DJ Mel at Malverde | Friday, July 23rd | 400-B W. 2nd St. | 5PM | Free
DJ Mel is an old-school turntable purist, providing the soundtrack the the best parties in Austin on any given night of the week as he works like a conductor to bring the masses to their feet. A night dancing to his electric, unpretentious style means going home satisfied and sweaty. He’s the man who has provided generations of University of Texas students a proper Hip-Hop education with his weekly Monday night residency at campus dive Nasty’s, an event that will celebrate it’s 14th anniversary in September. His quarterly packed-house Rock the Casbah parties have successfully made Austinites dance since 2001, he’s spent hours digging through record crates as the former Hip-Hop buyer for Waterloo Records, and has helped to curate the Hip-Hop line-up for Lollapalooza 2010 after playing the festival for the last two years. One to always have a full plate, Mel is a regular on the turntables at The Highball, Beauty Bar, and spends his Friday nights in the hanging gardens of 2ND Street’s Malverde.
Musically inclined from childhood, Mel found his niche spinning records at a young age and crowds responded to his ability to blend varying genres with ease with a style all his own, without ever creating a lull in the party. “My mom forced me and my sister to take guitar and piano lessons a child, which I was not really into at the time. It wasn’t fun being stuck in a room with an instructor all summer, who also happened to teach swimming, so she had a giant pool in her backyard, and all I could think about was that I’d rather be going swimming.” Mel learned more than a little bit from forced summers spent indoors and continued throughout high school to perform in marching band, take music theory classes, and practice the trumpet. His good feel for music segwayed into a move towards collecting and spinning records as a radio DJ.
Mel’s mixing is a flawless blend of differing genres, making leaps across seemingly unrelated tracks to create a fluid movement and structure of sound always full of surprises and with no two sets sounding the same. “When I began, I had somewhat an idea of composition, but the actual DJing part was really hard — beat-matching is important, and once you get over that hump, then that’s like half the battle.”
His Rock the Casbah events focus on 80′s music (the next one will be on August 28th honoring Michael Jackson’s birthday) and nights at Nasty’s mean more straight Hip-Hop, but Mel knows the key to a successful party is blending what people know and love in new, interesting ways. He owns countless records which fill his garage, house, and every space in-between. His digital library constantly grows daily as Mel researches the music he plays. His style reflects this devotion to music knowledge. “Just like everyone else in the transition from childhood into being an adult — I’ve gone through 4 or 5 different music phases — be it Goth kid to Metal lover to Hipster. I’ve had phases where I’ve was into New Wave, then and got all into Indie Rock and the whole Seattle thing, and then loved dance music. The thing is, even though I was into all that stuff, I was really into Hip-Hop the entire time. I think that having all of these phrases — be it Rock or Disco that my parents loved –made my style musically represent each genre, but my style always centers on Hip-Hop. The way I DJ is technical, to where regardless of the genre, I can play it convincingly, never sounding like an outsider. After you DJ for a long time, you’re able to play multiple genres with it all making sense.”
His commitment to musical diversity correlates to his success in becoming Austin’s most well-known DJ. Mel’s watched the Austin scene change over the past 15 years as downtown clubs transitioned from live bands every night of the week to the explosion of regular DJ nights, as technology made collecting and playing music more accessible to individuals of varying skill levels when it comes to determining a party soundtrack.
“I remember when I first moved here in 1994, I had the skill set to DJ, but when I first moved to Austin, I remember walking up to these promoters, introducing myself, and asking how I could play events. They’d say, ‘Why don’t you give me a mixtape, and we’ll go from there.’ I was eager, and had to constantly practice to be interesting enough for people to want to hear. Now, we’re at an interesting time, there are a lot of good DJs in town, but I think that the art of DJing has been watered down due to technology. Similar to what has happened with photography — 20 years ago, you really had to know how to shoot photos, but now you can have your iPhone, and take a phone and make it look however you wish, or make it look like a Polaroid. The same goes for DJing, as in 10 or 15 years ago when 6th Street only had live bands in bars, but now there are DJs at every bar, and 1995 to 2010 is a completely different game. With that said, in order to do well as a DJ is to actually be a DJ — which means to learn the art of it, see who did it before you, see who laid the ground. Playing an iTunes playlist in a club is one thing, but DJing (meaning buying records and digging for songs) is more of a lifestyle.”
Mel knows how to play to a crowd, and his ability to feel out what a room wants to hear is an impressive talent he has honed over time. For his newest residency at Malverde, Mel’s sets are dictated by the beautiful setting the bar creates.
“For playing at Malverde, I think that gig represents more of what I do in general as a DJ — the owners told me: ‘We want you to do what you want to do,’ and they want to have music that compliments the space with the sounds. It depends on the night. Each week can be a little different, but I’m given free reign to play whatever the night brings. It can be more chill or low energy, but every week I make it something completely different, and the music reflects that.”
Seeing DJ Mel at Malverde on Friday, July 23 promises to be a great mix of old a new sounds. Technology has changed, the club scene evolves, but Mel remains a constant source for innovative music, and watching him serves as a testament to the art of spinning a record. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter for other show dates.
