The Nite Owl Diner’s Chrissy on the Evolution of His Music and Chicago’s Dance Scene

Chrissy is a genre-bending DJ/producer with productions on esteemed labels like Classic, Freerange, Razor-N-Tape, Tugboat Edits and Hypercolour. He co-runs The Nite Owl Diner label with Alex Burkat, holds a DJ residency at the legendary Chicago nightclub Smart Bar and is one half of the disco group Chrissy & Hawley.

In his previous incarnation as Chrissy Murderbot, he helped introduce the world outside Chicago to footwork music through his DJ gigs and releases on Planet Mu, Hyperboloid, Halocyan and others. Chrissy also organized the first international tour of footwork dancers, and ran the successful juke/footwork label Loose Squares. In this excerpt from his appearance on The Deepest Dish on RBMA Radio, Chrissy discusses his musical evolution and the changes he’s noticed on the Chicago scene.

Listen to The Deepest Dish on RBMA Radio every third Wednesday of the month at 11 AM EDT.

I’d always really been into disco and house and things that are a little more tied to R&B song structures. I wanted to move closer towards that. I started, frankly, just getting to a point where I ran out of ideas for instrumental music. All the ideas I’d have for songs would be for songs with lyrics. Why am I going to bang my head against the wall trying to write more tracky tracks when all the ideas I get are songy songs?

I kind of got tired of playing shows where everybody there was a straight 22-year-old male. Nothing against straight 22-year-old males. They’re welcome to show up to the party, but I just like a little bit of a mix. I found that I’m playing these jungle shows and there aren’t a lot of women coming. There aren’t a lot of gay people or trans people. A lot of them felt pretty overwhelmingly white, too.

I wanted to get back to events that had the diversity and feeling of togetherness and unity and acceptance that I grew up with at raves. Not this thing where it was this one, homogeneous mass of people, and if you played something that wasn’t the kind of genre they came for, they’d look at you funny, like, “Oh why isn't this jungle?” Or, “Oh, why aren’t you playing the dubstep record? We came to a dubstep show, and you’re playing something else. We’re going to get real upset about that.” I guess I [was] just writing whatever the heck I want to write. Trying to put myself into a position of alienating everybody who doesn’t like a bunch of genres so that then I can play shows for people who will let me play whatever the hell I want to play.

House music [brought me to Chicago]. I came up here without any real plan, strung together a part-time job to help pay for my crappy studio apartment and just tried to find all the gigs I could. It took a few years. I’d already had records coming out before I came here. I’d already toured in Europe, and had a little bit of a grounding to where, fortunately, some people were aware of my productions when I showed up. It was a little easier to get started out. Then, I met early on people who were in my same position of starting out and building up. I met The Black Madonna real early. We’ve know each other for about eight years. Met some other people. Garrett David, who is doing great things. Gosh, I met him when he was 18, 17 or something. And a lot of people in the scene here who have done some really cool stuff in the interim.

When we were all starving, deadbeat artists that no one had heard of, we all kind of met each other and started working on stuff. It took a few years. I’ve been doing the residency at smartbar for about two years now and that’s been going well. And before that I was playing wherever people would let me, stringing together gigs, putting out records, meeting people.

The creative community here I think is the best in the world. I love it so much, it’s so inspirational. I’m really happy that I came here.

I left Chicago because I was kind of feeling like I was at a point in my career where I wanted to go to another city, see what their scene was like, meet people, make some connections in a place with more of a music industry infrastructure than here. Because we’ve got all the best creative people but we ain’t got the record labels, we ain’t got the corporate dudes in the suits who give out big checks for, you know, putting your track in a movie or whatever. So I went to New York to try to get a bunch of them to buy me lunch, and so I went out and I did that. I was living in New York, I was enjoying it, I was having fun. There was a lot of stuff I liked about New York, a lot of stuff I didn’t like so much about New York.

And Marea, Black Madonna, she says to me, “I’m going to need you to move your ass back to Chicago and come be a resident at smartbar.” That’s a good enough reason for me, you know. I ain’t tied down to nowhere. I missed Chicago, so she gave me a reason and I came and did it.

I don’t see that there is a big record label infrastructure here. I think it’s all pretty much tiny indies. And that’s what makes Chicago so cool. It’s a cheap enough city that new artists can move here and develop as artists. Where I feel like New York is so expensive it’s hard to be there if you’re not established already. And there’s so many small labels that are here that are just laboratories and they can do whatever they want. They don’t have a lot of interference or influence from the corporate world. We miss out on a lot of opportunities because of that, and I feel like there’s not as much professionalism in the scene in Chicago, because there’s not people at a level above modeling professionalism. So I think traditionally there’s been a lot of people who didn’t really play fair, people who took money from artists, and obviously so many stories about the early days of house music that we don’t got to get into here.

I feel like that part, the lack of professionalism and honesty, I’ve seen really come around in the last few years, where you’ve got labels like Stripped & Chewed who really do right by their artists. I think Chicago has really come to a point where labels are starting to do right by their artists and be really by the book and legit.