[Dynagroove] NEW PARTY IN LA.......COMPONENT

[Jonra XXX]

Kinda far away but here's some information, on the new shit in town. betta 
check yourself

Saturday July 12th, 2003

launch party
Component.......................Los Angeles...

with very special guests..

MIKE CLARK.aka ' AGENT X '...Detroit, USA
plante-e, track-mode, nitelife colective, beatdown sounds

JONRA.......Los Angeles, USA
designforms research,   DFR

Celebrating My ( Jonra ) birthday....ohhhhhhhhhhhh shit

come join us for this very special night of tech-freak sound with a touch of 
soul

MIKE CLARK BIOGRAPHY
Funny how things turn out. There was a time when a DJ relied solely on their 
abilities on the decks to get gigs. You'd play all the parties you could to 
try build your rep - slowly, from the bottom up. It's the equivalent of a 
band spending years gigging around hundreds of seedy venues playing to 
audiences of five before eventually being spotted. Then all that struggling 
pays off, a record deal beckons and you're a better, tighter and more 
experienced band for it. Not any more. Just as 'bands' are selected at 
auditions by music biz fixers who don't give a damn whether or not you can 
play or write songs, merely whether you can dance, smile and possess a tight 
set of abs, so do DJs now need to also be producers just to get noticed, let 
alone a booking. Nowadays, your skills behind the decks are usually 
secondary to the records you've put out and the labels you've recorded for.

No-one is more acutely aware of this than Mike Clark. He might have a deal 
with Planet E, one of the most exciting record labels in the States, but 
somehow you figure he doesn't really want to be a producer. He wants to DJ, 
just as he has been doing for the best part of twenty years, on and off. But 
to DJ, he must make records. And he knows it. "I see that as where my career 
is heading now," he explains, in that distinctive Detroiter's drawl, 
"because you don't get any gigs if you don't do the records. It wasn't like 
that before."

He tells of turning up to play a rave in Detroit recently ("I don't usually 
do raves, but I was doing a favour for a friend") only to be bumped down the 
pecking order by a seventeen year old kid, despite the fact that Mike was 
supposed to be headlining. He found out later that the kid in question was 
the son of one of the promoters. "That kinda let me know where we stand 
right now, there's no respect, no nothing."

It's a world away from Mike's DJ roots in the pre-house days of disco. "When 
I started off, the whole mixing thing was kinda green. You know, like when a 
new country discovers house music or techno, the whole vibe is fresh, 
new,young, everybody's into it, you got a spirit that's not tainted by the 
music business, it's a good feeling. When I first started it was a whole new 
era, disco just started, mixing was in, there were no 1200s. It wasn't 
looked on as a business that could go corporate."

Mike learnt his craft from local heroes like Ken Collier, Darrell Shannon 
and Kevin Dysard, and devoured tapes of Tony Humphries and Timmy Regisford 
over in New York. Eventually he signed up with Todd Johnson's Direct Drive 
DJ crew (whose chief competition on the Detroit circuit was Juan Atkins, 
Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson's Deep Space collective) and later made a 
connection with the groundbreaking Hot Mix Five over in Chicago. He even 
began a long association with radio by working with Electrifyin' Mojo.

But as the dance scene took off, themoney men moved in and Detroit went on 
what Mike calls a "downturn" in the late eighties, Mike quit DJing with the 
intention of moving into production, helping Mike Banks set up labels like 
Underground Resistance, Happy and Nite Gruv, and picking up his Agent X 
moniker in the process. And then, as the nineties dawned, Mike quit music 
altogether. Partly because of disillusionment, partly because of his other 
commitments - hairdressing and martial arts. "I actually denounced the whole 
thing. Got burned out, I guess. I was backed into a corner, man, 'cause the 
whole music thing was taking off, we just formed Underground Resistance, and 
I'm doing platform work [hairdressing demonstrations] and hair shows 
competitions] and music and going to school and doing martial arts, so I had
to cut a lot of shit out."

It couldn't last. An eye injury put the brakes on his martial arts, but he 
couldn't deny the groove. "I ended up admitting to myself that I love this 
music - this is what I've been doing all my life, this is what makes me 
happy. So I had to figure out how I was going to pursue this without getting 
caught up the same way I did before, you know, letting other people 
influence my thinking - the 'coulda, shoulda, woulda' theory. I decided I 
had to do it strictly
on my own terms."

Releases for Track Mode and Glenn Underground's Nite Life Collective 
re-established him on vinyl, then by chance Carl Craig heard some tracks 
Mike was working on and offered to
put them out. These formed the basis of the "In The Morning EP", released 
earlier this year and a subsequent global hit with DJs of the deeper 
persuasion.

Oddly enough, the deal with Planet E (for whom Mike hopes to have an album 
in the can by March) has brought him full circle. Craig's request that Mike 
mix the second Planet E Geology compilation means he finally gets a chance 
to stake his claim as a DJ on an international stage. Although Mike admits 
he hadn't reckoned on Carl Craig's perfectionist streak: "It was always 
missing something - [imitates Craig's voice] 'You're a hair
off there - do it over', 'It's fine, but there's hissing right there - do it 
over', 'You hear that pop and click? Do it over!' I'm like, 'What the 
fuck..?' But I thought, 'Carl's serious about quality and this is gonna be 
in Tower Records, I understand where he's coming from'."

Mike might not be reaping the financial rewards just yet - "I think this is 
one of the most brokest times in my life, I've never had it like this 
before." - but he's back doing what he loves and heading in the right 
direction once again. He knows it won't ever be the same again - the rules 
of the game are different now - but he's finally figuring out his place in 
the scheme of things.

"I never know what the crowd thinks any more, because you know, we're older. 
When we were teenagers and in our early twenties, we had a whole 'nother 
frame of mind. Now we're like, late twenties, early thirties, you know? So I 
don't necessarily know what gets the kids going these days, I just try to 
stick with the basics and keep my ears and nose open so I can go with the 
flow."


JONRA-DFR-2003

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