It’s 11 o’clock on a Saturday night and Willy Joy is working one of the most simultaneously sweet and difficult gigs in the city: opening for former Kanye West DJ A-Trak. The gig confers some prestige, but the crowd is full of Kanye fans who seem more interested in group beer chugs than dancing. Joy seems intent on getting their attention. He bounces around behind the decks, knocking back drinks and spinning everything from big-club techno to Police remixes, looking for a reaction. Eventually the combination of his selections and his infectious energy gets ’em moving. By the time he drops a heavily tweaked remix of Lil Wayne’s “A Milli”—with the song’s original loop replaced by a chopped-up sample of Dr. Evil’s blackmail scene from Austin Powers—they’re downright rowdy.
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Joy has inhabited a number of music scenes over the past decade or so—he cut his teeth spinning records at underground raves as a teen in Minneapolis before moving on to clubs in Providence, Boston, and now Chicago—and all of them have influenced his style as a DJ and producer. “At this point a lot of DJs would look at you crazy if you said, ‘I’m a something DJ,’” Joy says. “It used to be so accepted that you could say, ‘Oh, I spin house,’ but now it’s like, ‘And what else?’”
Fly by Night shares its name with a party Joy’s been promoting since moving to Chicago three years ago from Boston, where he’d burned out “fielding requests from jerks and trying to please middle management” by night and languishing in cubicle hell by day. “I kind of wanted to hit the ground running when I came here,” he says, “because I was really fed up in Boston and I had a lot of pent-up energy that I wasn’t using, except to watch movies and eat Cheetos at night.”
Currently Joy and fellow Fly by Night fixtures Capcom—DJ duo Dylan Reiff, who went to middle school with Joy, and Carlos Mercado—have a limited-run vinyl EP called Fly by Night: The Prequel for sale at Turntablelab.com. Joy is also contributing a track to Zebo’s upcoming record, where he’ll be featured alongside the likes of Bird Peterson, Dave Nada, and Tittsworth. Then he’ll start work in earnest on his first full-length of original material. His goal for the next year or so is to “step my production game up in general,” specifically in collaboration with locals who aren’t so well known outside the city, like foulmouthed party rapper Mic Terror. “There’s so many people doing so much cool stuff here,” he says. “It hurts as much as it helps, but it wouldn’t be Chicago any other way. There’s a bunch of people that, thinking about it, I should probably call up, but then again I’d much rather listen to Mic Terror rap about sex again.”v
Thu 9/18, 10 PM, Debonair Social Club, 1574 N. Milwaukee, 773-227-7990 or debonairsocialclub.com, $5, 21+.
