One of my saddest limitations is my absolute inability to play a musical instrument properly. And not because I haven’t tried. As a kid I melted down the Casio PT-1 I was given as a gift, putting little labels of the musical notes on top of the keys and everything. I managed to learn to play Beethoven’s “For Eliza”. And I played it. And I played it again. And then I played with the rhythms that the organ had. Samba, bossanova… and back to “Para Elisa”, which was what I was good at. And after boring my family for years, in the end I got bored too.
As a youngster I tried my hand at the Spanish guitar, where the pinnacle of my achievements was knowing how to play some sevillanas reasonably well. Beyond that there was nothing to scratch. Besides, I liked dancing them much more than playing them. And he who plays the guitar does not dance.
Sometimes if I saw my little nephew clumsily playing a toy xylophone I felt like Antonio Salieri, stark inside xD.
I had always liked electronic music, the synthesizers of Vangelis, Jan Hammer, Faltermeyer, Mike Oldfield and Jean Michel Jarre.
(Did you know that Jean Michel Jarre holds the world record for attendance at a concert with 3,500,000 people (aha, yes, three and a half million souls) with his Oxygene in Moscow? And, not content with that, in the middle of the concert they go and connect him with the Russian astronauts who were orbiting in the MIR station…. After the connection to the MIR, continue the concert using a laser beam as an instrument. Look at the date of the concert and then tell me about it. Then came Björk and her reactable, but the pioneer in electronic music creativity was Jarre Jr.)
Thanks to having brothers much older than me, I was able to enjoy Depeche Mode, the completely astonishing 101 de Depeche Mode, Chimo Bayo, Technotronic, New Order, Front 242, the unparalleled Technotronic again and the delicious Deee-Lite
By the time The Prodigy (I do not like censorship, enjoy the uncensored video 😉 ), Datura, The Chemical Brothers, Underworld and Bomfunk MC’s arrived, there was nothing left of me to be sold to the Moog god.
I had the immense good fortune that, during my early adolescence, a pact was created between my parents, my sister – who is several years older – and me. It was that on weekends, my sister could come home later in the night as long as I came home with her. It was a great deal for my sister because we always got along very well, and all she had to do was meet me somewhere and we would go back on her Vespino (it’s a Spanish moped). For my parents it was fine because we both kids liked the same kind of environment, we had to behave responsibly and we would take care of each other. And I could only return back home with her if I fulfilled my obligations (studies and sports). But for me it was, in fact, a gift that marked my adolescence and I will never be able to thank her enough.
Since my friends in the neighborhood didn’t have older siblings who went out late, they had to go home early. When they went home early, I got together with another group of older friends who did stay out later, and I started to frequent with them the second sessions of the pubs and clubs. With my sister I would meet at a discotheque at any time and we would go return home quietly. And as everything was going well and -really- we never had any problem with anything or anyone, we gained more confidence and little by little we could come back a little later.
So there came a time when every weekend I received passes and tickets for me and my friends to enter for free to the third sessions of the best clubs in Cordoba. I was maybe 15 or 16 years old and when the doorman would look at me as if to say “what is this kid doing here?”, I would show him the signed pass (“parranda club”?) and say “I am the brother of…”, and they would let me in. I couldn’t stay much longer, my sister and I still had to go home, but I was immersed in a world of electronic music, DJs and go-go dancers absolutely wonderful. And it was there and at those hours where the quality Techno was played. And if that Sunday morning there was a soccer match – I was a member of the local team – I would arrive dragging myself, but nonetheless I would arrive. My father always taught me “cocky by night, cocky by day”. And I kept my word.
After a while, there was no need for a pact or anything else. My sister and I continued to coincide because we frequented the same places, but each one of us went our own way. I kept getting the passes and little by little I was expanding the radius of action, always looking for the best electronic music. From Caché, Plató, Zahira, Spinnaker and Teiker in the center, to La Bola and Disco 3 in the nearby sierra. And I discovered the best of all, La Bastilla. A narrow basement in Los Patos park that opened from 3 AM.
The quality of the party improved when we could afford a car and we went out to the discos in the towns around Cordoba, like Joker Queen in La Carlota or PK2 (I swear it was a tiny pub indeed, not the current brothel that is today lmao) in Villarrubia. And once we were confident with the car, we started to do the “boquerón” route: we would start in some club in the center of Cordoba and we would move from club to club (Joker Queen, La Rambla) until we reached Malaga at night, to the Cuic club in Torre del Mar or the Palladium in Torremolinos. There we would finish the party – I remember that one of them had a swimming pool inside the discotheque, I don’t remember which one – and we would go to the beach to sleep for a while under the deck chairs or boats until the sun was strong. Then we would go back home the way we could and I would try to bring churros to ingratiate myself. I didn’t go to Malaga many times either, because fuel was and nonetheless I would end up destroyed for the rest of the week. Besides, I didn’t want to explain at home the sand in my shoes.
Then I entered college and completely abandoned the party as I had known it. Although I still loved electronic music, the pace of studying wouldn’t let me go out like I used to and we started doing home sessions in the empty apartment some friends had. We started to listen to electronic Jazz (Saint-Germain), Lounge (The Thievery Corporation), Trip-Hop (Massive Attack), Electro-Rock (Rinôçérôse) or Electro-Clash (Vive la Fête), even though we kept up with the techno-house (Liquid California).
After a few years in my family we welcome a new member, who happens to be a well known DJ in Ibiza. When I went to visit him at home he has two Technics SL-1200MK2 and a mixer in his living room. What do I want more from life.
And, suddenly, it becomes clear to me: I embrace that I’m not good at playing an instrument, but maybe I can be good at mixing the music that others play. And besides, it is a more creative hobby than video games -which I was also a big fan of at the time-.
I decided so, and after a few years -when I could afford it-, I bought two Akiyama decks, a Gemini P626 table and a Serato Scratch and I set up my first DJ set in my apartment in Madrid. It relaxed me and helped me to disconnect from long working days. My friends, teasing me a bit, baptized me as ToreSplash. You can see the problem I have. I love it.
When I go back to Córdoba for several days at Christmas, I set up the set in my grandma’s Gran Vía Parque apartment, to have a pre-party before going out to celebrate.
At that time I had the good fortune to coincide in my work team with two semi-professional DJs and they were passing me the techno-house-minimal tracks that they were playing in their gigs. I still have them. In some friendly meetings we do outside the office they take their sets with them and let me use them.
When I made the decision to move to the USA, and considering that initially my plan was to stay there for only one or two years at the mot, I decided to distribute the things from my apartment among family and friends. Knowing that in the first few months I would have very long days of work ahead of me, in the two suitcases that travelled with me I took, literally, the two turntables, the mixing desk and the Serato. The clothes I took with me were just to cushion the suitcases so that the stuff would arrive alive. It worked. (Except for dress suits, clothes in the USA are generally of much better quality and much more affordable than in Spain, so it made more sense to buy them directly there). My boss-partner couldn’t believe it when he saw what I showed up with.
It turned out that the Akiyama turntables did not work very well with the change to 60 Hz. from 50 Hz. in Spain, and the frequency of rotation of the plates was not stable, so I had to change them for an American Audio Technica LP-120 turntables. The Akiyama ended up in Buenos Aires, in the house of one of the best friends I have ever had in my life. Electricity in Argentina also goes at 50 Hz.
Then I changed the sh*tty headphones I had for a great Sennheiser HD-25, the mixtable to a Gemini PS3 and added an iPad with the Korg synthesizer app to the third channel of the table.
After a while I had the opportunity to do a gig at a private party in a bar. It was a lot of fun.
I updated the set again by replacing the Serato Scratch with a Rane Serato SL-2 and it got in its final form:
This was the set I left behind when I returned to Spain. Now I am looking for the best way to continue practicing this hobby but in a less bulky way. The set, with the chest and the stool eat up a good chunk of the room it is in. Although I love the feel of vinyl, they are so delicate and heavy that I had to leave them in the USA before returning -as tears rolled down my cheek. So I think I’m going to go with a two-channel jogwheel controller for beatmatching that fits in a backpack and that will be it.
My Sound Cloud profile:
Lately I’ve been into Future Funk and Electro Swing – let’s wear out the soles of the shoes! Like they used to do, all cool:
PS.- Do you remember that at the beginning I commented that I wasn’t very good at playing musical instruments? Well, it turns out that as a deejay I’m not that good either. It’s as if I had one ear in front of the other hehehe. A blunder. And mind you, I define myself as a beatmatcher. I mean, put a record on one turntable, another record on the other turntable, beatmatching and just let it fly. That is, literally, to play records in sequence lol. I don’t even think about DJing, MCing or other sophistications. It’s just a very entertaining hobby and also, in a way, creative.
Unexpected electro-clash pioneers: Martin Galway programming directly into the hardware of an chip SID de 8-bits the most powerful midi tune in history: the intro of the Arkanoid video game for Commodore 64.
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