DJ Spun is a producer, DJ, and master editor from the Bay Area. His releases span the the west coast breaks and disco edit spectra, and he co-runs the Rong Music / Promo Only labels with Ben Cook. He'll be playing in Denver for the venerable SPIN ZONE party this Saturday

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I can tell you're not in New York right now, but what had your residential setup been while you were living there?

I lived in Manhattan, in a couple different places, for like the first nine or ten years I was there, and then I moved to Brooklyn around 2010. At that point everything had started to move to Brooklyn, but when I first arrived Manhattan was kind of booming. It’s funny because when I first moved to New York City, I had a strong handful of friends in Manhattan; the clubs used to be more downtown. Giuliani really fucked it up there in the 90s, so when I arrived there wasn’t a lot going on. Little speakeasy-type, underground things because there was a cabaret law that was in effect. San Francisco used to be an inexpensive place when I was growing up, so it was a place where a lot of travellers could park, creative people could afford to be starving artists, you know? But I think that was part of me moving to New York, it was getting so expensive here that I might as well go someplace that they support the arts a little more.

Did you grow up in the Bay proper or somewhere else up North?

I was in the Bay; I grew up in San Jose. Started playing in bands as a kid, then started DJing around 1987. I think in 1988, I sold my guitar and my amp and bought turntables. Just out of high school, 18-19. I have a twin brother, and we were in a punk band where everybody else were adults. They were a little older, and we travelled around and performed quite a bit. So we were already kind of working musicians since we were about 15 years old.

My parents had good taste in music, so I heard a lot of jazz, especially. My mom liked rock ‘n’ roll, I heard a lot of good music growing up. But the punk scene was really vibrant, and I think I was attracted to the diy element of it. It’s not unlike The Little Rascals, really, a bunch of kids are just gonna put on a show.

1987, ‘88, what were you trying to get turntables for? Were you trying to scratch?

Yeah, I think it kind of came from hip-hop. That was definitely the “oh, this could be a new instrument to play,” or whatever. I didn’t really think of DJing clubs as much at first, but then I was already getting into it… there wasn’t a lot of DJs at that time, so it was kind of easy for me to get into it. I already had a pretty good understanding of music, and musical arrangement and theory, so it was easy to pick up DJing. I feel like if I’d started a few years later, it would’ve been a lot harder. When I started, a DJ was kind of like a lower-level employee at the club. Like, on the hierarchy of the club you’re sort of between the bouncer and the barback as far as how much juice you have at the club. It was different then, but it was good – I was able to get in there and do it within a year of starting DJing, several nights a week. I guess I have strange taste in music, but at the time I was trying to be as commercial as possible. But I was never really able to do that very convincingly, because I was still using the music that I had [laughs]. I’d play some music people had heard before, but it was definitely a different take than what other people in the area I grew up in were playing.

What was something you’d have always had in the bag for that kind of show?

I don’t know, probably Public Enemy “Don’t Believe the Hype” or something. What they called “modern rock” was really big at the time in the Bay Area, kind of new wave and industrial, Depeche Mode, New Order alternative. We would try and play acid house, but we didn’t really know how to do it the right way. People didn’t like it until the rave music, which started to come out around 1990, into ‘91. When the first big rave records, the Warp Records or the bleep stuff, that was the first time people really seemed to respond for it. Because we tried for a few years, but everybody resisted [laughs].

I was playing at the club, and then as hip-hop became more commercial it started to lose its luster. Probably the same thing as punk, really, when it really went overground and got popular it wasn’t as exciting. To me, that I could play two hours, three hours of music, a whole night of music that people had never heard before, and they were totally into it, I was sold completely. I like experimental shit and jazz and all of that, and it gave me an opportunity to be more freeform. I was lucky, and I played in a club where they had some pretty good DJs there already, and the club owners were pretty smart. They gave me a lot of freedom, I feel like, considering the environment. At first they asked that I didn’t make it totally exclusively one sound or one thing, just that it be kind of eclectic. But yeah, once the rave happened it was all over [laughs]. That was a club called FX that I played at for a few years right when I turned 21.

Was there any sort of tension between these club, rave, punk identities – some kind of subcultural opposition?

At the time, a lot of my friends from the punk world thought that DJing was kind of lame, a little bit. But as we moved on, I think there’s a lot of us out there that have that same connection. At the core of how it all started, it was super diy. The early house clubs were put together by people who just wanted to get down, you know? And it’s really the same ethos across all of it. And it goes back further, in New York there’s still the same people that were going to Mancuso’s Loft parties, and they’re still going to jams. There’s still a common line that’s gone through all of these diy movements. Then the psychedelic experience thing; San Francisco was really big on that, David Mancuso was really big on that, these ancient tribal rituals.

Outside of the import records you mentioned, what was the first kind of homegrown San Francisco outfit to start tapping in? I wanna say Hardkiss started around then…

We were kind of already doing it, but they did move here right at the beginning. There were these guys Tasti Box, they were the first people I remember that were playing live, more techno-y rave music. I did a compilation of early San Francisco breakbeat records a couple years ago, one of their tracks is on that. Hardkiss threw some of the earliest parties here, but there was still a little thing happening before then. The Wicked crew, they came out around the same time. That was originally started by two people that weren’t the DJs, but they were raving in England and decided to go do it in San Francisco, then slowly a bunch of their friends came out. Definitely in San Francisco, there was a big British influence. A lot of the English guys, they had really cool taste that was acid house and raving, but also based on Chicago house, and New York, and Detroit all kind of mixed together. But more of a mellow vibe, we never really had that crazy hardcore and stuff like that.

Did you ever get a sense of what all these British guys kind of imagined was waiting for them in San Francisco?

You know, it was probably more apparent then than it is now. The Beatniks were here. For a long time, before everything was so global, it was really the farthest you could go in the northern hemisphere without ending up back on the other side in Japan. I feel like it has kind of a long-time outlaw spirit, a place where weirdos would go to be weird. The hippies, Haight-Ashbury, all of that, kind of was still happening. When the rave scene first happened, the Grateful Dead scene was slowing down, and there were a lot of people from that world that kind of filtered over to the early rave scene, especially after Jerry died. That’s not really my scene, but I work with musician friends that are a part of it, and there’s a parallel psychedelic community thing that probably helped instigate what we were doing way back in the day.

Our parties would always have psychedelic lightshows, and a lot of the people that did those, it was like the next generation, but at the beginning it was still some of the visual artists that did some of the famous shows in the ‘60s and ‘70s, so there was a lot of this culture continuing. At the beginning, this music wasn’t familiar to anybody, and so when the people here would play it a certain way, that’s what the crowd got used to. New York, they had Tony Humphries on the radio, so everybody got to hear that. Chicago, they had Farley “Jackmaster” Funk on the radio, they had people breaking all this amazing music on the radio. Out here, it was a little more Hi-NRG, Freestyle, it was a little different. There was still some cool stuff on the radio, but it wasn’t as advanced musically, and it wasn’t as much based in the tradition. The people here came up with a unique sound, which is sort of an amalgamation of everybody’s sound, but with a certain vibe. You’d hear New York house, Chicago stuff, trippy English records, but there’s still the San Francisco disco sound as well, which is still going.

You never really had that integration with broader aboveground culture – do you think that made it easier or harder to get away with taking over some spot in Half Moon Bay or wherever for a big party?

Well, people could do that because it was sleepy, but a big part of the reason that we could – the heartbreaking reality of the AIDS epidemic is that San Francisco had all these fantastic gay nightclubs. They had amazing soundsystems, and it was sort of the mecca for part of that culture. They built these shrines – the Trocadero Transfer, the Townsend, and all of these great clubs – and they were pretty much empty, because so many people had died. So I feel like the gay community in San Francisco really welcomed the rave kids; I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was 21 years old playing at the Trocadero, and three years before Sylvester was up on the balcony saying his final goodbye. They were just happy to have some nice people come out and want to party, I think. So at a really young age, some of us were able to get into these epic clubs, and kind of take them over.

And there was some of the same shit in New York, too. I didn’t feel like there were a lot of gatekeepers – if you had the energy to do it, people were kind of just down to let you do whatever [laughs]. Now, San Francisco’s not like that at all. They used to keep these places open – it was a good year or two where we were throwing a lot of parties and not a lot of people were coming out, but it was enough of a vibe that it was exciting. There was no money being made, but these clubs would stay open so they could sell beer for an hour or two in the morning. Now I know people that own clubs, and they’re even my friends, and you have to be making money for them to want to stay open. Sometimes they advertise that they’re going ‘til 4 or 5, but they’re, like, ready to close. But it’s a different culture nowadays. LA has a great underground, they love to rage down there or whatever, but San Francisco’s a little more corporate right now. The bar closes and it’s pretty much over, there’s not as much of an underground scene. I’m sure there is some, also – you know, I’m 55 years old, I shouldn’t know what the kids are up to.

You’ve gotten into this sort of Bay Area contrast thing a couple times, and one aspect of that I was wondering about was at what point you might have looked around the scene and thought “oh, that Silicon Valley thing is really happening now.”

A lot of early tech people, going way back, were people that were involved with the rave scene. But then slowly it sorta changed, it was a sector of a lot of cool creative people, then more and more became a bigger piece of the population. It’s its own economy – there was the hardware boom in the ‘70s, software in the ‘80s, then dot-com in the ‘90s, and by the end of that it had gotten crazy expensive to live here. That’s probably when people started to take more notice, because it kept going and going to the point of a housing crisis situation. Over time, it changed the dynamic, and the people who were attracted to being here. At first, it was these people who were into this new thing – the power of computers, the internet, and all this stuff. And now it’s sort of like a giant gold rush, on a sort of worker bee level now, they need people to work all these jobs. It was more people that were from here, part of our greater community, but it got harder to maintain those connections over time. Rents are so high that you can’t have a club that’s not full.

While we’re on the old-school San Francisco tip, I had one more question about something I’ve never fully understood, and that’s the whole Goa connection. Not sure if that was something you ever really got into.

Hmm, not much. There was a famous guy, Goa Gil, there was a little bit of a psytrance thing. There was a store, F-8, and San Francisco has that long psychedelic history, so there’s kind of a world traveller thing. I met and heard DJ Goa Gil back in the day, but that’s about the extent of it. He had some Bay Area roots, and I think he came a few times over the years, would come for a few months and hang out. I think that was the first exposure that a lot of people had to that; a lot of it, he’d play on these DAT tapes, go into a trance and play these tapes for 17 days or whatever [laughs]. I don’t really know much about that, but I saw him a few times back in the day and maybe once in the early 2000s.

Clubs have their little cliques, even within the scene, but musically it was mostly pretty diverse. That music was new, like when I think of the early rave days there really wans’t psychedelic trance music yet. I remember playing early parties with Paul van Dyk, or Sasha, or some people like that. It kind of came from house, or that early techno rave sound, and then it got into… you know they talk about house music, and that’s the music Frankie Knuckles played at the Warehouse – there was already a sound for a while there. And then some peoples’ thing, it delved, and then a couple years later it was this whole trance thing. But that was never really my thing.

I’m interested in your own personal concept of psychedelia beyond, you know, the literal dropping acid or whatever.

I think it all comes from the idea of a journey inspired by The Tibetan Book of the Dead, sort of this idea of people coming together in a sort of communication vibe, then growing that to this outerstellar experience and coming back to Earth. Kind of taking that experience on with you. Kind of the same spirit at the acid tests, but it was also happening at The Loft, Paradise Garage, Gallery, places like that. Planning this trip with a musical experience too. And you know, people hit the mushroom and danced around the fire in ancient times too [laughs].

Interesting – I know there’s the classic thing about how no one was looking at the DJ at parties back in the day, but what you’re describing goes past that and almost requires a sort of voluntary spiritual anonymity from the audience themselves.

There were people that were into that, into the DJ, but it wasn’t the focal point. They sort of had the same idea as a lot of the psychedelic rock shows, but there were some that were more like a concert than an experience like that. It changed at some point, the DJ’s at an altar and people face the DJ. I remember when I first played on the east coast, people didn’t do that at all. The DJ’s up in the booth, somewhere removed, and people danced more together, facing different directions. It creates a different vibe, which is often missed.

I think when the English guys that came, they were all Tonka Sound System proteges, which was Harvey and Choci and Markie’s thing. They would have the DJ on the ground, you want to be with the people. So we started doing that, it’s great to be with the people, but at some point I think the anonymity of it was cool as well. In some ways, it’s why there aren’t the great clubs that there used to be. There’s still places – a lot of people go to Berghain and they don’t know who the fuck’s playing, they just know that they’re going to Panorama Bar or Berghain, the famous club. And so there are these epic spaces where as many people going to the club as are going to see the DJ. But it’s more act-driven, where this DJ is playing and so people want to go see this DJ. But I think the idea of a group of people making a party is really special, and that’s something that’s maybe getting lost a little bit.

It kind of parallels music industry stuff, where its transitioned from a song-product type model to an experiential product, as far as what’s on offer.

I’m lucky because I DJ as well as make music, but it’s really hard if somebody just wants to be a producer and not a performer. All the money’s in the performance now – streaming doesn’t really pay very well for people in the underground. I’m happy to get to do this stuff, it’s pretty fun; it’s interesting to see it change though. But now people might go to a festival or whatever… people used to just go to a club. They found a club they liked, they might like one night better than the other, but they’d hang out there. I even knew people in New York that would go to the Paradise Garage like “oh yeah, Larry Levan’s the DJ.” But that wasn’t even the thing – the Garage is just this place. Danceteria, these famous clubs. Now it’s very much headliner-driven.

You mentioned the kinda blurry concert-rave boundary – did parties out there ever have sideshows? Between two DJs a magician comes out or whatever?

I think there was always a lot of circus weirdo, circus performer stuff. We used to try and bring whatever weird element to the party. At first I thought you were talking about sideshows like the car things that they do now [laughs]. Burlesque is still big in San Francisco, then there's the whole Burning Man thing.

Word, yeah I’ve been thinking about that kind of variety in programming recently. This is this theoretically out-on-the-margins culture, but it can end up kind of isolated from this equally-weird other stuff that would fit right in.

Moving onto your own production, I actually didn’t realize til the other day that you were involved with that Central Fire track! Your super early work had very clearly honed in on, like, I wanna sample some breaks and I want that acid bassline in there. How were you approaching collecting the gear and knowledge and stuff to get the sounds you wanted?

I’d already played in bands and been doing all this stuff, and my friend Courtney Nielsen had an Atari computer, Dr T’s sequencer, an Emax, a Kawai K4, an R-8 and some other bits and bobs. This guy Jim Hopkins wanted to put out a song that he made on his label Twitch, which he had just started, and Courtney asked me if I would remix the song. We had so much fun remixing it that we started working together all the time. That first Central Fire record, though, that was just a bunch of stuff I really wanted to sample. I was eager. And that time, the sample times were really short, so I think we borrowed one of our friends’ Emax IIs, I think we had three samplers to get all the samples to play.

Were you able to quickly get this understanding, I guess outside of samples, of, like, “here’s the sound I want, this is how I can make it?”

I was kind of already into it, because I’d been getting into hip-hop. You know, I knew a guy with an 808 drum machine, my other friend had a 4-track. Even when I was in a punk band, we’d gone to the studio. So I was always involved in recording, and even in high school had worked with some friends to record demos for people. I was already into that, and then I spent a couple years focusing on DJing more, but getting back into the studio and making electronic music was always part of the whole idea. That was the whole idea from punk, that you could do it yourself, and electronic music made it that way for more and more people all the time.

Did you have much of this performer, showmanship vibe on the decks?

No, to me I could hide behind the turntables. I liked when I was in the DJ booth at first, but I like the music, I’m passionate about it, so I’m probably somewhat of a personality DJ. It shows what I’m feeling when I’m playing, on a good day I’m giving out that energy of whatever I’m trying to get into. But I wasn’t trying to do shows that much – I might have done some scratching in the studio, but if I was trying to do a battle, it was more intellectual than it was showing off my techniques [laughs]. But I come from that battle DJs vibe too, and a lot of that is just the friendly competition vibes of hip-hop.

Were you ever moved to take a full hiatus from DJing?

Sometimes I have periods, I’ve had several ups and downs over the years where I’ve played more or less, but I’ve never stopped. Probably three months is the longest I’ve ever gone without a gig since the ‘80s. But sometimes I just keep it low-key and local, focusing on making music. For me, I’ve been doing it a long time, so I might have a hot record and then get a bunch of gigs where people are like “oh yeah, that guy!” It kind of fluctuates, but now I’ve got these little families in New York, LA, Miami, places I can go and play. It’s funny as you get older, I’ve been dancing with the same people for 20 years now.

The way you talk about gear and studio stuff, there would’ve had to be a heavy, heavy culture of sharing, loaning stuff out, right?

Yeah, it was pretty expensive. I had studios I shared with, usually it was two or three of us would get together. My friends Mark Camp, Courtney Nielsen, we had a bunch of different studios together. Now I work in different peoples’ places. Mark [Greenfield] – Darwin Chamber – has a great studio, Jonah Sharp has an incredible studio. Both those guys are running synthesizer museums, you know? But yeah, back then there would be a couple of us that would combine efforts to build a studio together and share it, which would give us a little extra gear. Now, everything’s so remote. I go work in a studio, record all this stuff, and then I’m editing it on my little small home studio. Do that, go back to the place with all the killer mic preamps and stuff like that [laughs].

I was just about to ask about your editing, incidentally – you were talking about this long firsthand experience with disco, especially in a club setting. How are you approaching making the edits thereof – obviously you have all this source material, but what are you trying to achieve in re-formatting it?

For me, mostly we would do edits of songs that we felt like were great. When we first started, we were trying to make disco more appealing to a house crowd, so we emphasized that vibe. We did an edit of Jumbo “Turn On To Love,” and then I heard Prins Thomas play it a few years ago and felt like we took out all the best parts [laughs]. A lot of it was just extend the break, make it a little easier to mix. There was a lot of cool, early electronic disco and stuff like that, but maybe the vocal was really bad. My early interest in editing came more from making something playable that I really liked and couldn’t play at the club. Paul McCartney “Don’t Say Goodnight Tonight” is a great song, but I didn’t want to play the vocal, so I made my own instrumental dub version to play. So I was making a lot of them for myself, you know? A lot of disco, that’s already edited. My interest in editing was more, like, weird stuff. I’ve edited some disco records that were pretty dance-y, but a lot of it is stuff that I wanted to fix for what I wanted to do with it. Most of the edits that we put out on vinyl, the early stuff with Rong or Promo Only and stuff, a lot of those I wouldn’t play the song. If the original is already a masterpiece, I don’t see any reason to edit it. Although there are some where people just turn some little part out and it’s sick. There’s no rules to it, if it’s cool, it’s cool.

That makes sense, the other day I was listening to that Psychemagik edit of the, like, steel drum version of “The Way It Is,” Bruce Hornsby, which I guess was the theme for a news program in its original form, something totally outside of the club world.

There’s always something smart about it, you know what I mean? I heard somebody playing “Rhythm Is Gonna Get You” or something, but it’s just never the parts you know. Just all the little weird breaks or something, and it sounds really cool. Conrad from the Idjut Boys did this edit of “Juke Box Hero” by Foreigner, but it’s just the first two bars of it or something. But the way he makes it sound, and the effects… he never plays the actual song, it’s just that little dun dun dun dun…

Do you think you’ve got these little compositional tells in the editing process? Hearing a track, would you recognize the editor based on how it was treated?

Sure, or often. Idjut Boys have a very flamboyant editing style. I started doing the edits because my partner, Ben Cook, had done an album, Deep Fuzz, with the Idjuts. And so we were both friends with the Idjut Boys, we both lived in San Francisco, and we were both into disco. And at the time there was nobody into disco, so people kept telling us that we should work together. And the Idjuts wanted him to do another edit record for them, so that’s when I really started getting into it, before we started Rong. Back then the mixers didn’t have effects, so we’d use these crazy delays and do a lot of effects to it. That was part of the composition, too much delay and extending the cool breaks. If there was any kind of disco or hip-hop vibe, trying to capture that. Sometimes adding a few little samples. I’ve always been into arrangement, so editing’s a natural process. I like this part here, so we’ll do that and go back to the verse.

That’s kind of exactly what you said about “This Is A Shout Going Out,” that you had all these constituent parts that you wanted to make the track with, and at that point you’re ordering them.

Sure, arranging them. I really enjoy doing remixes too, for me it’s a fun exercise because you’ve got all this stuff and you can re-create somebody else’s vision. They can be anything too, which is cool – true to the original sometimes, or sometimes you just take one little sound that you liked.