DJ Richard: Embracing the Unexpected

Alongside friends and cohorts Young Male and Galcher Lustwerk, Providence-based producer DJ Richard has kept the electronic music world on its toes since 2012, when the very first releases on his label White Material began to offer up a series of alternately rough, ready and blissfully spaced-out tracks. Striking a perfect transatlantic balance – undoubtedly aided by a lengthy stint living in Berlin – DJ Richard weaves between the crushed grit of noisy maximalists like Shed or Container and the faded melancholy of Lawrence or Superpitcher with the expertise of an Olympic slalom skier. His 2015 LP Grind on Dial was hailed as one of the best of the year, its combination of minimal rhythm arrangements, atmospheric pads, and twinkling harmonics leaving dancers and music lovers alike hungry for more. In this edited excerpt from his Fireside Chat with Shawn Reynaldo on RBMA Radio, the simply-named DJ and producer gives a firsthand account of his introduction to electronic music and overcoming unexpected adversity while recording his first LP.

Probably my first obsession in terms of music growing up was this really good independent alternative rock station, called WBRU, which still exists, but I don’t even know what to describe the music that they play now. It was mostly grunge and they had the “Retro Lunch” which was all ’80s alternative, pretty deep and interesting cuts, which the DJs cared about. I guess I was like seven, and I was just obsessed with this radio station, listening every day on my way to school, on the way home from school. I was obsessed with Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins and Silverchair. I was into grunge and that’s carried over, I think, through everything. In my car I still have two CDs and they’re both Alice in Chains.

When I was a teenager I started hearing a little bit about this cool noise music that was coming out of Providence and the introduction, I guess the most obvious one, is Lightning Bolt. The first time I got to see them play was mind-blowing. I was obsessed with them – I probably saw them play 30 to 40 times – but I was always trying to be the person bracing myself against the drum kick, because they play on the floor. In high school I was alone in terms of my musical tastes. I remember I had a Wolf Eyes CD and I gave it to my friend who I thought was really cool – he could play cool guitar and he was into Sonic Youth – and he just hated it. He hated it, and I didn’t get where the line was, how someone could be into Sonic Youth, but then Wolf Eyes was garbage.

When I started getting into the Providence scene, it was like, “OK, I understand now.” Here’s an entire community of people who would all rip this CD. Wolf Eyes is a pretty important musical project for me because... Well, I had Daft Punk’s Homework CD, but I didn’t even think about that as electronic music. I just liked it. I feel like Wolf Eyes was the first project that I was listening to where I understood there’s different ways to think about creating music, and what you can do when you step away from using basic rock instrumentation. Wolf Eyes would be the bridge point, and then when it comes to dance music I’ve been into various things at different points.

The first time that I can remember making music and recording music, I was probably 13 or 14. I was playing guitar in a lot of bands, just sludgy, stoner-y simple guitar stuff. I didn’t have a functioning computer when I went to college, but my friend had a MacBook and had GarageBand on it, and I was making tons of music on it using the loops, and then recording my voice in through the MacBook tiny little mic spot. That’s actually where the name comes from, because her dad’s name is Richard. When I would export the files into iTunes to listen to them, I guess it was her dad’s laptop, so iTunes put the name in as Richard. I was like, “OK, fine.” I used that name for basically any solo project I did, just Richard, always.

I always wanted to go to RISD. I applied to some other schools, but I just didn’t give a fuck about any other schools, I just wanted to go there. That’s where I met Galcher Lustwerk, on the first day. Facebook had just come out, but we linked up before school had even started. It was that time where you’re going through all the people who are in your class and you see, “Oh, this person likes this band,” and send the friend request. I remember the first day after moving into my dorm room, meeting up with Galcher Lustwerk and a few other people and they ended up being my closest friends through the whole time. RISD is a funny school, but I felt like my class was pretty good. I went to school with all the K-Hole people and Eckhaus Latta which is this fashion line that’s doing well. Through Galcher Lustwerk I met Alvin [Aronson] and Morgan [Louis] because he was DJing with them. They were doing a monthly party in downtown Providence when there was no dance parties. Young Male had graduated already, I knew him through the Providence noise scene and through mutual friends.

In 2012 I was at the beach with Young Male [Quinn] – we all had tracks that we were sending to each other and DJing, but I had never thought that I could just start a label, it had never really occurred. Quinn was saying that he had some tracks that he wanted to put on a record, and I had White Material 001 and 002. We had finished independently, and both at about the same time were thinking to just press them. We decided, “Why don’t we do this together?” Quinn had the name already. We decided, “Quinn, let’s do the Young Male record.” We had no idea. We wanted to press 150 and we thought that was way too much, insane and just stupid. Neither of us had experience with actually distributing our music besides maybe having a tape or CDR that you’re selling at a show. we thought, “We’re going to be sitting on these forever. We’re still going to have copies when we’re on tour like five years later.” We really, truthfully had no idea what we were doing. Just a complete naivety... I didn’t even understand what record labels did, just that records came out via them.

It was a very steep learning curve for both of us. As soon as we decided that we were going to start the label, it was a natural next step that obviously we would release music from Galcher Lustwerk and Alvin Aronson and Morgan Louis if they wanted. It just made sense. We’ve kept it to the five of us since then.

With my first record I had just gotten Ableton and was just completely sucked into this world, because I had just been using GarageBand, making kind of jokey tracks before that, and really pushing GarageBand as far as you can push it. I finally was like, “I need to be a little bit more professional. I need to get a real program.” Galcher had been using Ableton and I watched him work on it. I made the track “Leech2” when I lived in Oakland, like 2010. I had no idea what I was doing, it’s one of the first things that I made in Ableton. It’s completely Ableton, 100% in the box. Which is funny, because when it came out so much of the reaction was that it was this raw analog sound. I think a lot of this analog sound is just me not knowing what I’m doing and not understanding so much what dynamics are or what a “proper mixdown” is and just kind of saying, “Fuck it.”

I used to go to a party a lot when I lived in Oakland, ICEE HOT. It was at a time where I was actually listening to dance music, and some of it stuck for longer than others, but having this sort of wide-open sponge with dance music. That first record, I feel like there’s grime influences in there, there’s definitely New Beat, but also mostly just not knowing where genres within dance music begin and end, which is kind of cool. It’s one of these things that you wish you could get back to.

I moved from Oakland to New York in 2011 really randomly. I was playing in this band Buddy Bag which was fun, we were playing a lot of shows and it felt good, then all of a sudden the drummer and I just kind of, “Oh, we’re going to move to New York. Bye.” It sucked, pretty much. I was working at Whole Foods and I never had any time because Whole Foods has no set schedule, ever. That’s part of their policy, which means you can’t ever go on tour because you’re working. I remember being like, “Oh my gosh. $11.50, that’s the most I’ve ever made from a job,” and then realizing, yeah, but it’s New York, so that’s like actually getting paid $1 an hour. I just had no money and I felt totally trapped. Then, I got a different job that paid a lot better and I just saved and saved and saved and saved until I could get out.

I went to Berlin on vacation in the summer of 2012. I realized quickly that that’s where I wanted to live. I feel like I got introduced to a really good group of people. I think the second day that I was on vacation I met Bill Kouligas and Stephen Warwick and Mo Probs, and just hanging out with them made me realize that I wanted to move to Berlin. It was like a person-to-person thing. I moved to Berlin in the fall of 2012 and told myself, “I’m not going to be one of these people who’s going to go out every week.” Of course I did for a while. I was just playing a few gigs here and there with Bill, or just started to get a few bookings outside of Berlin. My record had come out at that point. I think Hard Wax had bought a third or more of the edition of 300. I’m really grateful to the guys at Hard Wax because I think that was the biggest contributing factor to the label and us as individual artists sort of taking off outside of New York. When I moved to Germany, I had never received any sort of payment for DJing, so it was definitely a whole new experience. Thank you Hard Wax.

I lived there for a while with no day job or anything, just kind of fucking around and making a lot of music. Then a friend of mine was working at the Record Loft and needed someone to cover their shifts, and I’d been going there a lot. I would spend two days a week there just digging and digging and digging. In the beginning it was completely unsorted, it was still cardboard boxes on the ground from the collections that the owner had purchased. I had never really been to a record store like that before, that was just purely this huge amount of information and secondhand stuff. Still, I didn’t consider myself what people call a digger or whatever until I started hanging out at the Record Loft and then eventually working there. I would listen to hundreds of records that I didn’t know, at first just out of trying to organize the shop for customers, but then it became my favorite way to listen to records for finding things to DJ. Working at the Record Loft completely changed how I see myself as a DJ.

I had a lot more time in Berlin. I made like 30 tracks in the first couple months that I lived there, and those were the varied selection of tracks that I felt the best about. I was hanging out with Carsten Jost a lot this one summer and he had to do this remix for a Lawrence record. He was having trouble sitting down and doing it, I think. At one point he just asked me, “Hey, do you want to do this remix together?” I said, “Yeah, sure. Why not?” Then he was like, “OK, so it’s due tomorrow.” We just sat down and did this remix in one take, really raw, and sent it to Lawrence and he loved it. Because it happened so easily we were like, “Wow. We’ve got to work together more.” Through that they were always asking me to send them tracks or play. I would play stuff for Carsten when we were hanging out, and I had these two tracks that he was into. He sent them to Lawrence and they got back to me and asked if I wanted to do a record and I said, “Yeah, sure.” They were the ones who actually were like, “OK, what about an album?”

I had a lot of tracks ready for it and I had literally the last track that I was working on for the album. It was so good. I was bouncing it, and then I left. I was like, “I need to back everything up. I’m very close to done, I have the tracks, I’m going to go and buy myself a nice kitchen appliance as a reward.” I left my house for 40 minutes with my drive plugged in because I was backing it up and my computer was slow as fuck, so it would take half an hour to back up onto a drive. I left it plugged in and I came back and there were records on the floor when I walked in. I just assumed my roommate had made a mess or something, and then went into my room and was like, “Oh, fuck.” My computer had been stolen with the backup plugged into it, so I lost everything from the end of 2013 onwards. I lost the entire album except for one track. Everything else I just did in three months. When I started writing that album, I stopped drinking and was just sort of depressed living in Berlin, because stopping drinking for me changed my perspective on the city and I was realizing how I was spending, or I guess more like wasting, my time, in terms of my lifestyle choices. That fall, when I was working on Grind, I was pretty bummed out, staying at home a lot and starting to think that I didn’t want to live in Berlin anymore. That is definitely the state of mind that somehow was really conducive to music making for me.

Grind, I guess, has a much more smooth finish to it. I wouldn’t say that that’s because I sat down and was like, “This is Dial, so I want to match their aesthetic,” but I just think somehow making that record in that sort of melancholic, or even beyond melancholic state of mind in Germany, sort of makes sense, because that’s where Dial comes from. Grind came out in September 2015, and right about then I was like, “Fuck living in Berlin. I’m done.” I still have a lot of friends there, but also a lot of friends had slowly been leaving, so the thought had been in my head for a while. I had gone back to Rhode Island for a month that summer and just realized, “Man, I’ve been missing out.” I didn’t consider and I still wouldn’t consider living anywhere else besides Rhode Island right now. It’s been, for me, a really good change of pace. I’ve become productive again, and it’s nice to be close to all the other White Material guys. Morgan Louis is living in Rhode Island, so it’s nice to actually get to hang out with him. The same with Alvin Aronson. It’s nice to be back and casually hang out and not only see these people through touring.