PRACTICE! Deka has worked hard to develop his own brand of “hard New York tribal” house style.
At Rise the Saturday before Christmas, DJ Deka played a four-and-a-half-hour set. Deka has become the most prominent of the new breed of Boston-based house-music spinners, and he drew an almost full dance floor of fans. He did not disappoint. For the two hours of it that I attended, it was the best set I’ve heard him do. His style, he says, is “hard New York tribal,” but he has of late also favored electro-house and tech-house sound effects, and at Rise he used both, adding them as a kind of aural frosting atop his cake of deep, thick, fist-like beats.
There were also vocals: tape-distorted low-frequency male voices and slutty girls’ monologues coaxing and funning at the dancers with lines like “Close your eyes,” “Lose control,” Danny Tenaglia’s “I’m gonna take you on a tour . . . of a 12-inch.” To insert his vocals, Deka used three turntables: two to overlay rhythm sounds onto another track’s silent patches, the third to overlay them both with teasing voices. As for the beats of “New York tribal,” he made them as hard and thick as the genre (created, he says, by Victor Calderone) offers, in a syncopated, flirty texture that forced feet to dance, legs, hips, you name it. He did it to the dancers and then did it again, imaginative mixes — radical tempo changes, from down-beat to revved-up — that kept the surprises coming.
Deka’s fans were a diverse group: a few muscle guys, a lot of slender young Euro and Asian guys with very short haircuts, here and there a gal or two, many of them Rise regulars. The crowd also included other DJs. The mix of dancers was very Ibiza, even if the weather outside was Moscow.
Not Ibiza at all is Tabu, a bunker-shaped nightclub on Route One in Saugus, where Deka DJ’d back in November. But it is suburban — Deka’s roots. Here are guys wearing flared slacks and open-neck shirts. They gather along the sides of the dance floor, avoiding the metallic purple light show. The gals are wearing office dresses or pencil jeans and snug sweaters — one or two actually step onto the dance floor, moving to the rhythm. It’s an aggressive mix, almost rough enough for Rise.
Deka not only DJs, he produces his own tracks. He records for Jon Viera’s Escuro label, for Coraza, and — newly signed — for New York City’s legendary Nervous label. Several of his tracks (“In the Darkness,” “Industrial Tribal,” “Amor los batido”) are top sellers at www.beatport.com, the Web site where nearly every DJ (and a few obsessive fans) buys his stuff.
Deka — Alex Karangioze is his real name — grew up in Lowell, far from the neon runways of house-music Boston. Lowell is best known, in the music world, for rock concerts at Tsongas Arena; still, says Deka, it was house music for him, not rock. “There used to be a music store called Banana’s. They did mix tapes there, and mix CDs. They had a DJ booth in the store, so you could mix too! There were very few of us listening to house mixes at that time. Then I started working there.
“I heard about the Sound Factory, a club event in Boston run by DJ Manolo. So I started going there. A lot. It was progressive trance, Manolo’s sound — new to me. Soon I purchased my own DJ equipment. I had made up my own CD mixes — gave one to one of the club promoters who worked with me at Banana’s. He liked the mix, took it to the guys at a club called Fuel, and I got my first gig there. As the opener. The promoters asked me back. Eight to nine months I was doing that — I was driven! I knew that this was what I wanted to do.”
Besides Fuel, there was an even more popular house-music club: Reflections, in Chelmsford — “The place was packed, it rocked!” Deka became a fixture at Reflections, and his reputation spread, as more and more suburban “house heads” traveled into Boston to see the major house DJs spin at downtown clubs. Deka was there also. A club called Pravda brought him in as the headliner. “A one-time thing, but soon I began to get other offers.” And then, risking all on the strength of his Lowell-area reputation, in 2003 he moved to Boston.
“That’s when it really happened. All kinds of clubs wanted me. I was changing my style, too. Less of the trance, I was getting into tribal house now. Chus & Ceballos — the Spanish production team — did it to me. I heard one of their tracks at the Boston Beat store and there it was. Pretty soon I had a residency at Tabu, and then I got one at Venu, in the Boston Theater District — it was the Six One Seven promotion group who got it for me. They had heard my demo CDs — I had lots of demos out there! — and they wanted more. This was in 2004. Up to now I had done all of my own promoting, but after 2004 I began to have help promoting myself, and pretty soon I was spinning regularly at Venu, then Aria on Saturdays. And then Maria of BonTon Productions took over my promotion.”
“By now I was playing all tribal — hard, New York–style house. I’m still playing this. You can’t imagine how many hours I put in just practicing, even now. Anyway, you’ll hear New York tribal on my own productions. In August of 2006, my first track, ‘In the Darkness,’ was signed. Forty-eight hours after posting it at beatport.com, it was on the charts there. So now I’m on eight or nine labels. Besides Escuro and Nervous, there’s a track on DJ Peter Presta’s label, and one on Sound Groove featuring Craig Mitchell on vocals. And now I’ve got a track on Hypno Music, a UK label — they contacted me! — it’s called ‘In the City.’ You’ll hear it in early 2008.”
—- Michael Freedberg / Boton Phoenix January 7, 2008
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