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ou might think you’ve got Danny Daze pegged, but the chances are you haven’t. Anyone who has seen him DJing will have


probably more likely seen what he’s really about. His breakthrough track, the massive ‘Your Everything’ on Jamie Jones and Lee Foss’s Hot Creations, saw him stuffed into a rather particular pigeon hole, one he’s pretty much outgrown already. He’d find that people would pitch up to see him play and find, to their shock, that deep house isn’t really his bag. You’ll hear Miami bass, mid-’90s ghetto tech from Detroit, dark electro, jacking techno. Sometimes anything but deep house, in fact. Winning people over with an uncompromising set must be a good feeling though, right?


“Yeah, well sometimes I’ll get the complete opposite,” he laughs. “I’ll get ‘what the hell is this guy playing, we hate him’. But to be honest, those are the people I do not mind losing. People who just want to hear one sound. I’ll get a couple of tweets like ‘what the hell were you playing, that was the worst shit I ever heard in my entire life’, but I’m cool with that. If you’re just a deep house person, I don’t mind losing you. As bad as that sounds.”


Miami-born to a sprawling Cuban family, Daze – real name Daniel Gomez (his mother said he needed a name like Mixmaster Mike, so suggested his producer handle Danny Daze and it stuck) – grew up saturated in music. “Every type of salsa music you can possibly imagine” he says would be played in the house. “That was just ingrained. You’d listen to that every single day when you got home from school. I dance salsa. Joe Arroyo, Celia Cruz, they were the two biggest right there. But Cubans don’t just listen to Cuban music. Salsa in general, like El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico. They were big for me as well.”


Growing up, his dad sang opera, and played in a salsa band (“He plays pretty much everything, across the


board,” he says). He remembers playing along with a triangle aged around two. “What I think I got out of Cuban music is the syncopation. The different beats, different rhythms. That’s all helped me out quite a bit, even when it comes to DJing,” he says.


But what truly blew his mind – perhaps even literally – was the molar-loosening frequencies of Miami bass. Bass in Miami was everywhere when he was growing up, on every street corner and in every shopping mall car park. Pivotally, it was also to be found on the legendary Miami station Power 96, which was where he first encountered the sounds of freestyle and electro.


“I used to be a breakdancer, so from very early on it was Afrika Bambaataa and Cybotron,” he says. “Everyone here just used to call it ‘old school’ but then I discovered that it was called ‘electro’, and how it had affected Detroit. But the main reason I got into it was for the sub-woofers.


“For a long time I had two 15-inch KRK subs in my car. Anything that had bass, I’d just ride around with. I had no clue what the high-end sounded like, it was just all about the subwoofer music. It used to be a kind of rite of passage with young guys from Miami. You can get these bandpass boxes now that give out this insane response, but back then without the technology, it was a science.”


The soundsystem Daze developed somewhat outshone its ‘enclosure’, you might say. “I had a 1992 Toyota Camry. The system would just rattle the whole car. There would be nuts and bolts flying off. The license plate would be rattling. You could hear me from two blocks down, and I’m not even kidding.”


But while for some the incendiary lyrics of Two Live Crew was a rebellion, for Daze it was always all about the music. He’d more often than not be found playing the instrumentals – and still does in his sets now. From bass, the leap to the likes of Detroit techno and to the


ghetto-tech sounds of the likes of DJ Godfather was really not that much of a leap. In fact, he’s now good friends with Godfather and the pair are plotting a release of their own.


“Detroit techno and electro, stuff like Aux 88 and Dopplereffekt, was influenced by Miami bass. It was the mixture of that and the electro from New York, and that mixture then pushed the sound over to Detroit, and they blew it the hell up.”


It’s certainly one school of thought, and with the lineage of electronic music as we now know it so impossibly tangled between the sounds of Bambaataa, Kraftwerk, Depeche Mode, Moroder, Tangerine Dream, Parliament and Juan Atkins, it’s not inconceivable that the bass music emanating from Miami in the late ‘80s had a bearing on matters. But we digress.


“These were sounds that all came up at the same time, but from different cities, so Chicago had its house music but at the same time it had ‘juke’, which was sort of very close to ghetto-tech, which was from Detroit. Everyone had their own take on it, while over here we slowed things down a little bit and had Miami bass. Now, I don’t even know where we are anymore. It’s crazy, and it kind of sucks. I blame our commercial radio over here. The BBC over there pushes out really underground stuff. We don’t have that anymore. Things plateau too quickly now too, and we can blame the internet for that.”


He laments the fact that the mystery now seems to be gone from electronic music. Kids can find a sound they like, know precisely who it is, read what they had for breakfast, listen to the music ad nauseum and get bored of it all in the space of a few weeks. Had acid house kicked off now, it would have been drowned at birth.


“When I was an obsessive vinyl collector, I used to like not knowing where the record was from. Like Drexciya,


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