Born in Ecuador, but raised in Queens from the age of two, Abe was constantly exposed to music growing up. “My father was musical. He was very much into playing all sorts of instruments, and got me into the idea of doing that. I took piano lessons and experimented the same way my dad did. However, where he went from instrument to instrument, I discovered the synthesizer one day and that was it.” We’re sat in one of the studios at Dubspot, an electronic music, DJ and production school where Abe teaches. He is extremely affable and doesn’t hesitate to open up, always with a humorous twist of outsider wit that’s been evident throughout his musical career.
Synth Love
It was a touch of love at first sight the day the synth happened: “I was about fourteen and walked into a
fourteen year old who looked like I was thirty [laughs] so I was able to club in my early teenage years. All those early clubs were part of my early days. I remember there was a little club on Queens Boulevard, which has since become a ritzy-looking strip joint, that was called Palads. I saw Little Louie Vega play there for the first time in 1986. That was big.”
What happened next is far from your average tale of ‘kid graduates high school and goes full throttle into the club scene, enjoying huge success at a young age’. Nope, Abe joined the Marine Corps and spent almost four years away from home in a very different line of work, including being stationed abroad during the Gulf War. His love of music remained a constant force in his life, “I was buying synths during this time. I didn’t have to buy food or clothes, so I spent all my checks on synths and would bring them home from time to time
Club Kids
One of the biggest clubs of the day was the infamous Limelight, Peter Gatien’s large-scale home for hedonism set in a church on 20th Street and 6th Avenue in Manhattan. It was the place to be. So much, that Abe’s first experience of it was less than stellar: “I got turned away at the door the first time that I tried to go,” he laughs. “The door guy was like, ‘not tonight honey!’”
That was how it worked; a Club Kid, one of the venue’s infamous group of outrageous and drug-addled youth, stood at the door while a pool of people formed around him as he hand-picked whoever he thought was ‘ripe’ for the Limelight experience. Thankfully, Abe wasn’t dissuaded from trying again and his second attempt proved to be much more successful. He attended Disco
Sam Ash on Queens Boulevard in 1982. It was a Prophet by Sequential Circuits and it freaked me out a little bit. I didn’t know that it could be possible to turn knobs and have these kind of sounds come out. It was really as basic as that: I didn’t like dance music yet, but I knew that I liked this kind of idea of making sounds with electronics.” It was also around this time that he fell into a crowd, all older than him, who were DJing and going to the multitude of legendary clubs around the five boroughs like the Paradise Garage. Soon Abe was going to Modell’s, a sporting goods shop that also used to sell vinyl, where he started buying records and learning how to mix. “You could buy sneakers and records at Modell’s back then. They sold anything that worked on the streets, from early disco to hip-hop and Kraftwerk was considered early hip-hop.”
Clubbing was the next step in Abe’s musical evolution, “I went to the Paradise Garage once. I was a big oafish
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when I had leave. By the time I got out of the Marines, I had a fair few decent synths.”
When he returned in 1989, Abe was ready to use them. Within a week of being back he had befriended producers Victor Calderone and Gene Le Fosse, who took him on as their keyboard player. It was through them that Abe’s first record credits appeared, and also where he got his first exposure of a new kind of music that had exploded in the Big Apple since he’d been gone. “It was really weird because the first time Victor and Gene played me a techno track, the first thought in my head was, ‘I can do that!’ Something clicked, I could understand it. So I made a techno track and started going nuts with production!” Techno was seeping into every club and it was a sound and aesthetic that Abe instantly connected with.
2000 – run by Michael Alig, subject of movie Party Monster - on a Wednesday with his cousin and their minds were suitably blown.
“It really was that crazy inside. Everything that you see in the documentaries was true. After having experienced my time at (Peter Gatien’s) clubs like Limelight, Palladium, Club USA and Tunnel… I don’t think anything has been able to shock me since. I’ve been around the world several times, and seen all sorts of ‘shocking things’, but nothing tops those days.” There were theatrics, celebrities, drugs and a messy mix of the three. “As soon as you came into Limelight, it was obvious. You’d come in and there was this entrance with people lined up on both sides of the wall, and you get could get whatever you wanted! Right there.” Say no more, there are a variety of movies – including Party Monster, the more revealing Party Monster: The Shockumentary and the less flashy
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