. He lost his space for one of his earliest parties with Heiko Laux, Neil Landstrum, and a bunch of other techno superstars a week prior to the event. I was throwing smaller parties during that time and had access to a lot of spaces including a large virgin venue that was too big for the smaller parties I was putting together at the time. I let him have the space for a hefty finders fee. Little did we know, the concrete floor was fairly fresh and the 1,000+ people dancing on it completely destroyed it in about 3 hours. There was a cloud of concrete dust blowing out of the venue all night. The party went off and is to date one of my more memorable events partially because all who danced in the main room had brown residue around their noses from inhaling the dust. There’s a good chance this is where the term RAVE BOOGERS was coined. Thankfully, I haven’t heard of anyone currently having respiratory problems that attended that party in 1997. If you have, I don’t want to know about it!
I’ve been begging Zak to produce and release music for over 10 years and he’s finally done it now. This kid (old kid now) oozes midwest love and you can definitely hear it in his production. Floating is off of his debut release and it’s on Klockworks.
Land Of The Lost - Disco Jen (1996) Paul Birken - Mix Away (1996)
My former label mate on Communique and personal friend, Paul Birken (aka Land Of The Lost) and I first met in Duluth Minnesota at a gig we were both booked for sometime around 1994. It may have been his first Live set. Later, he became known as the guy from Minneapolis who hauls half his studio halfway across the globe for Live sets. Tonewrecker Records is his label and he’s still cranking out tunes. I like Paul so much, he gets two tracks posted here. I caned both of them in the 90s. And below, a video from ‘08 at First Avenue in Minneapolis.
Mike Dearborn - Rubberband Man (1994)
Sometime in 1995, I called Mike Dearborn and his mother answered the phone. She told me he was at school (college). Since this was in the days prior to cell phones being cheap, his mother had to take a message and have him call me back. She then grilled me, asking me how we know each other. It was all very friendly, of course.
Mike was raised in Chicago and grew up exposed to a lot of House music. He had a lot of success being a midwest hard techno guy in the nineties with a number of bangin’ tracks including an Acid scorcher called Birds On E and a number of releases on the DJax and Majesty labels. However, because of that phone call, I have always thought of Mike as a grounded conservative person who probably decided to pursue a normal life as opposed to the rock star kind of life he could have chosen to pursue. All this without knowing if he actually continued his education or received a degree of any kind. I’m just demonstrating how my mind works. Also, Rubberband Man bangs on a big system.
The Sabres Of Paradise - Smokebelch II (David Holmes Mix) (1993)
I was a little hesitant to post this at first because I had a hard time connecting this track to Midwest Techno. After some thought, I decided it’s going up because I played this so damn much and it became so popular that people made up their own name for it.
David Holmes is an Irish native musician who has been producing music for about 20 years now. His accomplishments include a number of film scores including music for Out Of Sight, Ocean’s Eleven, The Good German, and most recently, The Girlfriend Experience starring one of my favorite porn actresses, Sasha Grey. David Holmes currently has 10 full length albums under his belt since 1995 including one of my favorites Let’s Get Killed which highlighted random people talking in the streets of New York. Some of the bands he has remixed include U2, Doves, Primal Scream and Ice Cube. Smokebelch II (David Holmes Remix) is one of his earlier remixes of a track made by a short lived UK electronic group called The Sabres Of Paradise who made a small splash in the Ambient/Downtempo world of electronic music in the UK during the mid nineties.
This track was caned by yours truly at probably three quarters of the parties I DJ’ed in 1993-95 (sometimes I DJ’ed 2 parties a week). Not because I loved it so much but because so many ravers begged me to play it, referring to it as The Pretty Piano Song. I have no idea who started to call it that but people I know still call it that to this day. It took a long time for people to figure out what this track was actually called and a few DJ’s played the original beat-less version but David Holmes’ Remix is the cut. It was hard not to play this almost 15 minute length track in it’s entirety because it made such an impact on the dance floor as I mixed in and out of it. People would notice the bells as the track was being mixed in and they would immediately lose their shit, possibly due to the the X or LSD they were on. Then, just as the piano starts to get annoying, the track pauses then launches into an acidic onslaught which in 1994 was an extremely popular music style when it came to raves in the midwest. Needless to say, there was also plenty of time to mix out of this track. Almost every time I played it, I mixed out of it easily with a long mix of Plastikman’s Spastik, which, as you should know, is another Midwest Techno Original.
Chris Sattinger - Treeing The Dog (1995) Chris Sattinger is the only musician I know that has come close to using as many aliases as I have. I’m positive I have him beat but you never really know. A former label mate of mine on a number of international record labels, DJ Slip’s former roommate, and my personal friend, Chris has always been one to make music that has not been heard before. His level of originality has always been hard to match be it Live shows or music production. I remember watching him play and being floored with the techniques he’d use to make a live performance consisting of analog studio gear look like a DJ performance of sliders and faders many years before laptops and USB controllers were the norm for such gigs.
Treeing The Dog is off of the Timeblind double 12 inch on Minneapolis’ Communique Records run by DJ ESP/Woody McBride. I included this gem in just about every DJ set back in 1995 and often started out my sets with it.
His aliases include Happy As Hell, Timeblind, Keek, Mono Ekagra, Mothering Noise, Seed Prophecy, Toxic Tits of Buddha, and more.
Tommie Sunshine - Head 2 Toe In Drag (2001)
This is a picture of a pre-Grizzly Adams looking Tommie Sunshine taken at his first (or second) rave gig in Minneapolis in 1994. (I’m standing a couple of people to the left in the unedited version of that picture). We were playing to about 400 people in the “Chill” room of a rave that night/morning. He played right after me and neither of us played “Chill” music. I played Disco for 2 hours and he followed perfectly with 70s & 80s music of various genres none of which had to do with techno or raving. I had met him a couple of times prior to that night gigging in Chicago or Milwaukee and we became familiar with each other for many years to come, however that particular night I realized just how cool he was with his unique track selection, which Minneapolis partiers ate up.
Originally from Chicago, Tommie really started to shine after he moved to Atlanta in the mid nineties where he ran Satellite records. Since then, he has collaborated with fellow mid-western techno dude Mark Verbos, Chicago native Felix Da Houescat, DJ Hell, and James Murphy from LCD Soundsystem to name a few. He’s made a solid name for himself as a remixer in the Alt/Pop world and as a man who’s making a run for sticking to the ZZ Top look longer than some actual ZZ Top members.
