Midwest Techno Originals

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

Drexciya was a duo that kept their identities secret throughout much of the group’s decade long existence. They combined a faceless, underground, anti-mainstream media stance with mythological, sci-fi narratives, to help heighten the dramatic effect of their music. In this respect they were similar to artists within and close to the Detroit collective Underground [...]