4. Thomas Bullock
You may have noticed that I like DJs who aren’t averse to a bit of rock music now and then. Hey, it’s in the blood. But there are electronic music Djs who like rock music, and then there’s Thomas Bullock.
Thomas wasn’t one of those DJs who would drop in a rock or funk anthem to get the crowd fired up. And he didn’t just play dance records that had rock dynamics. I’m convinced that he actually heard electronic music and guitar music exactly the same way, so that when he played the distinction disappeared. What you felt was the impact of the records, the body-moving midsection, the gut-punching bass, and the shimmering, psychedelic treble. House, funk, rock, disco … records were records, they were his kind of records, they all rocked, and you could dance all night to them.
The sense that Thomas was doing something alchemically rock and roll was of course amplified by the fact that he seemed totally fucking nuts. Along with (15) Tim Love Lee and (19) DJ Harvey he had emerged from the extended Tonka Hi-Fi collective in England and emigrated to the United States, apparently with a manifesto to grow improbable beards and poison the minds of America’s young with musical and behavioural decadence. In San Francisco he was a founding member of the Wicked Sound System, and as they moved deeper into pure house music over time, he remained the wild card, relocating to New York but regular returning like a bandit in the night, his presence on a Wicked bill enough to get the house kids murmuring about a ‘big one’.
This sense of the dramatic was something he had in common with Harvey and Love Lee, but unlike his comrades, he seemed to be going beyond performance and inventing something new, and this made his sets impossibly exciting. I think he understood this himself, and that’s why he went off to do rock music with A.R.E. Weapons. That didn’t work – they were terrible – and maybe the full promise of his DJ sets was left unrealized. But for those who were there, the promise was more than enough.
http://artonair.org/show/dj-thomas-of-rub-n-tug
You may have noticed that I like DJs who aren’t averse to a bit of rock music now and then. Hey, it’s in the blood. But there are electronic music Djs who like rock music, and then there’s Thomas Bullock.
Thomas wasn’t one of those DJs who would drop in a rock or funk anthem to get the crowd fired up. And he didn’t just play dance records that had rock dynamics. I’m convinced that he actually heard electronic music and guitar music exactly the same way, so that when he played the distinction disappeared. What you felt was the impact of the records, the body-moving midsection, the gut-punching bass, and the shimmering, psychedelic treble. House, funk, rock, disco … records were records, they were his kind of records, they all rocked, and you could dance all night to them.
The sense that Thomas was doing something alchemically rock and roll was of course amplified by the fact that he seemed totally fucking nuts. Along with (15) Tim Love Lee and (19) DJ Harvey he had emerged from the extended Tonka Hi-Fi collective in England and emigrated to the United States, apparently with a manifesto to grow improbable beards and poison the minds of America’s young with musical and behavioural decadence. In San Francisco he was a founding member of the Wicked Sound System, and as they moved deeper into pure house music over time, he remained the wild card, relocating to New York but regular returning like a bandit in the night, his presence on a Wicked bill enough to get the house kids murmuring about a ‘big one’.
This sense of the dramatic was something he had in common with Harvey and Love Lee, but unlike his comrades, he seemed to be going beyond performance and inventing something new, and this made his sets impossibly exciting. I think he understood this himself, and that’s why he went off to do rock music with A.R.E. Weapons. That didn’t work – they were terrible – and maybe the full promise of his DJ sets was left unrealized. But for those who were there, the promise was more than enough.
http://artonair.org/show/dj-thomas-of-rub-n-tug
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