How I almost quit DJing (twice)

Converting power, a move to LA and Old Spice

Dear reader,
happy new year and hello!

One of my new year’s resolutions is “publish one Substack post a week”. Okay.

I have been regularly djing in clubs for more than 20 years now. I just scrolled down the list of my DJ gigs on https://hunee.world (unfortunately I lost the data of all pre-2007 gigs) and I wonder how quickly all these years have passed. How have I spent such a big portion of my adult life djing?

I was actually planning to quit djing twice in my life. Once in 2013. I had been working in two different start-ups with friends, sometime around 2011/2012. The first one was run by Martin, a former artist turned entrepreneur, who wanted to buy power converters for these huge photography lights he had brought from Canada and noticed the stark price difference between getting them on eBay in the US and on Amazon in Germany. He realized that the exact same products were being sold in Germany with a big margin on top. He researched where these converters came from and ended up on the Alibaba website in China, where they cost a fraction of the price. He ordered a few from China and started selling them in Germany. That’s basically how he started. When I joined his company we worked a lot on customizing and branding the converters, the sales logistics and customer service and making them fit for the German market. The start-up itself was just us two at that point. Funny side note, the 3D graphics for the manual we produced were done by Benjamin Castro (who now runs Sound Metaphors with Nemo). I left the company after a year and joined a little start-up in an even earlier phase. The computer engineer, who had built our website, had an idea he was working on and asked me to join. (Btw, the power converter company still exists and Martin, the owner, has developed it into a proper company providing multiple energy conversion and battery solutions for business and private use.) I won’t go much into the second start-up, but it was basically an idea around applying “Six degrees of separation” to knowledge and information systems. ‘‘Six degrees of separation is the idea that all people are six or fewer social connections away from each other’’ (Wikipedia). How are people, things, places and ideas related? And how do we make a particular information space containing these connections browsable. Sounds still interesting to me.

Through this whole time I was djing on the weekends and felt pretty stretched after a while. I realized, I needed to make a decision to fully commit to either djing or entrepreneurship. I had been djing for over 10 years at that point, released a few records, toured several countries and continents - although touring back then was nothing like it is today. My first US “tour“ in 2009 was basically just two gigs in New York City - the first one was in some brightly lit bar (Coco66) with DJ Speculator (Willie Burns) and DJ Chupacabras. We got paid 100USD plus bar tab. There were probably 20 people, most of them friends like Ron Morelli, Professor Genius etc. The second gig, a week later, was with Lovefingers and Speculator in some tiny, fancy mini-club in a hotel in Manhattan. But what a great trip that was! Going digging at The Thing and A1 all day… I had to buy two extra bags at The Thing to bring everything back home. I am totally drifting around memory lane here.

By 2013 I had played great parties and clubs all over Europe, the US, Japan and Australia too. And somehow I felt, maybe I had now “done” the DJ thing and the next decade was about something different. (I had also been working on an album for a few months, was already sending tracks back and forth to Rush Hour, but somehow ended up not liking the music I was making very much and cancelled the entire project.)

Maybe the next years could be about entrepreneurship? Or something completely different? I really loved how you could built something that previously just existed in your head. Think about it and make it a reality. Turn it into something people can actually use. So I decided to quit djing and move to Los Angeles (of all places!). A decision based on four days I had spent in LA in October 2012 around a gig at A Club Called Rhonda. It was so different to the European lifestyle I knew all my life. In the summer of 2013, me and my former partner moved to LA with all our belongings. My partner had never been to LA before that. Wild, when I think about it now. We even threw a big farewell party at Prince Charles in Berlin, that lasted for 12 hours, with Antal, Mick Wills, Mark Seven, San Soda, Bleepgeeks, Finn Johannsen & Return to Zero. The RA post is still online.

Why did I not quit djing then? Well, I kind of did, but I also played my first Boiler Room (in Berlin) a few months before leaving for LA, and that one changed the trajectory of my dj life. I was offered to join Octopus Agents, the evening of the Boiler Room, a few hours after it had gone live. Back then, Boiler Room was still a fairly obscure platform. I didn’t even know what it was, when someone called me and offered me to play. I had never seen a Boiler Room set. On the day of the event, I tried to go to “The Boiler Room”, thinking it was an actual place in Berlin. No one had told me that it wasn’t and where to go. Friends of mine eventually txted me “Hunee, it’s at Stattbad Wedding!” (Btw, that’s Castro from Sound Metaphors in the video, dancing through the whole set). Somehow that mix, despite being all messy with shaky records and nervous trainwrecks, kickstarted a new level of touring. But this time from LA and lots of long distance flights back to Europe. Not what I had planned, since I thought I was quitting. Talk about (bad?) timing…

Tbh, I loved my time in LA. Although I bought a broken car that could only take 20USD at the gas station before smelling like gas inside the car (broken tank) and we were burning through all our savings within one year. At one point I even interviewed for a personal assistant position with director Tom Kuntz, who had made some of the iconic Old Spice commercials. He’s also a music lover who runs the mixes website Pinchy and Friends. My partner was selling smoothies at Whole Foods. Can’t get more LA I guess.

But you can’t really run your own touring schedule when you want to work as an assistant, so we decided to move back to Europe. We didn’t want to go back to Berlin, so we moved to Amsterdam and shipped all our stuff back to Europe, after just 11 months. Never regretted any of it though. It was such a crucial experience for me, because it showed me that almost everything in my life was essentially just a decision away. I still feel that way today.

The second time I almost quit djing was after the pandemic. I can imagine, I wasn’t the only one contemplating not going back to Djing after such a long break. Especially, after learning to live a different life or rather to live differently altogether. I did return to djing though, but my relationship to it has changed. But that’s another Substack post…

One Substack post a week…right? Okay, I’ll talk to you again next week.

hun