The ground shakes, walls tremble, as all voices become mute to the insurgent wave of speakerism as thousands of watts blare aloud the glories of electronic euphoria. With an array of DJs manning the booths of each genre-themed room, the crowd of ravers are alive and well, each and everyone striving to be distinct in clothing, dance, and smiles. The intensity of energy is absolute as the incessant pounding of sythesized melody overcomes. Among the lineup, DJ Inyoung is set to spin half past 12 of his brand of hardcore gabber. Already hailed as a pioneer of the west coast hardcore movement by URB Magazine (Oct. '00) Inyoung does not disappoint. The room quickly fills as Inyoung sets about throwing records on the tables, his hands deftly setting needles as bass roars throughout the room.
EM:
Where are you from and how did you start?
Inyoung: I’m from
LA, born here. My ethnicity? I'm half Korean and half Egyptian.
EM:
How did you first get into techno?
Inyoung: I
was
around here (Marina) or actually in Melrose, one or the other and some guy just
gave me a tape. I heard some techno on the radio but it was like-speed
racer-James Brown is dead-kind of stuff, and that’s all commercial
style. Techno
music was really underground, back then they had mostly old school techno
or hardcore, in England they call it old school hardcore. That’s basically
the foundation of a lot of genres today but it’s not the origin.
EM:
Yeah I heard the origin was in Detroit right, what kind of music
was coming from there?
Inyoung: Acid house
was the first deemed dance type music and it was mostly at gay clubs. Gay
clubs were the first actual kind of techno clubs and then when straight
people started hearing it they were like, “Oh wow, it’s weird kind of
dance music, it’s not just dadada…”
EM:
So now that’s when it kind of spread over, on the
phone you mentioned how it was in Detroit for a while, it disappeared, and
it then went to the UK…
Inyoung: Well America
wouldn’t accept it; they just didn’t take it in really. So it just
remained really underground and when the sound got over to Europe, the
Europeans…they fuckin’ loved it, they just killed it. They were like,
“Oh man this is great!” and they started all these…producers started
coming out and all this stuff…
EM:
And Ibiza happened right?
Inyoung: (laugh)
Ibiza is pretty new compared to a lot of the older stuff like…
EM:
Could you explain what Ibiza is?
Inyoung: It’s some
islands off of Spain and it’s known for trance, they used to throw
trance parties there. Now it’s world renown, you could go into a Tower
Records and you’ll see fifteen different Ibiza trance compilations and
all this stuff…
EM:
Speaking of which, electronika music today is
somewhat getting commercialized. What’s your opinion or thoughts about
that? Is it good or bad…
Inyoung: I
think you
take the good with the bad. I know there’s a lot of people especially in
my genre – hardcore music – where they’re like, “Fuck
commercialism! Ugh!” you know. The hardcore techno is a lot to me like
the underground punk attitude. Music to me is like the more extreme the
music, the smaller the following but the more dedication the following is;
so to me that applies to everything in the music world, and for me
personally I don’t think commercialism is too bad but I see it like
this: you get a couple thousand new heads into it and then out of those
couple thousand, you’re going to get at least anywhere from say one to
a hundred that really like it and it’s going to stick on’em, and
it’s going to touch they’re inner soul or what not and
they’ll be like, “I really like this” and that’s the bonus, 'cause
you get that many people who truly like it, but then I guess the
disadvantage would be you’re going to have a
lot of people just jumpin’ on the wagon like producers…you’re
just going to have a bunch of people who jump from music to music just to
produce a style. I mean you’re going to get a giant rush of pieces of shit
producers who can’t do crap and they’re just like, “Oh it’s a new
sound! Let’s try it out!”
