DJ gives dance music
By John Berger
international flair
Special to the Star-BulletinIt's been well over three years since DJ Lars wrapped up his gig as a cast member of MTV's slice-of-modern-life series, "Real World London." He recalls it as a great opportunity, but adds that it created a dilemma for him when he moved to New York. "It definitely opened some doors for me in this country, because before that nobody knew me here as a DJ or a television persona or whatever. But a lot of people were still skeptical - could I really DJ?," Lars says. It was his work at Vinyl, an underground club in New York, that convinced the skeptics.
It's been pretty much straight up since then for the 28-year-old German club artist. More than 5,000 people turned out for the rave he played last weekend in Los Angeles.
"What really makes a great DJ is creating something new out of the existing product. You can especially get creative with a mixer that allows you to separate individual channels. You can take the treble and mids (mid-range) of one track and just the bass line of another track and thereby create an entirely new track. That's something I love to do by playing with equalizer on my mixer and do those sorts of things."
The newest club mixers make it possible for DJs to add or alter recording-studio effects. Club DJs have been interweaving music from two or more turntables from the dawn of disco. Now they can do the same thing using CD players, although Lars still likes to use the grooves on a vinyl record as a visual cue when mixing.
Lars describes his repertoire as "variations of house music - progressive house, hard house, vocal house, sometimes even techno." He chooses the raw material for his creations with a seasoned international perspective.
Raised in Berlin, he became a DJ at the age of 20, and made a name for himself as a club DJ in Germany and Italy before moving to London and ending up on "Real World." He found the Berlin scene losing momentum when he returned after "Real World," and preferred what he saw when he visited New York for the 1995 MTV Video Music Awards. New York has been his base of operations ever since.
"I've met people there who don't like Germans, but within the whole DJ/house music community itself they don't care about color, or what sex you are, or your country of origin. The more exotic the better, actually."
He still enjoys dissecting and reconstructing other artists' recordings, but signing with a label and releasing his own product is the obvious next step.
"I have mix tapes I distribute, but I want a proper fully licensed mix CD in conjunction with a label. I've been working on that, but I'm very cautious. There are people waiting to bad-mouth me if I come out with a bad record. I won't have a hard time shopping tracks to a label, but I'm not going to do that until I'm 100 percent satisfied."
DJ Lars
In concert: Midnight today
