Julian Pena, Dysqo, DJ MTM
Info 773-278-6600
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
What he looks for in all those records are breaks, the building blocks of his crazy-quilt music. A break is just an element of a song–a drum pattern, a guitar riff, a bass line–that can be isolated, looped, and stitched to other snippets. The Bronx party DJs who developed the technique in the 70s ended up inventing hip-hop as a by-product: old-schoolers like DJ Kool Herc would bounce between two copies of the same record to keep a single break going for long stretches, which made a perfect backdrop for an MC. Berry is pretty old-school himself–when he spins live he uses only vinyl–but his style is more frenetic. He constantly switches from record to record with reckless disregard for genre, creating a hectic series of transitions rather than a steady groove. These days most hip-hop DJs use bigger pieces of songs and aim for the smooth segues and steady tempos of dance music. The most notable exceptions are probably west-coast DJ and producer Peanut Butter Wolf and his Stones Throw crew–in Chicago, DJs like Berry are a rarity. “People always ask me why I don’t play the whole song,” he says. “But I figure if you want to hear the whole thing you can listen to it at home.”
The Analog Addicts were all devoted hip-hop heads, but they understood that hip-hop drew on a whole range of music. Berry’s dad had spent the late 70s spinning parties as part of a crew put together by legendary DJ Herb “the Kool Gent” Kent, and though he had to find steadier work after Berry was born, in 2000 he gave Berry his records to go with the new turntables. They formed the nucleus of Berry’s own collection, and he realized he’d long been hearing samples from them in rap tracks. Along with funk, soul, and R & B, he says, “my old man used to play Phil Collins, the Rolling Stones, Chicago”–basically anything he could get a crowd to dance to.
