Regular readers of the blog will know that last month Naveen G. did a guest episode for our rv_cast. It was a great mix and well worth a listen if you haven’t already. [You can check it out HERE.] Unfortunately I wasn’t able to catch up with Naveen in time to include a few interview questions with the post but I’m pleased to be able to share them with you now. He also sent over a brand new live mix for me to post which you can find after the questions…
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What was the first track you produced that got a release? How important was that release to further your DJing career?
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The first tracks I made were with Reason when it first came out. I spent a summer figuring out the basics and ended up with two tracks that I was reasonably happy with which I mailed out to a handful of places with some actually sending me responses. I then managed to pass Deep Dish a cd when they played gig at a tiny club in Chicago, well before they got to the status that they have now. I got an email back from Ali two days later that said he’d be road testing the tracks the rest of the month and soon after that, he signed both to Yoshitoshi. He then played Chicago a couple of months later and told me one of the tracks made it into Satoshi’s Nubreed CD. I couldn’t really have asked for a better setup for a first track. The tracks weren’t released under my own name, which is a completely different and much longer story, so it didnt do that much for my name recognition but it was good positive feedback to keep working on more tunes.
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Are you still producing, and if so what’s coming up?
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My DJ schedule has been fairly busy given how it gets squeezed in with the day job, so there’s been a significant slowdown in my output but I’ve got loads of half done tracks that need just a touch more work to get done. As always, they’re all over the place style-wise so I gotta set my mind to finishing them soon.
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I consider you an accomplished DJ who knows exactly how to warm-up for a headliner, or headline a gig yourself. What advice can you give to people who are just getting into DJing?
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The best thing about the digital age is that it has freed DJs from the financial limitations that buying records used to hold us to. When buying vinyl, I could never afford to buy all the tracks I wanted to play, so you end up buying records that all fit into one genre. But now you can buy MP3s from 5 different styles and figure out how to make it work, and thereby making your own sound. This is I think how I best like to construct my sets. By buying and playing music that is all over the place but making it work, you get the feel of how to work with the crowd and take a set in many different places – a very useful tool for the opening slots. And by digging through tons of music every week, you find all these peaktime gems at the same time that are not played out but can really rock a crowd and those get saved for the headlining slots.
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So the key is really to just buy what you love and never play a track that you dont love. If you love every track you play, people can read into that and get into it that much more. A diverse music collection is never a bad thing, because you never know what you’re getting yourself into with some of these gigs, no matter what the promoter tells you.
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What are your top 3 labels right now, and who are your top 3 producers right now?
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Producers: Hugo, Nikitin and Semikashev, Dmitri Andreas
Labels: Discoteca, Alchemy, Systematic
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What’s the best party you’ve been to this year, and why?
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Joris Voorn at Cielo, July 3rd. The man can translate the technical genius of his carefully edited Balance CD straight into a rocking set of all things house and techno that had both the music heads and the uninitiated random clubgoers going absolutely nuts. Everyone was with him on every track he dropped, from the classic chicago house to the heady minimal grooves. One of my top nights ever at that club and easily one of the best sets I’ve ever heard from start to finish.
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What’s the best gig you’ve ever played, and why?
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The Twilight on the Tikki this past March at WMC. Being able to open for SOS allows you to really play a wide, diverse range of tunes since they bring that to their live shows and their mixes—like on their Balance compilation—so it was heaven to have a clued in crowd as a captive audience on the floating beach that is the Tikki Boat. I was able to start with some cosmic disco, and play through some deep house into some minimal and tech house and just really stretch those legs as a DJ. Its very rare that you get to really build a set like that purely from scratch and it went down perfectly. Sometime opening does beat headlining and that was one of those sets.
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Thanks Naveen!
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.Naveen G – Live at Bar 13 (07-25-09) – No track list available.