ZapTown

Each month ZapTown highlights DJs from around Indiana to bring you not only exclusive mixes to showcase each DJ’s unique talent and identity, but to provide you with a proper resource and guide on each individual DJ. This month, we celebrate the work of Sea Monkey.

Link: http://www.myspace.com/seamonkey82

Listen to an exclusive ZapTown Mixdown by Sea Monkey (1:11:03)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (0.0KB)

You’ve been known to champion styles of Drum ‘N’ Bass that haven’t received much play in Indiana such as Atmospheric, Liquid, and Sambass.  What kind of reception have these less established styles received?

Overall, I think all of the different styles I play have been pretty well received.  The music that got me interested in Drum & Bass was actually of the dark, aggressive variety, but it didn’t take long for me to realize how prominent and over-represented it was, and when that’s the sole flavor of Drum & Bass being played over the course of the night, it’s no longer intense and crazy, but becomes a sterile, repetitive caricature of itself – who can play the tunes with the most epic drops, the most menacing stabs, the spookiest horror movie samples.  There are so many different moods to explore within Drum & Bass, and I think there are others who recognize that need for variety just as much as I do.

You have a high attention to detail in regard to your mixing technique. Many DJ’s prioritize Turntablism (manual manipulation of records) and track selection over solid mixing. Why did you choose to develop this method over others? Are there downsides?

It may be a bit of an oversimplification to put it this way, but as I see it, there are two types of mixing – active and passive.  In active mixing, a DJ will try to show you all of the things they can do with the turntables, mixer, and/or other hardware they are using to perform.  In passive mixing, a DJ strives to blend tracks together as seamlessly as possible, making their own presence transparent, and putting all of the focus on the tracks themselves rather than what he or she does with them.  I don’t believe that either is right or wrong, and I think that the style of music one plays often lends itself to one or the other.  Much of the music I play is very layered and melodic, so it doesn’t make sense to do a lot of quick cutting, scratching, or beat juggling.  While I admire and respect the talent that goes into active mixing, for me, setting the mood and smoothly transitioning between tracks takes precedence over flashy showmanship.  The downside of this is that many people expect watching the DJ to be as entertaining an experience as listening to what the DJ is playing.

I’ve heard you spin sets that have shown a progression not just in tempo but in mood, style, and sub-genre. It’s almost as if you’re telling a musical story without lyrics. This is in direct conflict with the approach that many DJ’s take where they simply try to respond to the crowd. What are the pros and cons to a conceptual method?

I feel like most DJs put a lot of importance into feeling out the crowd and trying to respond with the appropriate music.  For me, DJing has always been about finding the music that I’m passionate about and sharing it with others.  While I do consider the crowd I’m going to be playing to and how my set will fit within the context of the rest of the lineup, I usually have a pretty specific idea of the arrangement of tracks in my set before I start.  Being a crowdpleaser is easy and only requires loading up your bag or your hard drive with whatever is popular.  For me, it’s much more gratifying to treat a DJ set as a composition and take the willing amongst the crowd on a musical journey.

You come from a generation of DJ’s that are pre-Serato (software that allows DJ’s to spin digital files instead of records). How do you feel about the advent of a generation of DJ’s that have never touched vinyl?

Serato is kind of a double-edged sword as far as what it’s done for DJ-ing.  On the whole, the idea that you can carry your entire music collection on a hard drive and manipulate it just like vinyl is great.  However, DJs downloading low bit rate and/or transcoded MP3s, or worse, rips of tunes from MySpace and YouTube, and using them to DJ with is an unfortunate side-effect of the digital revolution.  Another gripe I’ve had is that since the advent of Serato, I have been to a lot more electronic music events where there was dead air between DJs as they hooked up, and battled issues with, their hardware.  For example, I’ve shown up to gigs where a Serato box was hooked up with the intention of multiple DJs using it, but it lacked an AC adapter, and without a laptop to power it via USB, this left me unable to play vinyl without completely unhooking all of the cords and plugging the turntables directly into the mixer.  I’m still a purely vinyl DJ myself, but I acknowledge that I have an irrational obsession with an obsolete medium.  I did buy Final Scratch way back when it required its own Linux partition and was incredibly buggy.  I only used it for one live performance and had it crash mid-set before deciding to get rid of it.  Beyond the fact that it was an unreliable product at the time, it just wasn’t as fun as using actual vinyl to me.  Also, I felt a bit guilty, as it was the only time I have ever played out tracks that I didn’t legitimately own in a live performance.

I view the Drum ‘N’ Bass community in Indiana as being one of the purest scenes because of the fact that it has a higher percentage of DJ’s and producers per capita than most music-based communities. Most Drum ‘N’ Bass enthusiasts that I’ve encountered actively create and contribute. This is different than most genres where the fans mainly listen and attend shows but don’t make or spin music. How does this affect the development of the music itself? Do new styles and sub-genres spring up quicker because of this?

It’s difficult to assess the rate of evolution of Drum & Bass in relation to other genres, or to attribute that evolution to a greater involvement in the Drum & Bass scene amongst its enthusiasts, but I will say that 2009 was wonderful for Drum & Bass.  Three of my favorite albums of the year, amongst all genres of music, were three very different styles of Drum & Bass.  Those were Bop – Clear Your Mind, Fanu - Homefree, and Consequence – Live for Never. All three really showed that Drum & Bass *is* still evolving and that there is plenty of new territory to be explored.

For popular music, it seems as though there is a balance between the crowd and the DJ. The DJ may introduce the crowd to new sounds but ultimately they can’t play out songs that are too much of a departure from what’s established or the crowd will stop supporting them. Does the crowd/creator dynamic that I mentioned above affect this relationship? Is it easier to introduce radically different tunes to the Drum ‘N’ Bass community?

I feel like the Indianapolis Drum & Bass scene has become quite varied and open to new and interesting styles of Drum & Bass.  I think the minimal and atmospheric styles present the biggest challenge for DJs and crowds alike, because they require you to approach Drum & Bass more as thinking and relaxing music than simply as dance music.  The Consequence and Bop albums I mentioned above are perfect examples of this.  They aren’t albums that make you want to throw your hands in the air, shake your ass, and jump around.  Rather, when I hear music like that, I tend to want to close my eyes and let the music take me somewhere else.

For a long time, I saw you take the responsibility of archiving most of the EDM (Electronic Dance Music) events that you attended both through photographs and by recording people’s sets. Did this benefit the community in the way you thought it would? Can you describe the importance of documentation in this context?

I’ve received many thanks and even a few donations to help maintain the costs of running the site over the years, so I’d like to think that it has benefited the community.  When I started, I really just wanted to do anything I could to help support electronic music in Indianapolis.  Also, since I’m not a terribly sociable person, while at events, the camera was what I could hide behind when I wasn’t behind a pair of turntables.  It was a lot easier to remain active within the scene and attend several events per week when I was working nights.  After my work schedule changed, it really started to wear on me, and after two and a half years of helping run Broke(n) Tuesdays at The Melody Inn, I desperately needed a break from it all to be a hermit for a while, as evidenced by the significant decline in the volume of pictures and recordings over the last year or two.

Induceonline.com has long been known as the focal point for photos, songs, and DJ sets from Indy’s Drum n Bass community. Are there any plans to update it or create a web 2.0 presence for it using contemporary Social Media platforms/services?

I’ve never been great with design.  The Induce brand was actually created by my friend Alex many years ago, and initially, he had a lot of big ideas about managing DJs, Artists, Lighting & Sound Techs, and various other projects, so he hired someone who created a nice site design incorporating pages for all of these services.  However, he went on to pursue other things and I started using the site to help promote any and all Indianapolis electronic music, Induce affiliated or not.  Since most of the site design was irrelevant at that point, I took it all down and replaced it with the very simple folder structure that exists today.  Some time around 2006, I think, I turned all of the picture folders into PicLens galleries (which took a painfully long time), but beyond that, nothing’s changed except the content.  I don’t have any plans to update the appearance of the site, but if some ambitious site designer wanted to do it free of charge, I’d be willing to see what they had in mind.

Any performances, releases, mixes, or anything coming up that people should watch out for?

Upcoming Gigs:

Aug. 31st 9:30PM – 11:30 PM
The Melody Inn
3826 North Illinois Street
Indianapolis, IN 46208-4017