Just a quick post here to announce a new album: Jondi & Spesh – REFLECTIONS
This is my sixth full-length electronic album with my longest-term collaborator and one of my closest friends, DJ Spesh. Way back in the day we hopped on a young genre called “progressive house” and rode it a long way.
Spesh and I had a long moment of fame in the late nineties and early 2000’s when we were hosting the most popular electronic dance music party in San Francisco (Qoöl at 111 Minna), touring the world in support of our releases on Spundae Records and our own label Loöq, getting voted among the Top 10 DJ’s in San Francisco by the Nitevibe poll, getting ranked as one of the top albums of the year in Muzik Magazine (right next to Madonna), licensing music to prime time broadcast shows (CSI), and composing music for the most popular dance game of that time (Konami’s Dance Dance Revolution). I can’t really ask for any more musical success or fame than all of that, but Spesh and I–all these years later–still enjoy making music together and sharing it with the world.
It’s all gravy at this point. Gravy I hope your ears enjoy! Available on Beatport, Spotify, Apple Music, and most other music streaming services and stores. We’re also on Instagram.
It’s possible to have a career without really thinking about it. Nothing wrong with that. I’ve had at least three-and-a-half accidental careers so far.
I started doing computer support and database design right out of college, just a few hours a week, at my dad’s friend’s company, learning as I went. Ten years later I was the Senior Database Administrator for the San Francisco Symphony, and I still do freelance db work to this day as my main source of income. But none of my friends ever remember this, because it’s so boring that I never talk about it.
My record label business partner wanted to start a weekly happy hour at an art gallery. I thought it was a terrible idea. The ayahuasca-snorting gentleman he initially partnered with to throw the event got a little squirrelly and they parted ways. I reluctantly stepped in, and under our management we had a decade-plus run as one of the biggest dance music events in San Francisco, lines around the block, written up in international guide books, DJs from around the world eager to play to our crowd.
I had no interest in DJing. But we needed to promote our album. So I learned to DJ at my own party, trainwrecking mix after mix. Spesh put me through DJ bootcamp and I got a little better. Soon we were headlining the biggest dance clubs in San Francisco, voted among SF’s Top DJs in the Nitevibe poll, on the cover of The SF Weekly, and touring in Europe. But eventually I quit because I don’t like travelling, or listening to hundreds of promo tracks to find the few good ones.
I started a blog in 2009. I can’t remember why. Probably to practice writing, to express myself, to share my ideas. Eventually some of my health posts (about sleep and artificial light, about the paleo diet) got popular. The blog hit a million views. CNN interviewed me. A TV show The Doctors flew me to Hollywood to be a guest. I experimented with advertising. Then I wrote a post about how I regrew some of my hair by intensively massaging my head, and things went crazy. Views through the roof, readers begging me to make instructional videos, asking for personalized advice. Should I take up hair regrowth coaching? I thought about it. Maybe I could help Tim Ferriss regrow his hair, or Prince William. But I’m not patient enough to be a coach, and I didn’t want to be the hair guy. Or another paleo guy. So I made it clear to my readers that though while I would still write the occasional health post, the content of this blog was much broader (systems for living well, self-experimentation, the creative life).
As I’m trying to launch a new career (fiction writing), I’m also taking stock of an old one (producing electronic music). I signed my first track in 1992, at the age of 23, to Mega-Tech records (an offshoot of the famous San Francisco disco label Megatone). I released my latest record, a reggae/breaks hybrid track, a week ago.
Breaking in wasn’t easy. I remember vividly sending out cassette tape demos in padded mailers to record labels in New York City and Los Angeles, following up via phone, and getting shot down by arrogant label runners (I’ve made a point to never be mean, running my own record label, even though our signing bar is very high).
This is not the kind of blog post where we look at two things and conclude that one is better than the other.
Instead, let’s check out one side of a coin, then flip it over and look at the other side.
The coin is success. While there are many ways to define success, for now let’s think about success as more sales, more attention, more attendees, more customers, more wins, etc. Not success in life, but rather success of a thing, a product/service/event/team, etc.
When we work very hard on something and then present it to the world, we’re hoping for success. More often than not, we get a flop, or a break-even-ish kind of semi-success. This is true even of the most talented, experienced people with every resource at their fingertips. Here’s a great post about a group of extremely talented, well-paid songwriters, producers, and marketers creating a flop for Rihanna.
Jondi & Spesh -- Angles of Estrangement (Loöq Records)
I’ve been writing and publishing electronic music — mostly dance tracks — since around 1991 (the heyday of rave). In those early years I released a few tracks on my own as “DJ JD”, but the music quality took a jump a few years later when I met and started collaborating with Spesh. As part of the Trip ‘n Spin Recordings collective/dance label, we released a series of polka-dotted house music vinyl 12″ singles as Jondi & Spesh.
Discovered by John Digweed in an East Bay record store.
One of our releases, “We Are Connected,” caught the attention of a world famous (yet still up-and-coming) UK DJ named John Digweed. We learned that our odd track somehow fit into a new category of music called “progressive house.” Fine with us. The track was included on Digweed’s Bedrock compilation, and became something of a hit.
JSJ - Ghosts of You (Renaissance)
Spesh and I did our best to capture the momentum, and wrote and released a large number of dance tracks through the early 2000’s. We collaborated with Jerry Bonham on a project called “JSJ” that produced two wildly successful releases on Renaissance Recordings. We started our own record label (Loöq Records) and released a full-length album — also called We Are Connected — that did pretty well (especially in San Francisco). At the same time, we were running a weekly in San Francisco called Qoöl that for a long time was wildly popular — lines around the block and so forth. For several years running we were voted into Nitevibe’s Top 10 San Francisco DJ list. Fun times!
Too strange?
Around 2004 our music careers came to something of a fork. We released an album on Spundae Records called The Answer. It got some good reviews, but never really took off. I’m still proud of that album, but it veered away from the known dance music genres, and some people didn’t know what to make of it (maybe the incredibly weird cover art had something to do with that). Spesh and I toured the U.S. (supported by Spundae), and then did a self-organized tour in Europe that was both fun and exhausting. I knew for myself at that point that I didn’t want to pursue the possibility of becoming an international superstar DJ (even though we had a pretty good start!). It just wasn’t for me.
Spesh continued to pursue his own DJ career, and together we continued to promote Qoöl and run Loöq Records. For a time, producing as Jondi & Spesh fell by the wayside. I was burning studio time on my other music project — Momu — and Spesh was spending hours and hours listening to tracks and making mixes. In addition to all the music stuff, we’re also both married guys, and work other gigs for money (I do database/programming work, and Spesh is a freelance advertising producer).
Excuses? No way! We were just taking a breather until we figured out what we wanted to do next. After almost twenty years of producing dance music, we were both ready to try something different. The “different” turned out to be a complete change of direction — we started experimenting in the studio with some ambient tracks. Using parts from previously produced tracks, we deconstructed and reconstructed our way into an entirely new album.
The result is “Angles of Estrangement,” out today on iTunes, amazon.com, Beatport, and everywhere else. For now it’s a digital only release, though we might follow up with a CD release (and I wouldn’t rule out vinyl if it does well).
The music came together quickly and easily — it was a blast to produce. That said, we were extremely meticulous in the mixdown phase, working to get the feel of each track just right. We made every single track on the album seamlessly loopable; each one starts exactly where it begins. The original idea was that the music could be used to accompany art installations. From the (rather dramatic) press blurb:
This album is comprised of previously published material that has been radically altered. Certain rules were applied to the re-composition process. For each of the “songs” in this collection, elements of soft and loud were deliberately used in search of contrasts designed to provoke the listener. There is little or no percussion. Each composition contains a dramatic arc, and within that arc, an event. Each piece begins exactly where it ends, and thus can be played in an endless loop.
Individual interpretations guide the listener.
Uses for these compositions stretch beyond the simple delivery of sensation or emotion. They are also meant to accompany life’s occurrences as alternate soundtracks to common events or carefully constructed realities such as films or other works of art.
Let us know what you think about the project. It’s a new direction for us — a real break from the pounding four-on-the-floor stuff we’ve been doing for years. I’d love to know what you think.
Oh yeah … you can download the 14 page digital booklet right here. Enjoy!
ANGLES OF ESTRANGEMENT — SOME FULL-LENGTH PREVIEWS:
