Research, Seattle (07/02/25)
I arrived in Seattle last Wednesday evening after a rather long journey from Lisbon that featured a layover in Ponta Delgada in the Azores and a night at my sister’s in Brooklyn. It’s an eight hour time difference in total, which doesn’t sound like much more than the five hour difference in NYC but meant I was wide awake at 4am on Thursday morning. I spent that day doing touristy stuff (Pikes Market, Seattle Art Museum) and hanging out with Sharlese, who I’ve written about before (here and here) and who I warmed up for at Outra Cena back in November. En route from dinner to her place, where we had a bit of a DJ practice before Friday’s gig (she would be closing the night after me), we stopped by Pony, a gay bar where Sharlese runs a monthly night called Audiodrome that also broadcasts live on Intergalactic FM. From the outside the place genuinely looks like a bus stop, but you walk in the door to be greeted by disco lighting, pin-up hunks on the wall and cocks hanging from the ceiling. Audiodrome was scheduled for Saturday night, but sadly I wouldn’t be able to attend because I had to head down to San Francisco. I heard the party was fabulous.
Like I said, me and Sharlese were playing on Friday at a night called Research. Run by Nick and Eileen, the party is a bona fide DIY job, with little to no outward promotion (you request to join as a member in order to get a ticket) and, this time at least, taking place in an office building that during the day houses a holistic gut health clinic. Nick and Eileen spent several hours on Thursday and Friday taping up the doors and windows in the building, not just to prevent them from rattling (though that is something I truly appreciated while playing) but also to limit the damage done by the copious amounts of fog needed to disguise the fact the party was happening in an office. But I wouldn’t know about this until I arrived at the venue on Friday night.
During the day on Friday I met up with Bobby ‘nohup’, who soundtracked my post-shift epiphany at Honcho Campout last summer. They took me on a walk up to the top of a water tower in Volunteer Park, which affords a 360 view out over Lake Washington to the east and Puget Sound to the west, snowy mountains in the distance. We hit the park’s botanical greenhouse and then wandered along Millionaire’s Row before jetlag smacked me round the face again and I crashed into a long afternoon nap. This was a period I had allocated to some final playlist preparation, so when I woke up at 8pm I was a little freaked out about how little time I had left. From my outsider perspective, the musical vibe at Research was a bit of a black box. I had looked at the party’s list of previous guests and the connecting thread between Nick and Eileen’s choices seemed to be “good DJs” and nothing more specific. I listened to a couple of Nick’s own sets on soundcloud, including this one from the 2023 edition of The Lodge, a mini festival he helps run out of the city. It’s pretty heads-down driving club stuff until 38 mins in he drops ‘The Ultimate Warlord’, and in the final half an hour it really opens up. As soon as I heard that I started to feel a bit more grounded. The practice session with Sharlese the night before had also helped, as we vibed off each other’s choices and geeked out about Razormaid.
So I made a 70-song playlist, with a longer auxillary playlist titled ‘Jan 25’ where I dumped a lot of recent additions just in case. Many of the tracks in both playlists were from records I’d ripped over the preceding weeks. In fact, I should actually have started this story in mid-January, when I got back from a weekend in Madrid with a borrowed 2000-piece jigsaw and the intention to complete it before my trip. As soon as I started laying out the edge pieces on my upstairs desk I realised this was the perfect opportunity for the awkward and tedious task that is ripping records. Unlike trying to work or read, which is always a pain because you have to get up every 5 or 10 minutes, doing a jigsaw is the perfect background activity, especially when you have a chair as uncomfortable as mine. My back actively thanked me for the regular breaks from craning over tupperwares full of similarly-coloured pieces. And soon enough my ‘Rips to process’ folder was brimming with roughly chopped wavs to be put through my very low-tech ‘process’: removing obvious clicks and pops and normalising in Audacity.
My focus while ripping was initially on tunes for Bonanza Festival, which I’m playing at this coming weekend, and of course I was trying to only rip things that weren’t available digitally. I started in my 80s synth pop/rock cube before moving on to italo, Chicago house and Detroit and UK techno, and even fit a bit of UK garage in there too (more on that later). When it came to making the playlist for Research, I ended up pulling a bit from all of those now-digital cubes, figuring that the musical brief was open and I could take it in several directions. I knew that with the rips I would be fighting the eternal battle when it came to mixing them with digital tracks — of trying to maintain the energy level between significantly differently-mastered music — but I felt up to the challenge and was willing to push the EQs to make it work.
I always organise my digital playlists like a record bag, so this one went:
80s b-boy electro
Chicago drum tracks and derivatives
Detroit and UK machine funk
House
UK garage
Breaks and electro
Bass
Techno
Dark disco and synth pop
‘Injeção’ by Deise Tigrona
And when it came down to it, that’s pretty much the story of the three hours I played. But let me set the scene first. I arrived at the venue around 10.30pm, dropped off by my taxi in the car park of a big complex and following the official instructions to locate the entrance, tucked away round the back of a building and up some nondescript stairs. Eileen and Nick had rigged up a long curtain that masked off the dancefloor from the entrance, so you had to walk down this corridor along the side of the room and enter the floor from the back. This, plus some camo netting, just the right number of techno tubes and the aforementioned copious fog, completely disguised an otherwise standard office space. The two speaker stacks, which had been brought all the way from Portland, barely fit vertically in the space. Warming up was Drake aka .dmp, who, from the moment I walked in to the moment I took over two hours later, played good tune after good tune, taking us from 100bpm up to a sensible 121. The vibe was alternately sludgy and groovy, with unambiguously classic drum sounds but a sustained mysterious atmosphere, and by the end of his set the dance floor was already filled up and moving. I was in an excellent mood.
I opened with Paul Hardcastle’s ‘The Wizard Pt 2’, a long-time staple of mine and definitely superior to Part 1, which for many years was employed as the Top Of The Pops theme tune. After that big opener I wanted to have a good stretch of funky drums and squiggly acid, without too many hooks, but there came a point after eight or nine tunes when I knew a punch was needed. I reached for Danelle Dax’s ‘Cold Sweat’, a bombastic tune with a big vocal and crazy sound effects that I know Jane Fitz plays occasionally (I’d love to see that!). Sure enough it elicited a few whoops from the dancefloor, and there were more when I followed it up with the Tommy Musto & Frankie Bones version of Lisa Lee’s ‘When Can I Call You’. I should have capitalised on this momentum with a few more rolling bangers, but me being me I got distracted by the idea of playing ‘Harmonise Me’ by Ubik. I knew as I was cueing it up that its general sparseness and thin high end were no match for the Lisa Lee tune, moreover since it was a rip from my 1991 four-tracks-a-side vinyl. And sure enough, as I mixed it in I felt the energy in the room drop. (Of course, now I go to look it up, I see that a digital remaster was released on bandcamp several years ago. But even so I’m not sure it would have stood up to the other tune.)
I say I felt the energy drop. The fact is I couldn’t really see anything: this was one of those booths and rooms where the fog and light rendered even the front row of dancers almost completely invisible. Occasionally, when the techno tubes flashed, I could make out silhouettes, and every time that happened and I saw a body moving, a shape being thrown, it reassured me that something was happening. But even without the visual cue you can sometimes tell when the energy has shifted, and this felt like one of those moments. I made myself pause for a moment, breathed, and decided that rather than switch course again back to more straightforward energy-giving fare, the best thing to do would be to insist a little on this vibe, make it clear it wasn’t a total mistake. Luckily I had just the right tune, ‘Everything (No Statues)’ off Nexus 21’s Mind Machines LP. This album was also recorded in 1991, between Kevin Saunderson’s KMS studios in Detroit and the Network Records studios in my hometown of Birmingham, but was shelved when the duo created Altern8. Now it’s been unearthed and finally released, and it contains a handful of those kinds of tunes from that era that bridge bleep, house and something stranger. I mixed it in and killed the Ubik tune. The track had drive, but also a hell of a lot of space, and my sense that the room had lost energy now shifted into the sense that people were, it seemed, concentrating.
The sound system at this party was very, very good, and the deep bass gave the room a fuzzy sound without too much rattling (thanks to Nick and Eileen’s prep work). At the moment just past two minutes into ‘Everything (No Statues)’, when the bassline plays unadorned, I couldn’t hear a whisper from the dancefloor but I knew that people were there, moving. This slightly surreal sensation returned about 20 minutes later when I played an Appleblim tune from last year that seems to have been completely ignored. ‘Wah Tin’ has moments of almost silence where only the hi hats play out for several bars, and again I didn’t hear even a murmur. But then the bass would come back in and I’d hear a whoop, and sense the movement out beyond the fog. I can’t remember the last time I had this feeling of the room being so quiet and focussed on the sound. It was amazing.
There were some further struggles. As predicted, I continued to battle the energy gap between some of the rips and digital tracks. I played two tunes I’d ripped from Rob Gordon’s Black Knight EP and both times I had to go a bit wild on the EQs to reset people’s ears for how they sounded. But there were some counter-examples: rRoxymore & DJ Plead’s ‘Celestial City’ is a recent digital release that is as quiet as a pre-master, while my rip of Spacetime Continuum’s remix of NIN’s ‘The Perfect Drug’ sounded satisfyingly fat. (Incidentally, that latter tune got an immediate nod of recognition from Nick as he was passing through the booth, which surprised me given it’s a bit of a niche pick, but for that very reason gave me a feeling of pride that that was the tune to get the nod.) Not long after I decided to indulge myself for a moment and dropped the aforementioned ‘Injeção’, which M.I.A. and Diplo famously sampled on ‘Bucky Done Gun’. (This was a version taken off a Mr Bongo compilation that in its final 30 seconds has full-on audio artefacts far worse than any of my rips. Digital does not always mean cleaner.)
It was around this point, two hours in, that I started really needing to pee, and rather than just getting it over with I decided to wait it out a bit longer, which was an error. All sorts of things can lead you to getting stuck in the DJ doldrums, but needing to pee is one of the common ones. I was having an electro moment with Warlock’s ‘RD1’ off the recent art-aud ten year comp, and I mixed out pretty shoddily into S-Max’s ‘400 Ton Booty’. I felt the energy dip again and, dealing as I was with the added pressure in my bladder, rather than pausing and breathing like I’d done much earlier, this time I panicked and decided it was the right time for UK garage. To be honest, outside the UK itself, there is never really a right time for UK garage, so to reach for it in a time of particular stress is more than a bit reckless. I felt like I’d taken a wrong turning and didn’t know how to get back. The only thing I could think to do was pee, so I stuck on an 8 minute house tune and scuttled off to the toilets.
Of course, when I got back to the booth I felt not just relieved but also excited to tackle the final 40 minutes of the set. I could fix the mess I’d created. I thought about Sharlese coming on next, and how neither UK garage nor, frankly, straight-up house were the right note to leave things on. Paul Rutherford (of Frankie Goes To Hollywood fame) came to the rescue, his wacky acid house anthem ‘Get Real (Happy House Mix)’ establishing the mood I wanted to hand over to Sharlese, and also providing a useful bridge to the Combination Mix of Depeche Mode’s ‘Get The Balance Right’. I knew she would approve of that one, and sure enough she told me from the side of the booth that it was one of her all-time favourites. Job done.
So it was 3.30am and Sharlese took over. I danced a lot, thrilled by her selections and energy and indulging in the company of the dancers who had previously only been shadows glimpsed through the fog. People were really going for it, focussed on the music, locked in. Sharlese played a few tunes I recognised - CC:DISCO!’s ‘Yes Papi (Miami Daddy Theme)’, an edit of Dionne’s ‘Come Get My Lovin’’, DJ Split’s ‘Fear Factory’ — but mostly it was stuff I hadn’t heard before and simply really liked. I remember a special stretch going into the final hour when she dropped a couple of breaksy tunes with what sounded like Shoegaze-style vocals: they matched the now dreamy vibe on the floor, as the last of us continued to sway.
I stayed until the music stopped at 6am, even though I had to leave for the airport at 8.30am. The party was just too good. I haven’t even described the rest of it — the side chill room with a 90s nature documentary put through a filter; the upstairs space that looked like a meeting room but with a neon light in the corner; the toilets that were basically the only warm spot in the entire place. Research have hit on that magic formula of not having to advertise their parties too heavily, relying more on a regular crowd of people who seem to know and respect each other. The focus was on sound and dancing, people were open to different kinds of music (maybe they even liked the UKG and I was just in my head), and the care in the production translated into care among the people attending. I was and am very impressed, and feel like it has put me in a good mental space for the rest of this tour. Thank you to Nick, Eileen, Sharlese, Drake, and everyone else who contributed. Check it out if you’re in Seattle!
If you’re in any of these places, this is where I’m playing over the coming weekends:
14/2 - Bonanza Festival, Santa Marta
21/2 - Paradisco, Bogotá (w/ Leeon)
27/2 - Bicho, Tepoztlán
28/2 - Discos Movimiento, Mexico City
29/2 - Roca Hi-Fi, Mexico City (w/ NAP)
Say hi!