Morgan Geist grew up in Wayne, New Jersey, less than one hour from New York city but a world away from the city that never sleeps and the place responsible for some of the greatest movements in dance music history. His love of new wave, Devo and synthesizers led him to start his own label, Environ and then to form Metro Area with Darshan Jesrani.

After his latest release; Storm Queen's 'Look Right Through' clocked in at number one in our Furtive Fifty for 2010, DJhistory caught up with Morgan to discuss; New York, freestyle BMX, growing up in suburban America, techno from Cleveland, Daniel Wang and the importance of leaving a legacy

Did you come from a musical upbringing?

My parents split when I was young so there’s multiple generations of kids. I have an older brother and sister and my half-brother and sister. My half sister or step-sister, I should really get this down, she’s like 17 now so I was exposed to all different kinds of music, in that everyone liked music. Though to me that’s like saying we were into eating or sleeping it just seemed like it’s something that everyone’s into but I realised that actually that’s not the case. Some people have no interest in music or it’s not played in the house.

Did you know from an early age that you wanted to make music?

I was totally fascinated by synthesizers from an early age. I think it was a combination of a couple of things. I was really into Devo as a kid, partly because of my sister but also because Devo really appeals on two different levels.  So I was always interested in that. My babysitter, he ended up being in this ridiculous pop band later on in his life. I think they did a theme song for some big American television show but anyway he used to bring over these Roland synthesizer catalogues and I remember really getting into those. It sounds really dorky but I was six or seven and I was enjoying being dorky. The names Jupiter and Juno and these futuristic, space age instruments that I thought I would never own and never know how to use, they kind of fascinated me because they were this technology that I didn’t understand, all these buttons and sliders and all this crazy music would come out of them. Even with the piano I used take my little tape recorder and record myself playing repetitive piano patterns on my tape recorder, then rewinding it and playing it back and  improvising over the top of them and that was really with no guidance. I didn’t know that was what you were supposed to do, I just wanted to hear more than one track of myself, that’s kind of weird when you think about it, it’s almost as if I was programmed to go into electronic music, you know laying down multiple tracks of your own music. I’m trying to avoid saying playing with your self here. (laughs)

I was always fascinated with music and records and as soon as I could start going to concerts I was going and later on to clubs. I wasn’t going to dance clubs, I was going more to live shows but as soon as I hit my teens I wanted to do that (make dance music). I was fifteen when I got my first synthesizer and sequencer so yeah pretty early on I wanted to do that kind of thing and there was a long period of being lost after I first got those instruments.

I was really into freestyle BMX; that was my main thing in my early teens, it was all really wrapped up in alternative music, that’s where I first heard a lot of punk and underground music through that scene, a lot of music from the UK. It was a sport for loners. You have to keep in mind here I was in the suburbs and when you rebelled you weren’t doing stuff that kids that grew up New York City were doing. You did your best to try and find other freaks to hang out with and that often revolved around these ‘alternative’ activities, like skateboarding, break dancing, graffiti or whatever and that’s how I got into a lot of music.

I remember hearing the first Public Enemy stuff at some freestyle bike competition. These were like older hip kids from Venice Beach in California or somewhere and they were exposed to a lot more cooler music than I was in suburban New Jersey. I just remembering hearing it and I couldn’t figure out how any of it was made, I only understood the 808, the drum machine but beyond that all the crazy samples laid on top of each other. I had to stop riding bikes because I had surgery after I injured myself really badly and I couldn’t ride at all for six months and started concentrating on the synthesizer and the sequencer, which I guess was the real beginning of it all.

So was that still a form of rebelling for you?

I mean look, I was a good kid, I lived with my mom most of the time and we have an almost peer like relationship. If your parents get divorced often you have this relationship if it works out well where there isn’t actually that much to rebel against. My mum often went to New York City, she was into the arts so after my older brother and sister had been really rebellious I never felt this need to rebel against my family. Against my peers? I just didn’t like what they liked. I was never into rocking guitar music, I liked stuff that had some mystery to it, stuff you had to search for.  You can romanticise this and say that I was trying to escape my suburban environment or the drudgery of that but the truth of the matter was it was just something I was really into.

When I think back on how hard it was to find so much interesting stuff, even if you heard an amazing song on the radio if you didn’t catch the DJ running down what they were playing you could search for years for stuff. I mean ‘Glad To Know You’ by Chaz Jankel, I searched for that track for years. ‘Kiss Me’ by Stephen ‘Tin Tin’ Duffy as well. There where all these weird, nu wave(y) tracks that I spent ten years of my life looking for and it was only once I moved to New York and went to college that I found out what most of this stuff was but that also made it exciting and to this day I still relate to weird kids who grew up in the suburbs because we had to try really hard to track down the shit we were into. Kids in the city or rich kids that were going to clubs or kids with older siblings who could take them to parties where underground music was being played, I am sure it was great to have this stuff at your finger tips but there’s a passion amongst isolated suburban kids. I have friends who grew up the same environment as I did and you end up being way hungrier for this stuff than a lot of city kids.  I found this out when I went to college as there were a lot of kids, from New York, from L.A. and San Francisco and they were pretty blasé about everything, they weren’t going to drive to Detroit with me in the middle of the night to go to a party to see Derrick May or whatever man, they were at college and they were having a good time. I still had this insane desire, this hunger to discover new music.

Do you think that music suffers today because it’s so easily available?

I’m trying to be fair here but I do think music suffers but that’s because I just don’t like a lot of music that’s coming out now but I could just be mixing up the cause and effect. It could also be that I am just jaded and getting sick of music in general, I’ve heard too much music, I don’t know what?  But I do think the experience suffers, people suffer from having this immediate access to everything.  First of all there’s not that satisfaction of the hunt and the mystery and the drive and staying focused. I mean you really had to stay on task and focused if you wanted to track down a song. I have so many examples of that, like ‘Atmosphere Strut’ by Cloud One, I can’t tell you how many people I hummed that song too trying to figure out what it was and only when a friend of Daniel Wang called Danny who was working at this synthesizer store in downtown New York and I sung the song over the phone and he said, “That’s ‘Atmosphere Strut’ by Cloud One”. You know you rarely savour the prize once you get it and I think that’s kind of lost.

Also there is so much music readily available that you don’t spend as much time in detail or listening carefully to music and I’m guilty of this as well. People will send me demos or I’ll get record pool stuff and often I’ll listen to it on my laptop just because I’m traveling or whatever and that’s not the way to listen to music, especially music where half the frequencies are below the frequency response of my laptop speakers. So listening to music isn’t an event anymore, people don’t sit down with a nice hi-fi system and nice speakers and pay careful attention. Also I used to spend my hard-earned money on 12-inches or buying cassettes or whatever and I would sometimes get a record and it would suck but I would really try and find something worthwhile from. Sometimes I would get something out of it, yeah this album sucked but there’s this really cool drum part in it, or it has an interesting atmosphere and it all sounds like it was recorded in a tiled bathroom. So there are things to be learned by paying close attention and people don’t pay close attention anymore.

So it’s lost that romanticism of saving up to buy a record and reading the sleeve and the cover notes and looking at the art as well as listening?

Actually that’s something I wanted to talk about. I remember my brother playing early Pink Floyd records and trying to work out all of the artwork. There were so many records like that, so much mystery in the cover or even in the artwork and it could provide a counterpoint to the music. You might find some ethereal music with an especially violent , vulgar or obscene cover and you would wonder, ‘Why is there this contrast here? What does that say about the music?’

A lot of people argue that it should just be about the music and not the format or whatever but for me it wasn’t only music, it was records as well, it was recorded music, which involves the media it was recorded on, the artwork that’s included with it. It was a whole piece of art that you were buying, there was just a lot more to it.

Do you still buy records today?

Not often but part of that is because I never want to have too many records, I feel like you loose focus. I gave away thousands of records when I moved from Brooklyn to Queens and I still try not to regret giving stuff away because I figure I can always find the music later on, even the obscure stuff at this point but I keep what’s important to me and I haven’t had that real itch to go out and go record digging like I used to. In a way it’s liberating because I can go to another city and enjoy the city and not just hang out in some dank basement. In other ways I miss it. It was a great way to just go into a different world, find new music and to procrastinate as well and if I wasn’t in the mood to go to the studio or I wasn’t feeling creative then I felt like I might find something inspirational that would spur me on in the studio. So now that’s sort of gone, I’m not sure it’s gone forever though!

Do you think that New York has influenced the music you make?

Its really just a feeling on the street and the city itself that actually influences me and this has always been the case. I went to school out in the mid-west with all that emptiness.  My earlier more techno records were really influenced by my surroundings and just driving. So I feel like New York influences me now more in that sense, the feeling on the street and the places I like to go, the subway and just old buildings and those things.  It sort of influences me in terms of my imagination but I can’t understate the importance of the music that came out of here, radio that I grew up with, the record labels from New York, I mean my favourite labels were definitely West End and Prelude early on, when I first started digging I was just looking for the pink spines, looking for West End records all the time and eight times out of ten those records were going to be amazing. The first ones I found are still some of my favourites today so in that way New York is really important. Going out, I would almost only go out in New York, very occasionally, maybe only once I would go to Newark in New Jersey, so I’m really thankfully to have been able to have been brought up here.

How did you first come into contact with techno?    

It didn’t really influence me when I was younger, well I guess it did because I’m kind of an old fuck now but whenever someone says younger I think like in my teens or something. Growing up, ‘Good Life’ and ‘Big Fun’ were big on the radio but I didn’t know, ‘oh that’s a techno record’ I just thought they were another dance hit being played alongside ‘I.O.U.’ on these house and freestyle radio stations. It really started influencing me when I went to college in the early ’90s. I went to school out in Ohio and I used to buy this magazine called Street Songs, which anyone from that area would probably remember. It was like a little dance magazine and I would remember reading about Dan Curtin and that he was from Cleveland and I didn’t think anything was happening in Cleveland. Up till then the only techno stuff I really knew was imported and easy to find like LFO from England and also 808 State both of which were imported by Tommy Boy and then just some random Detroit tracks and really random stuff I would pick up like early Aphex Twin. But it wasn’t until I went to Ohio and met Dan Curtain that I really started getting into the Detroit stuff. 

At college there was a book store that stocked records and what they were buying was almost comic because they would order records and they would just sit there un-purchased. So I would just wait until the end of the school year when people were going home they would have to put them on sale to make room for new stock. They would order Red Planet records and DBX and these were some of the first underground Chicago and techno-sounding records that I had heard. Meeting Dan Curtin was huge because he introduced me to Carl Craig and the people he worked with. I first met Derrick May and Juan Atkins and I had no idea how big these guys were you know, I met them in some little suburb of Detroit in some little bar where they were playing and they were just other musicians to me. It was only later that I realised that they had such a huge influence on things!

Your productions as part of Metro Area are a huge leap from your early techno, what happened in between?

By the time we started Metro Area, digital recording became affordable and within our means. I remember when I was doing techno I would always buy instruments that would allow me to replicate what I needed to do. I mean I don’t want to get too technical because it’s just so boring to non-technical people but the point was it was hard to just record as you would now. You could record into a computer and you could record live instruments and synthesizers and drum machines but you needed something where you could re-create those sounds, so I think I would have done Metro Area earlier it’s just I couldn’t. I was stuck working with samplers and didn’t really use live instruments, which was a huge part of the Metro Area sound and I didn’t want to use samples of hand claps, I wanted to use actual hand claps so it could change over the course of the track and the technology really helped and of course, the influence of disco and boogie and the increasing size of my record collection and my knowledge about that stuff and meeting Darshan were we both had this common interest that was huge!

But I listen to my first album even now and it’s the same influences, I mean there are D-Train samples and Giorgio Moroder, Herbie Hancock and some West End records and that’s when I was making pure techno stuff in the nineties so it was just sort of headed in that direction. Plus, so much of the techno stuff that I like sampled these records that were so important to me.  Carl Craig, of course, sampled ‘Hypnotic Tango’ (by My Mine) and Yello, there’s just countless early techno records that sample disco and boogie and electronic music. We also got disgusted with dance music, we were buying these house records were the whole song would just be a looped sample and people would just call it their own. We just started to feel it was a little cheap and we wanted to delve into how those records that were being sampled were being made.

I should also here mention the influence of Daniel Wang. I started buying Danny’s first Balihu records when they came out and even though he was doing these collages based on samples, he wouldn’t add a kick drum. I mean his first record was called ‘Look Ma No Drum Machine’ and that was intentional, it was more of a homage to those early disco records and let you hear the original vibe of the record much more than these sort of jacked up hose tracks with a huge 909 kick in them. It made me realise it was ok to have small acoustic drums and to not have to modernise things or make them sound like whatever the trend was at the time, huge kicks and filters and all that. Becoming friends with Danny and just being exposed to tons of amazing music, we had countless dorky conversations about music and we’d go out and go dancing and he would DJ and I would DJ, it was a nice time when he was still living in New York, we were good friends and saw each other a lot. He’s a legend.

How did you and Darshan meet?

I mean you almost don’t have to interview Darshan (laughs) it’s just such a similar story to mine, I think Darshan was more into graffiti and hip hop and club culture than I was but we both were getting into the same things at the same time. I think we met after college through some techno or house internet mailing list, we were into the same music but from different perspectives, the same artists but on different labels. Me mostly techno labels, Darshan mostly house labels and when we got together and started playing music for each other we realized we were into the exact same kind of stuff but didn’t know each other’s records. It was pretty funny but it also showed how strong the concept of genre was back then, where you would think that just by a producer putting out a record on a different label the production would sound different, like, ‘Oh this guys putting out something on a techno label, I wonder what that will sound like?’ as if it’s going to sound fucking different than when he was putting it out on a house label,

So we just started talking about or common interests and we were both into disco and boogie and also interested in slower music, which doesn’t sound like a big deal now but techno and house, especially techno, is pretty fast, which was leading us towards boogie but I think we were trying to find slow house and slowed down techno and just kind of going in the opposite direction to a lot of other people. Also we’re both from the suburbs of New York, Darshan’s from Poughkeepsie in upstate New York, so we used to go record  digging up there and we’d go to this place where it was just fucked up records and sex toys and porno tapes. I think our collections really started there, we got a lot of stuff from there, it was also when we started our huge sex toy collection (laughs)! Seriously though we really did get a lot of our music from there. He just had the same thing as I had man, we were both desperate to learn about this underground music and were isolated in the suburbs and both used to listen to WBLS and Shep Pettibone and these late night mixes. It was just nice to meet someone else that was into all that and we just got along you know? Darshan says he knew my records then too but I never really factor that in to our friendship, he was just a DJ and he bought records.

What about Italo-disco, how big an influence was that on you?

I was listening to this esoteric stuff and Italo-disco definitely falls towards that for me, most of it was so shitty sounding and underground, low budget, mysterious records. So I got pretty deep into that and there was something I listened to that was kind of Italian boogie stuff, like Advance and Rainbow Team that I used to hear on Kiss FM once in a while, I can’t even remember the fucking radio show now but I used to tape it, it was this old school radio show that would be on at midnight on Kiss FM and every once in a while they would get some weird Latin DJ to come in and play and he would mix in some Italo stuff. It was called Kiss Club Classics. That stuff definitely influenced me and then I really got into it owing a large part due to I-F who was just really ahead of his time with his Hot Mix record distribution and records shop and his ‘Mixed Up In The Hague’ CD. My first record in ’94 before it came out was on a cassette from a magazine called Surreal Sound which was based out of Holland or Belgium so I knew about I-F for years before you know ‘Space Invaders’ or ‘Smoking Glass’ or ‘Mixed Up In The Hague’. I think it’s funny though, a lot of that could just be good fortune, I mean despite having good taste, he got a lot of his records from this distributor in Chicago and going into that place was just like a history lesson. I wish I could go back in time because I would have bought so many more records but Walter the guy that ran it was probably the main importer of Italo stuff in Chicago, he had crazy amounts of music and I think that’s were I-F got a lot of his stuff from.

What’s your favourite Italo record?

Ahhh come on! You can’t ask me questions like this… it’s really hard, the moment I am most proud of in music? What’s my favourite record? It’s really impossible for me to narrow it down as there’s records I like a lot, Black Devil Disco Club, that record was massive for me and I don’t even know if you would call that Italo-disco, the guy‘s French. There are big classics for me, ‘Life With You’ by Expansives, is one of my favourites. I mean when I was at high school I was hearing Italo-disco because all the new wave kids were into Depeche Mode and OMD and New order and I was really into that stuff and all that lame and cheesy Italo stuff that people don’t get into, I used to listen to that as well (laughs)

Do you think what you are doing now is in an extension of America’s dance music history?

I don’t really think it’s for me to say.

Do you think most Americans are aware of their country’s impact on the history of dance music?

No…. of course not. I think people who grew up in the disco era or with the twist, people were aware of the power of dance music then, even back to Glen Miller or people that did ballroom dancing.  Dance music was culturally important at different times throughout our history but I think the average American, especially in middle America, doesn’t realise, I don’t even want to say the contribution but just the dominance of black music in our culture! Rock’n’roll  dance music, African American music, just so much comes from there even in pop music history, you know basically everything comes from there in dance music history but I don’t think people think about it. My little sister is from the suburbs but she’s trying to talk like she’s some inner-city black American kid and listens to hip hop and club music. For her it’s just music and culture. The internet and television has just blurred everything into this mess (laughs).

But I don’t think that dance music with the exception of disco and couple of other flights in American history where dancing was an important part of culture was ever a big deal.. For the rocker kids around me it would be a sexual orientation thing, they would say that I was listening to fag music or whatever, New Jersey is fairly diverse so it’s not as if I was in the south or the mid-west where people would think it was a big deal that I was listening to black music, I went to school with black and Asian and Latino kids, all different sorts of people but the macho-rocker thing was really dominant, especially in New Jersey but two towns away was Tee Scott and Zanzibar was in Newark, so there was tons of this gay, black dance music culture going on, but it was worlds away and you weren’t really exposed to it.

Do you find yourself getting depressed with modern dance music and culture?

I used too and now… now I just don’t care that much anymore, which is sad in itself because I feel like at least when I was depressed I cared a bit more. I don’t want to be one of these stuffy old guys that spends all their time wishing it was the way it was way back in the day, I want to stay excited by new music but I just don’t hear as much that I like, but I am open to the idea!

I miss records, miss being able to sell records or buy records from more places, I miss being able to excite people and pull out a record that kids haven’t heard of and ironically now the way to do that with younger crowds is to just to play an overground set of well-known disco records because they are all so busy probably looking on like DJhistory or at set lists from hip DJs. You could go and play a Change record and they’d be like “what is this!” even though it sold over a million copies instead of being some obscure thing that Harvey played or whatever. So I do miss being able to break more new music to people as everyone’s an expert now and can download set-lists from the internet. It’s harder to surprise people with a DJ set.  I’m not totally depressed, I mean I’m glad it’s still going strong and I‘m given the opportunity to DJ around the world and as far as clubs are concerned, when I was younger I used to love going out and to go dancing but I’m sort of an anomaly for dance music, I don’t do drugs, I was never into that side of dance music. I love listening to music on big systems when I went dancing but my favourite thing was always being in the studio and creating, so I am sort of immune to a lot of the ups-and-downs of what’s going on in the outside world. On a practical level if affects me because I’ll see if I am getting more bookings, I know that sounds brutal and kinda cold but you know I don’t go out in New York that much anymore.

Why do you think that New York is no longer what it was in terms of dance music?

It’s become a city for rich people. It’s very expensive to live here, places get gentrified. I moved because I couldn’t stand the hegemony of this gentrification, then again I am not gonna be a total hypocrite here, I benefited from it, I don’t want to jinx myself here but my studio’s never got broken into, I’ve never lost my gear, I’ve never been attacked on the street, it’s not like I crave the New York of the ’80s that I used to see from school bus on field trips or when I used to come into the city with my parents, that was dangerous. I have this really good friend who worked through the time and he is a Russian immigrant, a Russian Jew, and we’ll walk in Times Square and I’ll be thinking this is disgusting, it’s just like a big mall now and he thinks Times Square it’s great. He used to work in UPS on one of the corners loading stuff into trucks and every day he would watch the same group of kids mug people all day, just come over pull someone’s pants down, take their wallet and leave them laying on the sidewalk

A lot of people, especially young kids living in places like Williamsburg or whatever and even people my age to an extent, say, ‘Oh New York was so much better back then,’ and it was in terms of art and excitement but I am not gonna lie and say, ‘I wish there were more drugs more crime,’ it’s just that went hand-in-hand with a lot of the exciting things that were going on. The safer it gets, the safer it gets in terms of art. There’s gonna be more controls and it’s going to be more expensive so you can’t just squat in some building downtown and throw parties or spontaneous art exhibitions. I know it’s hypocritical for me to say there is no benefit, I’ve benefited from the relative safety of New York.

Though overall I agree with the people that mourn the loss of this exciting New York and I do think that’s kind of over forever now. I mean Daniel Wang is very anti New York, he lives in Berlin now and can’t say enough bad things about New York, it’s too expensive, it’s too commercial, it’s boring, people are boring and blah blah blah. I’m different from Danny in that sense, I’ve been coming here my whole life and a lot of  New York that remains – even through the money and the boredom and the lack of art ­– still thrills me.  The Architecture, the roads, you can still find elements of the old New York that always mattered to me, but there’s no question in terms of club life it sucks, especially compared to the way it was.

How hard is it to run an independent record label at the moment?

I mean, well it’s just a mistake… (laughs)

How did Environ come about?

I started it in my dorm room in ’95, I basically put out a couple of records for Dan Curtin and decided I wanted to do it myself and see how it was done. Basically if  I get into something I want to learn all that I can about it, so I felt like the best way to school myself in the music business and even things like the contract writing was because I wanted to put out stuff on my own. I just wanted to be able to do whatever I wanted from the beginning to the end, I guess it was ultimately about control and eventually I started only releasing on Environ and that was as a result of a lot of deals with (laughs) English labels, so I was also driven to it.  It’s not that hard to do, if you’re a reasonably smart and responsible person, actually you don’t even have to be smart, as long as you can keep your shit together you can put out a record so after a while I just didn’t see the point of doing it elsewhere. I generally just like to control things myself, it’s sort of that DIY instinct.

Have you ever had any superstar experiences?

Which way? You mean meeting someone or  being treated that way?

Whichever way you wanna go with it…      

I don’t think I’ve ever been treated that way but I guess I don’t really take that shit too seriously. We’ve been places where we’ve been treated as if we’re important, I mean you feel that way to a degree every time you’re booked for a DJ. I just feel like it’s important to not pay any attention to that, it’s all going to be gone someday and it doesn’t really matter.  The most I think about it is that it’s nice. It’s nice that people care, there’s people that labour in music their whole lives and nobody ever listens to them, they never get a record out, they might just be a piano player in a bar and be way more talented than I am and just through lack of luck or life gets in the way they don’t get heard. So I try not to take any of that other stuff as anything but good luck and often it’s a joke anyway, the whole fame, popularity thing. I’m normally extremely suspicious of it and just don’t trust it.  I feel like there’s a part of me that would like to be in the pop world as a pop star or producer, it appeals to me but sort of  in the way that say Quincy Jones was involved in pop and the way he was viewed, where I feel like his work spoke for him. I’d like people to know me for my work not cos of me, I would rather my work spoke for me.

What are you most proud of musically?

I think probably my first record.  I don’t mean like it was the best music I’ve ever made but transitioning from a kid who always wanted to make music and always wanted to make a record, to someone who had a record out: that was a really exciting moment for me.  I know you’re not supposed to talk about money and all because that changes the purity of the art or at least the creative intention but I remember Dan Curtin giving me a cheque for an advance and I couldn’t believe it.  It didn’t matter what the cheque was for, just that someone liked my music enough to give me money for the privilege of putting it out that blew my mind! After that it’s like anything else that’s exciting, falling in love whatever, it’s really exciting at the beginning and then slowly you acclimate and then suddenly you’re jaded.  I mean I am not saying that it has to go in such a downhill trajectory but for me, there’s nothing like that first record.

It’s a big word but you’d like to leave a legacy?

Yeah… I like it best when people like the music and the only time recognition in a fan way has ever really turned me on is when I see myself in the people who are recognising me. I remember one time with Darshan, I think we were playing in Holland and we were on the street and some kid and his girlfriend walked past and he said “Metro Area?”  And he just looked really happy and just kept on walking but he looked excited and just by the look on his girlfriend’s face I could tell he was a total music dork and she was almost like tolerating him but it was sort of cute because I could tell that she was happy because he was excited that he saw some musician who he liked on the street and that reminded me of me. I used to get so psyched when I would go to a concert when I was younger and either get to meet a band I liked or even just to get near to them. It wasn’t a fan thing, it was that their records were so important to me. So that’s really satisfying, when you see someone who is really into music and you can see that you’ve brought some pleasure to them, that’s exciting but it’s not a fan thing it’s the same feeling as when one of my friends likes a record that I’ve made. You put your work into something and someone noticed and it mattered to them. That’s a pretty huge gift and that’s a really important part of recognition for me.  

© DJhistory, 2011. Interview conducted by Mark Treadwell over the internet on December 20th, 2010.