29: Vivian Host has caught every beat

Vivian Host’s rave credentials go deep. Much deeper than we realised in fact, and we’ve been friends with her for over a decade.

There are several entry-points through which you could have discovered Vivian Host. Maybe it’s her podcast, Rave to the Grave, where she interviews DJs, dancers and ‘freaks of all ages’, from legendary house vocalist Barbara Tucker to performance art pervert Kevin Carpet. In Vivian’s words, RTTG exists to document ‘a vital and resonant global (sub)culture that has often been ignored, dismissed, trivialised and poorly documented.’ Amen!

Or maybe you know Vivian through her journalism? A former editor-in-chief of both Thump and XLR8R, she also hosted Red Bull Radio’s Peak Time show, once the internet’s best resource for audio interviews with unsung heroes from countercultural scenes across the world.

Or maybe it’s simply through throwing parties and DJing under the name Star Eyes (a reference to the Moving Shadow classic). After breaking through as a teenager Vivian spent the late ‘90s and early 2000s becoming one of the most prominent jungle DJs on the West Coast (she may have both been the first woman from LA regularly playing jungle at parties, and one of the first people full-stop to play UK garage in the States). After relocating to New York in 2004 she co-founded Trouble & Bass, a party and record label with an anything-goes approach to genres – far from common 20 years ago. T&B were also the first crew to book grime artists in New York. There are a lot of firsts in Vivian’s catalogue.

These days her focus is on Warp Mode, the LA party she runs with Bianca Oblivion and AK Sports. In this episode we naturally talk about the current state of play in LA, but we also go back to Vivian’s formative years exploring the city’s nitrous-fuelled punk and rave scenes, how she navigated the world of jungle as a teenager, San Francisco’s ‘90s free parties, and being held up at gunpoint by dodgy club owners in New York’s wild mid-2000s. It’s Vivian’s story, but it also doubles as an education on how raving evolved in the US throughout the 1990s and ‘00s. By the end of the interview we were equal parts inspired, envious and exhausted.

A bonus for this edition of No Tags: Vivian kindly scanned some incredible photos of her ‘90s rave years, which you’ll see throughout the transcript below. Document your culture, people!

Talking of legendary womenfolk of D&B, Chal interviewed the one and only DJ Storm earlier this year for RA’s Art of DJing, which just appeared on the website. Click to see the shoes she DJs in.

As ever, if you enjoyed this episode of No Tags, do consider rating, reviewing and subscribing on your podcast app of choice, as it does really help. We’d also ask you to consider subscribing to our paid tier, which costs a humble £5 a month and helps us continue hosting, editing and transcribing extensive interviews like this one.

Tom Lea: Vivian, welcome to No Tags.

Vivian Host: Thanks for having me. It’s great to see you guys. Friend of the show!

TL: Longtime friend. But I guess we’re also members of some kind of podcast inner circle now too. Viv, you’re more experienced with this than us. You probably should have formally welcomed us in. But I feel there’s very few of us doing these kind of podcasts in our sphere.

VH: I guess that’s why we’re doing it, right? There’s a podcast about every other random thing that people can rattle on about for three hours. I don’t know how you guys feel, but I feel like there’s such a dwindling coverage of electronic music, dance music, or even just things that aren’t pop music, that maybe it’s incumbent on the people that know something about this to talk about it, and someone might care to listen to that. People listen to podcasts about all sorts of other things.

TL: It feels like you’ve lived at least like nine different rave lives. A true soldier of the scene, as they say. But when people ask you what you do, what’s your go-to answer at this point?

VH: To try and distill it down, I host and produce my own podcast called Rave to the Grave. I also host a podcast called Sound Advice for SoundCloud. I am a DJ and put out music every now and again, but I’ve DJed all over the place. Mostly in the States currently, but I used to travel around the world to DJ. I play bass music, which is the worst term ever, but basically drum and bass, grime, Baltimore club, Jersey club, all sorts of underground American and UK-focused club music. I also throw a party in LA with Bianca Oblivion and AK Sports called Warp Mode.

I have a day job as a contractor for Apple Radio and I help prepare and clean the songs that they want to play on radio. So I’m a censor, according to some people. (Laughter) But you would be surprised how many songs are delivered supposedly clean that still have a bunch of bad words in them. It’s a job, but it enables me to pursue all my other side hustles with a little bit of purity and not have to do anything that comes along because I need to financially.

Chal Ravens: I see this conversation come up frequently, this problem of how to balance whatever your creative passion is with a full-time job, or at least protect the side hustle nature of it in order that you only do the things that you love. I think that’s really difficult, especially if you’ve previously been in a position where you’ve been able to focus on it full-time. It’s not always possible to do the thing that you want to do all the time. I think there’s a lot of honour in just finding another job and then only working on the stuff that you really need to work on.

VH: I see a lot of people doing GoFundMes and stuff because they can’t make enough money as a DJ to pay rent. I’ve pretty much always had other side hustles. Sometimes DJing was my full-time hustle, and then I had writing, music journalist side hustles on the side of that, or curating playlists or whatever. I think I’m just a person that lives in fear of being broke and who’s chosen to live in the most expensive cities in the world. I never was asking my parents for money, and I always wanted to be self-sufficient even when I was really young. I always had a fear of being broke, and not having money is like the most miserable thing ever, so I strongly believe in having as many hustles as you need to have so that you’re not lacking the basic necessities. Because how are you supposed to be creative if you might end up homeless? It’s terrible. 

TL: It’s the fear of being broke combined with the fear of living in a city smaller than New York, LA or London, which I think is the trap that all three of us have been stuck in our whole lives. Tell us about Warp Mode, because that seems to be like a real focus for you at the moment.

VH: It’s up and down because we started Warp Mode… well, I moved to LA in February 2021 and Warp Mode started shortly after that. Like I said, it’s a crew with Bianca Oblivion, who is another LA native, and AK Sports, who moved here from Australia via London. I moved here from New York thinking, maybe I won’t throw any more parties anymore after the pandemic. And me being me, saying yes to everything, I ended up throwing a bunch more parties in LA.

It’s a really different landscape because New York doesn’t have too many warehouses. New York has a lot of clubs. And so most of my parties that I was doing there, whether it was with Chaos Clan, which is my own promo company and label, or Trouble & Bass before that, those were almost all in clubs or bars. But LA has barely any clubs that you would go to on a regular basis. The cool parties here are mostly warehouse parties, which involves a lot more money and a lot more risk, but is a lot more fun when it pops off. So we started throwing some warehouse parties. There wasn’t really anyone (else doing it then). It was the (after the) pandemic so it was like, who knows who’s going to be doing what? Let’s do this crazy rave-y bass music party and capitalise on the fact that everybody’s been in their house.

There was a whole generation that came of age in the pandemic who had been watching these Boiler Rooms and listening to everything online and hadn’t really gotten a chance to go out. And they were super bumming, people were saying stuff like, ‘Are we ever going to go out again?’ I was fine because I’ve spent my whole life going out. I can relax for a couple years. But obviously, if you’re 16, 18, 21, with all this pent-up energy, watching all these DJ sets online, people are ready to rave. So that’s what we’ve been doing, except this is what happens when you’re in a DJ crew, everybody starts travelling so much that suddenly it’s impossible to coordinate our touring schedules. 

TL: I’m always curious about the LA scene. I haven’t been to LA for over a decade now. When I did go, I didn’t feel like I managed to crack it, clubbing-wise. I spoke to people who were from LA and they’d be like, ‘Oh yeah, there’s not really a club scene the way you know it. It’s all warehouse parties or wild rich kid house parties up in the hills.’ But as an observer from across the pond, it does seem like there’s a load of really cool activity going on at the moment. And interesting links back and forth between some of the faster, bassier labels from the UK as well. What’s your diagnosis of it at the moment?

VH: I think it’s really exciting. Because it is so focused on these semi-legal venues it really has ebbs and flows, because it goes in waves when the cops decide to crack down on everything. So there’ll be a period of time, anywhere from two to six months, where every warehouse party gets raided. And when that’s happening it feels like the scene is in the toilet because the mood is grim. Promoters lose a lot of money. But in general I think it’s a really exciting time. I think the musical palette is way more open post-pandemic than it was before. I think there’s a really interesting interplay between the underground punk scene and gabber, hardcore and hard techno, and also bass music to a degree. That happens in New York as well but out in LA it’s a different vibe, a different beast, and people dress differently. I don’t know how to describe it, but the cultural makeup of Los Angeles is different.  

CR: You mentioned the risky aspects of putting on a night in LA. In what way are these nights semi-legal, and what happens when police decide that they’re cracking down? Can you predict that?

VH: It’s just that there’s a lot of industrial area in Los Angeles. There’s the fashion district. There’s the flower and produce district. And there’s the straight-up industrial area where people are, you know, machining things. It’s a large area of Downtown LA. What’s really crazy to me is that the parties that I go to are sometimes in the exact same spaces or on the exact same streets as where I used to go to parties when I was 15. And we’re 25 years on from that now. I’m like, ‘Oh, this street? Over here? Under this bridge? I’ve been here before.’ That’s wild to me. That’s just to give you an idea of how long this has been going on in the same area.

Cops have quotas. Sometimes they’re not making enough money off the other things, tickets they’re giving out and whatever. They want to prove that they’re putting in work. Sometimes they get a new captain, and that captain is like, ‘OK, this is important. We got to crack down on these illegal parties.’ But sometimes no one cares, sometimes they’re more disorganised and have other things to do. But how do you know? You don’t really know.

If you were throwing a party and you knew that the weekend before a bunch of parties got raided, you would be concerned, and you would have to keep the flyering and everything underground. It used to be that raves had flyers, they would put flyers on cars. Now you can only do that if you have a legal situation or you’re a legal concert, because the cops will get the flyer and call and figure out where your party is. So I guess it’s going deeper underground, even though a lot of things are still on Resident Advisor. So how deep underground is it really?

TL: What brought you back to LA after so long in New York?

VH: I grew up in Los Angeles. I was born at the Kaiser (Medical Center) in Hollywood, on Sunset Boulevard. As a child I lived in Hollywood, which was a terrible idea on my parents’ part. But it’s a cool fact now because Hollywood in the ‘80s was pretty fucked up.

I left here when I was 17 and was always like, ‘I’ll never move back to LA.’ And then LA got cooler. A lot of people moved here from other places and I think they changed the culture quite a bit. Also I had been in New York for 16 years and I was getting kind of fried and paying a lot of money for a pretty shit quality of living. I had been working jobs that kept me in New York, like I was working for RBMA and Red Bull Radio. That was a terrific job and I couldn’t do that job from LA – I had to be in New York and in the studio every single day because I was hosting a daily radio show for them.

But it got to a point when the pandemic hit when there was really no reason to be in New York. Also I came back to hang out with my family and with my mom. Seeing your family twice a year is way weirder than just being able to pop around for dinner sometimes.

TL: Seventeen is a pretty young age to pack up sticks and move to a different state on the other side of the country.

VH: I didn’t move to New York at first. I went to school at UC Berkeley, which is in the Bay Area, just across the bridge from San Francisco. So I went to university for four years over there, and then I lived in San Francisco until 2004. Then I moved to New York.

I had my hand held a little bit because I already had two really good friends that lived in New York. One of them was my DJ partner at the time, DJ Siren. We had a back-to-back thing called Syrup Girls. If we weren’t the first, we were definitely some of the first people playing UK garage in the US. She had moved to New York, she was bartending and working at Breakbeat Science, the drum and bass record store out there. Every week she’d call me and be like, ‘When are you moving to New York?’ I would go out there and we would play these fabulous gigs, and then I’d come back to San Francisco and feel like, musically, I had hit a dead end. 

All people wanted to listen to was ‘80s and electroclash stuff. I was like, ‘Why are we all just listening to ‘80s music?’ I wanted to play grime and bassline and just crazy stuff, but everybody wanted to do this retro thing. And a lot of people were… you know, it’s a very druggie town. So that was going down. I had just gotten made editor-in-chief of XLR8R, which at the time was a print magazine, predominantly about electronic music. But they let me move to New York. So I did. 

TL: So tell us a bit about your time in New York and throwing parties, the Trouble & Bass era. That era of of clubbing and dance music feels like something that’s getting brought up a lot at the moment, both with this nostalgia for the blog era and the Hollerboard, Hype Machine era we keep seeing. But I also think it ties into the indie sleaze conversations people are having at the moment…

VH: That you guys are having! 

TL: We’re not the only ones! We’ve been prompted by the keepers of the discourse.

VH: Well, Trouble & Bass started sort of unofficially in 2005. Me and Drop the Lime, who now is known as Curses! and lives in Berlin, he was coming from the breakcore scene and we sort of knew each other through XLR8R. I really liked his breakcore releases. We met and became friends, and we did a mix CD together for the Tigerbeat6 label called Shotgun Wedding Volume 4. Syrup Girls, my duo, did the mix with him.

We did a release party and it was Jammer, Skepta, Plastician and us. It was the first time any of them had been to New York. We brought them over. I was friends with Plastician already – I guess he was called Plasticman at the time. So I was like, ‘Hey, can you bring some grime MCs? Who’s interested in coming to New York?’ And who was interested was Jammer and Skepta. They came and stayed on the couches in my apartment with my three roommates, which is unthinkable now. I’m waking up and Jammer’s on the couch with two cats on his head and Skepta’s down the block taking pictures at a phone booth with my makeup artist roommate. I don’t know. It was crazy. I think Plastician has videos of all this.

That was the first true Trouble & Bass. And then I think it was the end of 2005 or beginning of 2006 that we really started throwing the parties. But the whole coming together was that we were basically all from more bass music slash indie-punk backgrounds – like, indie rock, punk backgrounds. Not indie sleaze yet. At that time in New York, it was the DFA, nu-disco time. And we liked that.

Those parties were fun, we went out to them all the time, but there was really nothing that was ravey and crazy, and there was nowhere for us to play what we wanted to play, which was grime, bassline and jungle, mixed in with hip-hop and Baltimore Club. We just wanted to mix all that stuff up. It was open format, but for ravey bass music – plus old rave records like Awesome 3 or 2 Bad Mice, stuff like that. So Luca (Drop the Lime) and us really bonded, because we’re both really into Fugazi but also Goldie and the Prodigy and whatever. 

But prior to Trouble & Bass… I don’t know if that many people know, but I’d already had a whole career. I started DJing when I was 15, and I started travelling around the US when I was 18, playing raves all over the US, playing jungle and drum and bass. So that’s what I started with. We had a party in San Francisco that ran for maybe nine years called Eklektic, where we had everybody from the British drum and bass scene. You name them, they played our party: Goldie, Ed Rush & Optical, Matrix, dBridge, Andy C, everyone. I had 10 years of DJing under my belt of just drum and bass before I got to New York. And then I was playing UK garage and grime. 

Anyway, we started Trouble & Bass at this very scrappy bar called Boogaloo, under the J Train Marcy (Avenue) stop. And it was super fun, a tiny bar, it maybe fit 100 people. But if you had 50 people that would be enough. We would just play until it got too sketchy and we got scared and then we would leave, because around 5am a bunch of coke dealers would roll in and it would start feeling like someone’s gonna jack us or get in a fight. So that was when the party would end.

TL: Were there any particularly sketchy incidents?

VH: We had a very sketchy incident. We did a party once at this place called Don Pedro, I think. That was also in Williamsburg, but a different part. It was a collab with this promoter Todd P, who now owns Market Hotel, who was doing a lot of punk and garage rock shows. I don’t really know exactly how it went down, but basically we had to go in the basement to get paid by the owners when the party was over. It was a pretty good party. And the owners just pulled a gun and were like, ‘You’re not getting paid.’ And it was like, well, you can’t really argue with that.

Drop the Lime and I became friends on this night where we went to a wild DFA party that was on a docked boat called the Frying Pan, which is a giant old Navy vessel that’s rusted out and in disrepair and docked in New York. They used to have parties where you could go in all the state rooms and just like fuck or do drugs or whatever, and then the dance floor was in the main part of the ship. Anyway, we went to this DFA party and then went to some bar in the East Village, we didn’t really know each other that well.

I was outside and somehow got in a fight with this Russian – I think he was Russian – car driver, and it ended with him going in the trunk and pulling out a gun that was like something out of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Like a Tommy gun, literally a gun that you would have if you were in the mafia in the ‘40s or whatever. Anyway, he was pulling this giant gun on me and Drop the Lime came out of the bar and kind of talked him down.

TL: Can I ask a semi-related question? Since you brought up DFA… what’s your take on The Dare?

VH: You know, the thing about this new revival of indie sleaze, and I would argue even stuff like MCR-T and DJ Gigola and that whole sound – hard, fast, schlager-y techno with vocals – it’s just so similar to what we were doing back then. It’s that same idea of these slutty, cheap vocals and downtown trashy rock vibes. When I walked into New York in 2004, 2005, that was fully what it felt like.

We all had those pointy, crazy haircuts, your hair is sticking up all crazy with a really flat bang in the front. So I don’t need it. Because I did that already, several times in my life. When I was back in San Francisco it was full-on that vibe – trashy, coked out indie sleaze, falling all over the place. It was like the OG Brat. Whatever Brat Summer means, like not giving a fuck and just being messy and wasted and falling all over the floor, saying whatever and looking crazy – we did that in SF in 2002, 2003. And then I did it again in New York in 2004, 2005.

I get the impulse though. It’s always this pendulum swing between this and serious, stripped back heads music. And also, culturally, there’s so much stuff going on in the world that’s really heavy. The discourse is so heavy and intellectually charged, and there’s this real strong impulse by some faction of the culture to be like, ‘Fuck it all, I’m sick of fucking thinking and talking about this stuff and having a political stance, and I’m sick of considering all people and I just want to be, like, wasted in the streets.’

I don’t know, what do you think of The Dare? 

TL: I like (Charli XCX’s Dare-produced song) ‘Guess’.

CR: Yeah, I was surprised that his solo stuff sounded like it does when he supposedly produced ‘Guess’, which is obviously great, and thought the solo stuff seemed very undercooked.

VH: So much music sounds undercooked to me, but I don’t want to be the old man, like, yelling at the clouds. So I don’t really talk about it too much. 

TL: You can yell a little bit. Come on.

VH: I already talked about how I listen to all these songs for the radio (to clean them up for Apple Music). So it’s interesting to get a wider view of like, what kinds of music are people making? What’s going on in country music? What’s going on in pop music? What kind of rap are people playing? Stuff that I wouldn’t choose to listen to myself. And I would say there’s quite a bit of stuff that sounds half done, undercooked. Like, who mixed this? People are just OK with people putting out ideas rather than fully fleshed out songs.

TL: The mixing thing is crazy to me. I do understand that there is this loose line you can draw from Yeezus through Playboi Carti to rap songs feeling more impulsive and not overthought, and I think that’s really exciting when it’s done well. But I’m also kind of shocked when I listen to RapCaviar or whatever, and half these songs just sound like they’re like melting.

CR: I would like to know more about how teenage Vivian became a touring drum and bass DJ by the age of 18. I’m imagining you must have been one of the first people playing drum and bass, and one of the first women playing drum and bass on the West Coast. Tell us about how you got into that situation so young.

VH: People are shocked. Even random people that I’ll meet when I’m on vacation or something are so shocked that an American person knows about UK garage or jungle or something. It’s pretty crazy. I got started going to raves when I was 13.

CR: Sorry, can we just spend a second on that?

TL: Yeah, please.

VH: Like, how am I alive?

CR: What kind of raves did you go to at that age? How did you get dragged along and what was the music?

VH: So when we were 12, 13 years old, everybody would go to Melrose (Avenue), which is a street in LA that basically has all the subculture shops. The goth store, the store with the Adidas shell toes and the breakdancing clothes, you know, anything you want to buy that’s subcultural would be on Melrose. So your parents would drop you off there to go walk around with your friends.

There were also two record stores on Melrose, Beat Non Stop and Street Sounds. And every store in Melrose had flyers for shows: rock shows, rap shows, raves. I think I had a flyer from one of the stores on Melrose and I got it in my head that I wanted to go to this rave and wouldn’t shut up about it. And my mom, having had a bunch of kids before me, knew that I was probably going to sneak out at some point and just go anyway. She was either wise or unwise enough to be like, ‘OK, you can go, but I need to vet this and I need to know where you’re going.’ 

In the early ‘90s, what we did for fun was go to coffee houses. Which sounds so not fun, but that’s what we did. We used to go to this coffee house and this guy that worked there, who was probably 19 or 20, offered to take my friend and me to a rave. My mom met the guy, got his phone number, checked him out and made sure he was not a creep, and yeah, then me and my friend Leah went to a rave in the back of his white windowless van, sitting on the floor with some other people.

There were other people with us too, it wasn’t just us in this weird guy’s van. But he was kind of a kid too. He wasn’t creepy. He was a nice guy. And I can remember Messiah’s ‘Temple of Dreams’ playing on the radio while we were going to this rave. And I was pretty freaked out, actually.

My first rave was scary. It was a break-in in the bottom of a public storage unit. In LA there’s these giant, tall public storage units, and it was a break-in in the basement. It was really dark in there and they just had a lone strobe light and all these blow-up inflatables, like giant ketchup bottles or giant mayonnaise, like what you’d have in a supermarket if they were doing a promo for Heinz. It was pretty freaky, I wasn’t sure if I liked it.

Then shortly after, I went to a giant rave at (amusement park) Knott’s Berry Farm called K-Rave, which was thrown by Destructo, who later started the brand HARD and is this big LA EDM guy. And around the same age I went to this concert with The Prodigy, Moby and Cybersonik, which was Richie Hawtin’s act before he was Richie Hawtin. And after those two events, I was like, right, I’m a raver now. 

But obviously I was 13 or 14, so I didn’t drive. I always had to talk people into driving me to raves. When I was in 10th grade my friends were seniors and they were indie rock, garage rock folks. So we would go to (coffee house turned venue) Jabberjaw, we would go see Fugazi and related bands like that. Free Kitten, Bratmobile, Distorted Pony.

CR: Did you see Fugazi?!

VH: Yeah, yeah. I saw them like three times back in those times. Like that underground rock scene is probably the coolest scene in LA. The rave scene has come and gone but that scene has persisted the whole time, it’s super locked in and has always been very dope. So we would go to those and then I would talk them into driving me to a rave after. Then I started having some raver friends and they would drive me. 

I was a master. My mom used to say that Friday afternoon at our house was crazy, it was like I was running a switchboard. I would be on the phone for a couple hours, trying to plan all the different parties that we were going to and trying to figure out my ride and who was coming. Friday afternoon was party organising for the weekend.

We had crazy jungle parties in LA in ‘94, ‘95. People don’t really know about them, but the craziest one was actually called The Jungle. They would do some parties in this place called the Belmont Tunnel, which was like a disused railway tunnel, and they would pay all the homeless people to sit outside around a bonfire while we had this party in the railway station.

It was definitely not a place that I should have been at the age of 15, as a young girl, but nobody was going to tell me not to go. Everyone’s in black hoodies, sucking nitrous balloons, tagging, and raving to ragga jungle in a disused railway station. It’s not the kind of thing that people imagine ever even happened in LA, but it did.

TL: Were you consistently the youngest person there?

VH: I was usually the youngest person, but there were probably other kids my age at some of the parties coming with their older brothers. There’s always kids that have parents that are absent or don’t care. They’re like, if you go with your older brother or sister, you can go.

CR: It was also different then. I don’t think kids are allowed to do that stuff as much now.

VH: Yeah, the more I do interviews for Rave to the Grave and interview people from New York who grew up in the ‘70s and ‘80s, that shit was wild. I just interviewed Junior Sanchez, and he was going to Limelight when he was 14. And he lived in Jersey! Same thing in the ‘80s, people were going to the club when they were 11 or 12 years old. It has become a little bit more puritanical over time in terms of parents being strict.

CR: Were there any UK artists coming over to play those parties at that point or was there still a little bit of distance between the scenes?

VH: The UK rave scene got really big here around ‘92 when people were going on Top of the Pops. It would have been The Prodigy, 2 Bad Mice, maybe Orbital back then. Because LA is such a music industry town, they were kind of exporting that to here. So there were people from the UK and Europe and New York who were coming here to play. Joey Beltram played a lot, I think 2 Bad Mice played here back in those times. Frankie Bones. Moby, obviously. Lenny D.

The other thing that people don’t really know is that LA was a huge scene for jungle, but also gabber. Even at the raves that I was going to, people would be playing Rotterdam Records type stuff alongside jungle. People think of LA as disco and house, DJ Harvey, we’re all doing yoga and drinking green juice, but real LA people like the hardest music. Because one thing that never gets represented in LA is all of the kids that live in East Los Angeles, all the kids that live in Orange County who are driving to LA. Our huge population of Latino kids, children of immigrants from Mexico, El Salvador, Nicaragua. When you see LA on TV you see Laguna Hills and all the rich kids at the beach, and real LA is not like that. These kids are super punk and they love hard ass music.

CR: There’s maybe a crossover between being into punk, which obviously is a big LA thing anyway, and so the leap to gabber is not that huge.

VH: And LA is kind of a hard place to live when you don’t have money, and if you’re not from money. Especially in the ‘80s and ‘90s it was really rough. I mean, we still had all of the gang warfare. We had riots here. The city was fucking dirty. It was so smoggy back then. You have to drive everywhere, and if you’re young and you don’t have a car, or if you don’t have money for a car, you’re always taking the bus and scrounging. It’s kind of a hard place to grow up. And that’s also a thing that is not really reflected in the media. But I think that translates into people wanting to work out that frustration or that anger in the mosh pit or in the gabber rave or whatever.

So just to wrap it up, the London rave industry came to Los Angeles, and the people from the UK who were doing the free party sound systems out in the fields, just roving around, went to San Francisco. So the San Francisco scene starts with the Wicked crew and all these people who were at Castlemorton and doing the free sound system parties – I think they were more from Birmingham, or the north of England. And they started a scene in San Francisco that’s more about free parties on the beach, and the music is like trippy house, trippy breaks. That evolved into a musical style (for) an outdoor day party, where people are doing acid and mushrooms and really good ecstasy. And then LA is people that are doing speed and bad ecstasy and sucking on nitrous balloons and dressing like Mickey Mouse and listening to gabber and hardcore.

There’s a misconception that EDM started the big raves in LA, or the dance music scene here, and it couldn’t be further from the truth. We had a New Year’s Eve rave in ‘99, maybe even earlier, that was by the Staples Center. I think it was 20,000 people – they closed down a whole street. We have been having massive raves since the early ‘90s, don’t get it twisted. 

CR: We want to be putting the record straight, this is important information.

VH: Being into jungle was a weird one because that was the hated music for so long, which made us all into junglist soldiers because everybody was like, ‘What is this fucking music? Turn it off.’ We were always in the side room of the rave and always getting yelled at, so you had to be tough, especially at my age. I was young, and I looked young, and there were no female DJs in the jungle scene in Los Angeles. Not to say there weren’t any other female DJs, but it was still very rare for a sound guy to see a female DJ. No one ever thought I was the DJ. I did a lot of yelling at people. 

I had a mixtape that I did in my dorm room at Berkeley and it got really popular in the Midwest, so I was going to Chicago and Wisconsin and all over the Midwest for a while. I played at Jungle Nation in New York in ‘97. There was a handful of other female drum and bass DJs – that party Eklektic in San Francisco, most of the residents there were women and the people throwing the party were women. But in the early days it was me and Reid Speed, who still plays drum and bass – she was another of the early ones. I used to cut dubs at Music House in London. 

CR: Shit, at what point in your story does that slot in?

VH: Well, by the time I was at Eklektic, I was fairly well known. And I obviously made friends with some of the DJs who were coming over from the UK. I also worked at a record distributor and worked in a record store called Compound, an all drum and bass record store. So through some friends that I met on a Telnet chat called V-Rave…

CR: What is a Telnet chat?

VH: This is pre-AOL, when we still had dial-up modems. There was a thing called Telnet, it was really bare bones text chat. There was a chat room called Vrave, this virtual rave that we would all, er, teleport to by putting in a series of numbers and letters. It was like an AOL chat or something, but before that existed.

Then my DJ friends from Boston, Casper and Timestretch – well, Timestretch had British parents. So we’d go over to England and he was friends with the guys that ran Renegade Hardware and some other people. We went over to London and he had the link for us to go cut dubplates at Music House. And that was crazy. You had to sit there for hours. Music House is this tiny little room run by a older Caribbean man named Paul (Chue) and his son Leon, may he rest in peace. Literally, the room was tiny, like, 10 people in there was crowded, and you would just sit there in a line depending on what time you got there and how many other people were cutting tunes. If somebody was cutting 10 dubplates, then the line was going to take forever.

Everyone from the drum and bass scene would be crowded in this tiny room. DJ Hype, DJ Zinc, Mampi Swift, all the guys from Renegade Hardware, everyone was in this room with a shitty couch and shitty lights waiting to cut their dubplates, or outside smoking cigarettes. It was an incredibly intimidating environment for me, I think I was 19 or something. But those times were crazy. I mean, being able to go to Metalheadz watching Grooverider and Goldie rewind ‘Metropolis’ like nine times, or going to Bagley’s warehouse on New Year’s Eve and rolling 10 spliffs in the middle of the dancefloor while DJ Hype plays. Going to Movement at Bar Rumba, which I actually played at once.

Yeah, it was just wild to go to England for the first time. I had been to England before, but going there to do junglist things was wild because you would just be like, ‘Oh my god, there’s everyone whose records I played and they’re all here!’

CR: Let’s just talk a little bit about your podcast then, Rave to the Grave. We know why we wanted to do a podcast, but why did you want to do a podcast? What kind of niche does it fill?

VH: I started it in 2019, shortly before Covid hit. I was approached by Joe Hazen, who used to be my engineer when I was doing a daily show on Red Bull Radio. He started working at this studio in the Rockefeller Center called the Newsstand Studios, which is a refurbished old newsstand from the 1920s that they have now turned into a tiny podcast studio. And he was like, ‘Hey, why don’t you do a podcast?’ Funnily enough, around the same time, I went to a psychic, and out of nowhere they said something like, ‘When are you going to do this podcast?’

And I was like OK, that’s weird. But given that I am the keeper of all of this rave lore, people are often telling me that I should write a book or do a podcast. They’re often telling me about stuff I could do that will be a lot more work for myself. I think it’s lovely that people would like to read a book or hear from me, it’s just that we know how much work this all is. 

But anyway, in 2019 Red Bull Music Academy had dissolved. I suddenly found myself with a lot more time and feeling like the scene that I was a part of in New York wasn’t really engaging with all of these interesting stories that I knew about. It was a bit disconnected. I feel like people these days have become more interested in rave memorabilia, old videos, and tying together how this culture is like a lineage, but that was not happening in 2018 and 2019, or not to the degree that I felt like it should be happening. So I was like, let me start a podcast. I know a lot of people who have fun stories to tell about raving.

I also wanted to tie it into not just raving and clubbing, but how politics, drug policy, cultural shifts, people’s backgrounds, racial and gender identity, where they grew up in the world, all of these factors are related. It’s not like we’re in a vacuum in rave and club culture. All of the things going around in society are playing into what we’re doing, and we’re experiencing them in a very weird and unique way because we’ve chosen this lifestyle to be in.

I wanted to tell the wild stories but I also wanted to tell a story about culture, music, and what different times were like. So I started the podcast and it’s been a really beautiful experience. It often happens that I’m really tired and I’m doing the interviews really early in the morning because people are across the world and I might not be in the mood. And then I just have this beautiful conversation with somebody and I’m like, OK, this is why I do this. To tell the stories that I know are within people, that maybe they don’t always get to tell, and to have people tell it in their own words.

Doing a lot of radio, I became really interested in people telling the story in their words, in their voice. I think writing is really beautiful too but I think it’s a different thing, because when you’re writing a piece you’re crafting the narrative and you’re using what you can do with words to bring this thing to life. But with an oral interview, it’s hearing the accent, it’s hearing the slang people use, the way they describe things. You can’t put that in the written word.

Anyway, I I really love oral storytelling. I interviewed Vjuan Allure for Resident Advisor’s podcast, and he passed not that long after that. And I just thought, that’s so beautiful, that we have a document of him talking for an hour or two about the roots of the ballroom scene. He’s such a character and such a beautiful, unique person that I’m just glad that someone 10 years from now will be able to hear his voice. Someone who’s into ballroom culture can get a little slice of what he was like and his energy, so that’s kind of what keeps me doing the podcast.

CR: Shall we do a little quick fire round? Let’s start simple: LA or NY?

VH: LA, because no one calls it NY. (Laughter)

CR: I was just thinking how that sounded as I said it. I don’t mean the state obviously, it’s just how I’d written it down. Let’s try again: Los Angeles or New York City?

VH: Both.

TL: Cop-out right from the off there. I feel like you might say both again here though, Baltimore or Jersey? 

VH: I’m going to go with Baltimore because that was the start of the whole thing. And I’m also just more connected to Baltimore. Baltimore gave me more inspiration, but I love Jersey, I love everything Jersey has given us in terms of Jersey club and Jersey house music, and the vibe in Jersey is insane too. Like, Newark’s insane. But in terms of the music and what I’ve seen and my connection to it, Baltimore.

CR: Think break or Amen break?

VH: You know, I actually always liked the Think break better.

TL: Me too. Red Bull or Monster Energy?

VH: Red Bull. Even just the taste, I’m more of a Red Bull fan. And I also need to do the sugar-free thing. So yeah, sugar-free Red Bull. Although if you open a can of sugar-free Red Bull and leave it there, it’s the nastiest thing. Like if you just leave one on your desk and it gets hot? Yeah. don’t do it.

CR: Pints or shots?

VH: Pints. I’m really crap at taking shots. If you see me taking shots it means I’m already wasted. I used to sip a shot and then throw it under the table when no one was looking because I just can’t. I’m just not built for shots.

TL: To sync or not to sync?

VH: Either, but let’s go with no sync. I don’t need no sync, much to the freak-out of certain people that have gone back-to-back with me who are like, ‘Why did you not analyse these files in Rekordbox, you fucking asshole?’ I’m very good about it now because I realise, as a DJ, you need to be prepared for basically any scenario. But I used to not analyse the tunes and just chuck them on a USB, because I’m used to playing without looking at a number, and other people really don’t like when they can’t see the waveform or look at the numbers. 

CR: Art house or multiplex?

VH: Multiplex. One of my great joys of living in LA is going to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, which is the theatre that has the handprints in front of it – like Marilyn Monroe and all the stars on Hollywood Boulevard. It’s been there since the ‘30s I think, maybe the ‘20s. And it’s really amazing. They have the Batman costume in the lobby and all these costumes, and they have a huge IMAX screen, I think the theatre seats 800 people, some bonkers-ass number in this classical theatre. But I love going to see blockbusters there, like Furiosa, or Dune. That’s my movie taste, sorry.

TL: Our last question, as ever: what film would you recommend us and our listeners?

VH: The one I’ll recommend is After Hours. Has everyone seen it? It’s Martin Scorsese, 1985. It’s a movie about a night in New York and a guy going out and all the crazy scenarios and mishaps he gets himself into. But I just really love seeing downtown New York in the ‘80s and that depiction of it. I really like movies that paint a picture or a vibe of a certain place in time, whether fictional or real. I’m not super concerned with whether a movie goes anywhere, sometimes I just like being immersed in that world.

But I also want to recommend people one that they haven’t seen. There’s this documentary called Dawson City: Frozen Time, and I have not stopped thinking about it since I saw it three or four months ago. It’s a movie that tells the story of the gold rush in the Yukon through archival footage, but specifically it’s about how people thought that all the first movies that were made, the first black and white movies, were lost, but they were actually found under a swimming pool in the Yukon.

But the more interesting thing is how it’s telling like three stories at once. It’s showing why and how people got to the Yukon in the first place, you can see all the footage of people there during the gold rush. One of the most interesting things is that a bunch of the people who started the movie scene or the film scene as we know it, and who moved to LA and started funding these movies and opening these cinemas and the history of Hollywood, as we know it… that all started in the Yukon. It’s kind of a mind-blowing story on all levels.

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