Interview with Dengue Fever
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This ring a bell?

“Now get your patchouli stink outta my store!”

Nothing? Well. Recall “rings on his fingers”… “awful cooking smells”… unbuttoned shirt and a greasy, salt/peppery ponytail. Light a little incense, maybe fondle some original-press wax. Is it coming back to you now? Are you thinking, “High Fidelity, circa early 2000?” If you are, you’re absolutely right: it’s that “f***ing Ian guy” →

Interview with the Meat Puppets (Chris Kirkwood)
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“Basically, we found something that we liked to do, which was play music,” Chris Kirkwood began.  “Curt and I came from different angles.  I started playing after I saw the movie Deliverance. When I was twelve, I got a banjo. Curt had taken up guitar… we had gotten really into it in our teens. I started playing bass at some point and then we [got] together with Derek [Bostrom] and started a band.

“It felt right at the time. We thought about “what it is to be” and “what do you want to do with yourself” and those decisions you make definitely depends on who you are as a person. →

Interview with Leroy Burgess
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As one of disco boogie’s founding fathers, Leroy Burgess boasts a formidable body of work in the music industry. Every DJ, musician, disco head, boogie fanatic and soul brother is inevitably a fan of his legendary voice and the production skills that shaped scenes from the underground sound of the 70s’ smooth soul right on through to modern day house, collaborating with such artists as Ron Carroll and Joey Negro. His studio creations, reaching tour audiences across the globe, have given the world over vinyl slices of New York to add to their record collections. Burgess has also gained a huge following that ranges from London to Tokyo; he’s been specially invited to Rome to lecture young music students at the Red Bull Music Academy’s yearly get-together, which saw participants from ever corner of the planet wide-eyed at Burgess’s generation-crossing influence. →

Interview with Ng
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I love home. Even in its potentially cramped, semi-dysfunctional state, it offers a good ying to the office’s yang. This is not the case for everyone however. For some, unsavory characters and unfortunate external circumstances color the home. In the case of artist NG, it is the traditional, seemingly stable and nurturing home that is intolerable. While I grew up in what I deem a functional (yet endearingly quirky) home, I rarely questioned the make-up of modern domesticity. My 1,000 square-foot childhood house was occupied at any given →

Interview with Sizzla Kalonji
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On the war-beaten trails of August Town-Kingston, Jamaica lies a village accustomed to the smell of sweet coconut and nectar. Amongst fresh water springs and cocoa trees, a population lives in the maw of political unrest and social inequity. The urban neighborhood that borders the eastern region of Jamaica and the dangerous inner-city communities of Angola and Hermitage suffers under a destabilized government, a fallen economy, drug trafficking and gang warfare. Heavily patrolled by the oppressive Jamaica Defense Force soldiers, residents have been subjected to life under stringent laws and curfews. More recently, suspected rivalry between neighboring areas such as Jungle 12 and Judgment Yard has sparked violence among both civilians and police. →

Interview with N.A.S.A. (Squeak E. Clean & DJ Zegon)
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The phone rings once and an impossibly high-pitched voice comes through: “Bueno?” Confused, I ask to speak to Sam. “Yes, dis ees heem.” I’m still thinking there must be some crossed wires in our overseas Skype-to-mobile connection, and then he drops the act. “I’m just kidding, sorry. I was just being stupid.” He’s kind of high on chocolate, he explains, having just been to the “finest chocolatier in all of Antwerp.” Sam Spiegel, a.k.a. Squeak E. Clean, and his partner Ze Gonzales, a.k.a. DJ Zegon, form the hip hop collaboration N.A.S.A. They’re in Belgium for the European leg of →

Interview with Rob Wegner
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“Dear DiscJockey101.com—I am from Hong Kong, China, and attend university there. I would like to drop out to become a traveling rave DJ, but my parents will not let me. What should I do?”

Staring at the email in January of 2001, Rob Wegner was awestruck. His fledgling Web site, which outlined the basics of DJing, had reached someone in China and now this kid he’d never met wanted his opinion the biggest decision of his life. →

As prolific purveyor of 80′s dancefloor jazz and Wire Magazine’s first DJ of the year (circa 1985), Paul Murphy is one of the original London legends. Cited by everybody from Carl Cox to Gilles Peterson as their major influence, Paul was the first DJ to introduce jazz to the dance floor and thus, influenced a generation of young Londoners. →

Interview with Onra
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A Parisian beatmaker and self-proclaimed “vinyl junky,” Onra (birth name: Arnaud Bernard) left France to venture out into Vietnam.   The trip was more than just a casual rediscovery of his grandparents’ homeland; he happened to be on a quest for foreign records from a bygone era.  Riding on the back of a motorbike through the narrow, hectic streets of Saigon →

Interview with Boogie
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Though Hollywood has tried to render apocalyptic worlds in scores of movies with fancy, multi-million dollar special effects, none of them has had the lasting, convincing verisimilitude of Boogie’s black-and-white photographs of real places and people. In one photograph, a child in the rough working-class Turkish suburb of Zeytinburnu curiously handles a pistol, his tiny fingers not yet mature enough to →