Beakers and BPMs: The Fascinating Double Life Of Teklife’s Boylan
Nate Boylan, 38, is married, with two young daughters and master’s degrees in biochemistry and education. He’s taught science at Thornwood High School on the south side of Chicago for over a decade. But when the school bells ring, everything changes – he drops the “Mr.” and becomes Boylan, an esteemed member of Chicago’s Teklife crew. He’s both artist and educator, living a double life of beakers and flasks by day and footwork tracks by night.
Sometimes this distinction becomes a little muddy.
“I make tracks that are clean enough to play in high school, so during passing period they play my tracks twice a day,” he laughs during a recent Skype conversation. “One of them was a Migos track that goes, ‘Brand new day and the birds they chirpin.’ Only a few of the kids get that the song is about selling bricks. So far the principal hasn’t figured it out.”
Boylan’s love affair with footwork goes back to the early 2000s. “Do you remember MySpace days? I got tapes up in Michigan from back in ’03 when I lived there. I started talking to Rashad when I lived up there, showing him my tracks. My tracks sucked ass, but he was always pointing out something good about it.”
I gave DJ Elmoe a D because he slept half the time. He was a good kid, but man, was he lazy in chemistry.
Boylan graduated from Knox College with a biochemistry degree in 2000. He was a substitute teacher for a while. Eventually he settled in Chicago in 2004 and took a full-time job teaching at Thornwood High School, Rashad’s alma mater. It’s a large, diverse urban high school, counting several decades of footwork producers and dancers among its alumni.
And when Boylan arrived at Thornwood High, it was as much a hub for the music scene as ever. Boylan found himself teaching artists who he knew through footwork – “I gave DJ Elmoe a D,” he remembers, “because he slept half the time. He was a good kid, but man, was he lazy in chemistry.”
In the mornings and early afternoons, Boylan spent his time teaching indolent footworkers. After the bell rang, he would start learning from them. He met DJ Rashad in 2005 and they became close friends. After school Boylan would pack up his high school chemistry lab and head over to a different lab: Rashad’s studio. “He only lived like three miles from the high school, so I would just go hang out with him after my day,” he recalls. Boylan became tight with DJ Spinn and the rest of their crew, then called Ghetto Teknitianz. Becoming a member took time and effort: “I officially wasn’t in Ghetto Teknitianz until about 2009,” he notes. “I had to put my work in.”
Boylan’s first release came in 2011: a six track collaboration with DJ Rashad called Look to the Sky. The gorgeous title track finds Rashad and Boylan laying heat on a buttery Roy Ayers vocal. Elsewhere on the release they sample Lil Wayne and Waka Flocka. Describing his creative process, Boylan refers to himself as “kind of a caveman. All hardware, unga bunga. I have to chop stuff on Acid, I have to go in and trim each sample. I start with the sample a lot.” And if the backbone of house music is bass, then Boylan’s got plenty. “I walk heavy, I’m a big boy – my drums are big, claps are loud,” he avowed in an interview with the Chicago Reader.
But he’s not a bull in a china shop: Boylan has a masterful touch for splitting samples open at the seams and sewing them back up with footwork’s quicksilver thread. Look no further than “Bullet Proof Soul,” his track on Planet Mu’s Bangs & Works Vol. 2 compilation from 2011 where he manipulates a Sade vocal like a glass blower, shaping his source material into a shimmering, slender thing just out of reach.
In Teklife group photos from the mid-2000s Boylan initially seems out of place: who, you might ask, is this white dude in his 30s, hanging with a crew of black dudes who barely look 20? As far as Boylan is concerned the question is irrelevant – Teklife is family. “Teklife is the lifestyle that we lived,” he explains. “That’s how we made our tracks. We were Teklife. You know what I mean? Living that Teklife, that Ghetto Teknitianz life.”
He lights up when he talks about the glory days, when the crew made his back porch a constant destination for cookouts. “We used to barbecue at my house, eat mac and cheese, drink, and make tracks,” he recalls. Then life got in the way. “I had a kid so I can’t really do that anymore. You know what I mean?”
Now Boylan has two daughters, ages two and four, with a third on the way. I meet his family over Skype: his wife says hi, his daughters look up from a cartoon and smile as he waves his camera phone around his modest home. Boylan shows me his studio, jammed in a tiny closet under the staircase. The room is bursting with synths, monitors, and an old laptop with a Teklife sticker.
He’s been teaching his oldest daughter to produce: “She can’t get her hands over to the pad, so I hold the record button for her. Anybody can do tracks. She made a better track out of a Fugees sample than I did.”
I think about him a lot. I have a DJ Rashad poster in my coat closet at school... He was a real good friend of mine.
While Boylan's biological family blooms, his Teklife family faces its own challenges and opportunities. Last April DJ Rashad died. His death shook his crew to their core. Around the world, footwork fans mourned the genre’s guiding light.
“I think about him a lot,” Boylan reflects. “I have a DJ Rashad poster in my coat closet at school where I lock up all my valuables. He was a real good friend of mine. He’s one of the top people in my life that I consider a friend, along with Spinn, a few people I went to elementary school with, and my family.“
I ask about his favorite memory of Rashad. “Censored, I plead the fifth,” he laughs. “No, but really, Jukefest 2010, that was such a fun party. There’s a picture where he’s got sunglasses on and his arms crossed, and it’s completely packed and like 150 degrees in there. It was crazy. That’s not really one of my favorite memories though; my favorite memories were just hanging out, man. Not just the wild parties, but all the fun stuff that we did that wasn’t even music related.”
Boylan contributed a song to Hyperdub’s Next Life compilation in Rashad’s memory, called “He Watchin’ Us.” He whips together metallic snares, slivers of a dissected breakbeat, searing synth lines, airy keys, and aqueous vocals into a swirling, hypnotic apparatus. I can’t shake the image of Boylan as Avatar: The Last Airbender, floating in stasis with the four elements orbiting around him.
“Those were the last set of vocals Rashad ever did at my house,” he says of the track. “I took some of the stuff that I thought was real classic and put it on that. Then I used some of the pads from my MK6 that, you know, is really the best. It’s the footwork sound from back in the day.”
Rashad’s death came during a time of international expansion for Teklife. Over the last few years the crew has gained members from places as far away as New York (Tripletrain) and Belgrade (Feloneezy and Jackie Dagger). Meanwhile, the founding members have extensively toured Europe and Asia. “The world just said, ‘Hey, it’s time for you guys to come,’” Boylan explains. “The world owns it now.”
“We don’t see each other too much nowadays – Rashad’s gone, Spinn’s always touring, I’ve never even met some of the European guys,” he adds. “Everybody’s kind of doing their thing. I only met some members at Rashad’s memorial service.”
Boylan sounds wistful when he describes the globetrotting exploits of his crew: he’s never been outside the country. The demands of family and the school year don’t leave much time for touring. Still, he does what he can. Boylan works to preserve footwork on its home turf, by coaching Thornwood High’s footwork dance squad.
“I’m just gonna have to go out there and bully kids into doing it this year,” he sighs. “I just can’t let this stuff die at Thornwood, because that’s where it was actually born. Rashad and Spinn went here.” Boylan has observed and participated in the rise of footwork as an international force. He’s seen his best friends go from Thornwood classrooms to foreign festivals. He doesn’t expect anything to slow down. The question remains: can the center hold?
“I think it’s gonna get way bigger than it is now, I really do,” he muses. “Like around the world. But what’s gonna happen to it then? Everyone has their day in the sunshine and then it’s done.”
