Whirlwind Tour of San Francisco's Underground Music with DJ Hax

Fate works in mysterious ways. Unsure how chance weaves its way into our lives, inevitably controlling all unseen actions, we continue unknowingly going about our business. It's only when taking an objective look back that the wonders which are left up to chance can be seen. Truly, there are opportunities lurking behind every corner, as I would soon find out.

During a business recent trip to San Francisco, I happened upon a dubstep show outside of Berkeley college. World class dub DJ's gathered in the lower levels of the restaurant that doubled as a music hall while upstairs attendees could find juicy breakbeats. The heavy bass wobble echoed through all speakers in the dubstep room as college kids awkwardly tried to dance to music with a slow rhythm and bouncy backbeat. Here, Erin Jale and Nit Grit would demonstrate their sublime talent at mixing and original tracks that practically buckle the knees. Upstairs was slightly less crowded for reasons unbeknownst to me. DJ Hax and DJ Ixnee laid down the sickest variety of high energy breakbeats and house around, demonstrating their keen ability to manipulate underground tracks into music which implores you to dance. As more people trickled in, the dance floors began to flood with gyrating bodies.

"Why aren't more people dancing?" I asked Hax about the few people who remained seated at the dance event. "These are great beats."

"That's what I'm saying!" He responded while twiddling knobs on his sound board, then turns to a petite girl nearby with a Bill Idol-esque blonde mohawk. "This guy gets it."

When inquiring where further dope beats could be heard, Hax and his partner, DJ Ixnee, informed me of a similar upcoming event which promised a taste of some of the best electronic music the bay had to offer. The show called Hookahdome was a fundraiser for this year's Burning Man and their similarly titled camp. Taking place at one of the hottest San Francisco clubs, 1015 Folsom, I eagerly anticipated the event.

The club was nothing short of awe-inspiring. Swirling colors lined the ceiling with color changing LEDs, forming the image of spectral clouds that lit up the room in a soothing, pseudo-psychedelic ambiance. The screen projection on one wall, which also appeared inside the restrooms, displayed a video of incomprehensible graphics including cartoons, morphing shapes, and nude dancers. Upstairs, in the dubstep room, the wide dance floor stretched for the entire room save for a few well place couches and two poles ripe for club goers to get up on and strut their stuff. Downstairs played a variety of Arabic inspired downtempo sounds to match the hookah lounge theme. Lacey throw pillows piled in the center of the room made for recliners for people to relax on whilst smoking flavored tobaccos with hookahs.

A technical difficulty set back the flow of music for a little while, however, it wasn't long before the dance tunes were in full effect. DJ Hax started things off with a set that was even better than the one I had witnessed the night before. His glitchy builds and breaks got the party started early and everyone to the dance floor. Utilizing a finesse touch of bass and four-on-the-floor inspired breakbeats, Hax creates a unique blend of highly danceable mixes. With electronic dance music surging forth from the speakers at full capacity, even the bartenders couldn't help but dance along.

Determined to give me a San Francisco music treatment worthy of the city, Hax, Ixnee, few friends and I depart 1015 and make way for Mighty, a dance club down the street, where we catch an emerging act called Love and Light. Consisting of two DJs, Probiotic and 2centers hailing from Reno, NV, Love and Light formed only in March of 2010 to bring dubstep to a new level with bass heavy beats, well timed glitches, huge kicks, and a dash of funk. Their performance was in the tiny back room of the club was nothing short of spectacular as they vomited the sickest beats around all over the audience; despite not being played on the best sound system, the quality of the music more than made up for it. With them was a DJ who calls himself Marty Party from New York who's collaborative efforts with Love and Light bring down the house as he delivers a more synth oriented sound with downtempo plateaus and bass kicks, adding a glitch-hop feel to his dubstep .

Back at the 1015, Cheb I Sabbah was midway into his set. Employing international drums, horns, and vocals, this DJ provides a unique experience for listeners to dance and get down to music you wouldn't otherwise hear anywhere else. Radiohiro from Chicago stepped into the booth later in the night to provide high energy breaks and dubstep with unyielding backbeats with tenacity not unlike the running of the bulls. His performance style kept people with zero energy left in those late hours on the dance floor because, regardless of your motivation, not moving to this music was an impossible sin.

As the night wound down and the venue staff began to kick us out, energy and a lust for dance music was still very high. My new friends and I withdrew to a mansion in the Berkeley hills for an after party. Climbing up the massive forefront of stairs into the house built by entirely by its owner revealed a very comfortable, cozy environment for an interview, among other things.

Meandering around its halls one could almost forget the fleeting recollection of why one was there in the first place. In the carved out lower levels of the house we sit on the bed discussing everything that is life, love, and music. As I convince Hax that it's time to go upstairs to do the interview in a less crowded place, he acknowledges that he'll be right up. When I get to the kitchen, and after fixing myself a drink, I can't help but notice that I am still alone. Upon returning to the room I find Ixnee bent over the threshold and Hax spanking her with a bullwhip. The both smile with guilt when they see me.

"I don't know how this happened." He admits.

"Talk about getting easily distracted." I say, and decide it's best to begin the interview before the procrastination gets out of hand, or worse.

Hax goes into detail, reminiscing about the days leading up to him first becoming a DJ. "I first was exposed to the art somewhere around 1996, when CDs really started to encroach on Vinyl's territory. I really seriously took up the hobby right around 99 or '00." Hax tells me that what originally got him into making music was a natural progression from making mixtapes for his friends as a kid. "Then the love of the art of how the DJs were able to run a dance floor so well at clubs I'd frequent. DJs, in my opinion, are just another form of musical performer. Granted they aren't always playing their own music, but I've found that lately more and more of the DJ's flavor comes out each time they edit or play their own tracks in their sets. The unique versions of songs you really love being played and driving you to dance; there really isn't much like it."

When asked what equipment Hax uses during his performances, he simply replies, "Lots." He adds. "I really want an iPad though. It has a lot of applications that are great for DJing or playing music live. I can't recall the specific names of the apps right now. I've seen people do some really cool stuff where they're DJing and they would go out into the crowd and continue DJing while they were operating the dance floor from their iPad. Essentially the reason the iPad is really cool is because you're looking at a really novel piece of technology that allows you to interact with information in a new way. It allows you to interact with music that would be more difficult to get to by other means. For example if I had the ability to have a capacity multitouch interface. Wait. Let me explain." Hax digs through a satchel by his feel and pulls out a small, gray interface with a few dials. "In my DJ rig I use a laptop and this interface. This is a prototype from M Audio when they started delving into the idea of doing a mini DJ interface. Circa 2002, 2003ish. I used to work for this company. Essentially I use this as the DJ mixer that one would use. None of these knobs have a real function.

"It's like a big paperweight." I remark.

"It's like a big paperweight." Hax repeats. "But when you connect the USB to something you can assign these knobs, high mids and low. Volume controls and crossfader of course. I love it. I hate it. I've been using it for how many years now?" As I pick up the device I can't help but notice it's complete lack of weight.

"This is light. Do you keep your lunch in here?" I laugh.

Hax bursts out into laughter. "I know, right! This is one of the first models to come from the plant in Korea and they through it at tech support in M Audio and were like, 'can you use this?' and of course I could use it! I would love to have something that would do these very few things that would only entice me to want to have more control. The naughty nightmare of trying to play for you what I have in my head becomes very possible if you have the right circumstances and the right amount of control and the right tools than you can hear what's going on in my head, but your limited by something that only has so many functions. So when you go to try and play music, you will get angry. You run out of things to do with it even though you hear in your head the things you want to do."

I ask Hax about other music production software, such as Ableton Live. "Live is a fantastic tool. I'm in the process of learning it as well as I can. Basically anyone DJing who isn't using turntables is using Live unless their using their PC as a record crate. It's good for DJs and music production. I don't use it, I use Cubebase. It's like the difference between Photoshop and Illustrator. In 1987 I got my first midi sequencing software." He responds. "Then I got Cubebase and I ended up working for Steinberg, who makes Cubebase. I was an evangelist for them at trade shows. This was before they completely recoded the entire engine, like 2001ish. I did a lot of product demos and set up people's studios. For example, Kevin Haskins of Bauhaus was a friend of mine and I set up most of their studio gear. Charlie Clouser of Nine Inch Nails had a house in the Hollywood hills where I helped set up his studio."

"In the audio world, pretty much anything you can do with one program you can do with any program. But the interface and the way you interact with the music is different. I learned how to create music from my father who is an audio engineer in New York in the 60s and 70s with Phil Ramon. Him and my dad and Donny Hon were A&R recording in New York. They recorded thousands and thousands of albums, but he taught me how to hear music. I took that and applied it to the rest of my life."

My inquiries of Hax's father seem to leave him a little unsettled. "When I was eight years old my dad would sit me in a chair blindfolded and play orchestrations for me. He would stand behind me and say to me, 'Point to the French horn' and 'Point to the strings section'. So at an early age I developed this amazing ability to isolate and pick apart individual music pieces." Hax notes that this unique ability for musical recognition frustrates him at times.

Hax has produced quite a bit of music over the years, though most of his passion has been in remixing and production. "I'm working on a number of tracks right now, some on my own, some with Ixnée, and some others. Personally I find it more rewarding to take other people's idea and work them into something else. I enjoy remixes."

"So you enjoy plagiarism?" I jeer.

"Actually, a very good friend of mine had a word entered into the dictionary called plagiarythm." He explains. "It was founded by a gentleman by the name of Trademark Gunderson and the Evolution of Control Committee, who is essentially the founder of mash-ups. When you try and take something and make it your own it becomes plagiarythm."Hax's tells me that his style of production is to sit on an idea of awhile before hatching it out and playing it with some virtual instruments in Cubebase.

Planning to release his own content soon, Hax has ran into a small dilemma. "The problem with a lot of the work I do, since I do a lot of remixes and work on other people's material it sort of precludes my time and availability to put together a set of my own stuff. Even when I was putting out music for myself with other bands it was impossible for me to make my own stuff and put it out. With current technology, with something like Soundcloud, you have the ability to make music and put it up and have the world comment on it immediately. But yes, I plan on releasing an EP later this year. " An admirer of Sound Cloud, Hax publishes some of his content and the occasional DJ mix at soundcloud.com/hax. "I can't release a remix version of someone else's song. The original stuff I'm doing isn't easy to get to because I'm doing so much more of the stuff meant for live performances, which can never be release on an album. But you don't want to make money by recording music, you want to make money by performing music."

"Don't you have to establish a fan base for that?" I ask.

"It helps." He answers. "It isn't as much of a fan base that's important than it is to just have people in front of you when you play. They don't need to be your fans. They just need to hear what you're putting down. And if they like it, they're going to like it, and chances are that they've never heard what you're about to put down, and that's what makes it interesting."

When describing his own performance style, Hax thinks carefully. "Style of performance is a hard thing to describe. The styles of music that I like to play, though - from uptempo breaks and electro house to midtempo or chill breaks, even the occasional dubstep set. I guess I like to play the music that I love to listen to, and orchestrate a set so the tracks blend melodically, rhythmically and energetically. There are a lot of favorite producers that I inspire to their greatness, like Trevor Horn for example. He was in the Buggles, and before that, Yes. He was also a part of The Art of Noise. He is my favorite producer of all time. I aspire to do stuff like he has put down."

"And yet, it's still electronic music." I point out.

"Exactly. Which is where it gets interesting because in a lot of electronic music there doesn't seem to be the human element of when people played actual instruments."

"You're old school, aren't you Hax." I observe.

"I don't know if I would go that far, but I've been around it enough. Sure, why not?" Hax responds.

The underground music scene is really varied and complex in not only large cities such as San Francisco where music communities thrive, but also globally. "There is a lot of really interesting work being done in some of the areas associated with Glitch Hop, Dubstep and Breaks. Some of the acts that I'm really excited to see this summer are Love and Light, Tipper, Bil Bless, and Radiohiro & MC Zulu. They always bring something new."

When asked about where Hax's performances can usually be caught, he tells me, "Ixnée and I have a monthly at Blakes (Berkeley) with the Gruntworthy crew. The next one is scheduled for August 18th. After that is Burning Man, and we're definitely playing a couple shows out there. The fun thing about underground electronic music is that the fan base isn't a commercial thing, and this music doesn't go down in commercial clubs very well, so you aren't going to hear us playing at Ruby Skye anytime soon. The fringe elements of the electronic music scene, which is where some of the more fundamentally cool ideas come from, it's fostered in the smaller, intimate places. We [Hax and Ixnee] came here [San Francisco] from Chicago last October."

"This is an incubation period." Ixnee adds from across the room.

"Since then we've been trying to inch our way into the scene, much like any other aspiring DJs. It's difficult to break into even though we had something established in Chicago." Hax adds.

"It's a completely different scene here." Ixnee says.

Hax moved to Chicago in 1999 because of the music scene that was happening there. "I was completely enthralled with the Industrial music going on there, like Ministry and Pigface. That sort of guitar, bass, industrial semi-electronic music that's fund to get your anger out on the dance floor. When I saw the industrial scene begin to wane I started to look into other forms of electronic music, and eventually settling into sexy downtempo stuff I would play. Kind of like Massive Attack and Hooverphonic and a bunch of the stuff that guy sleeping on the couch over there would play." Hax gestures to a man curled up on a couch, sleeping with a blanket draped over him.

"Whoa, I didn't even see him over there. He's a music producer as well?" I ask, surprised.

Hax looks me in the eye with a very uncharacteristically serious face. "You don't even want to know how sick this guy is."

"This place is like a hotbed of creativity." I note.

"It's really a hotbed of creativity." He repeats. "It's mind blowing to be a part of this shit. I had only dreamed that a reality like this existed. The people I was once listening to and drew inspiration from are now the people I'm making music with and performing next to at shows. Not a day goes by that I don't get to hear something incredibly awesome from an incredibly talented music producer who is a friend of mine. I can think of five mind blowing DJs who live in the same warehouse downtown."

"The Vulcan." Mumbles the man sleeping on the couch as he adjusts himself.

"You know which one I'm talking about!" Hax excitedly exclaims.

The ramblings about all things music continue well into the night, touching on everything from defining genres, quality of venues, and music enhancing chemicals. As the sun comes up, I begin boarding my taxi homeward as the rest of the gang prepares for a relaxing dip in the hot tub. Bidding my new friends a fond farewell, I leave behind a house full of limitless vision I would never forget.