FUGAL (aka TED SHIN) (secondnature)
Current Top 5 Tracks:
"I find it hard to choose just 5 tracks. This list doesn’t show the extreme ends of my taste on the harder or softer sides, rather tracks that have found their way into a majority of my sets over the years in different places and different contexts."
Psyk, "Eclipse" (CLR)
"Friends in Seattle know how much I have played this track over the years. The airy pads, the heavy suction in the kick and toms, the clubby chord at 2:22—it just works on the dance floor every single time."
Adriana Lopez, "Sin Sentido" (Modularz)
"[This is more] on the functional side. I use this track to build momentum and imply I’m going somewhere a bit hotter and heavier. The toms and synth beeps roll along and incessantly tease and poke to build up a frantic tension. I’ve played this in almost all of my recent sets."
Rødhåd, "Patient Zero (Function Remix)" (Dystopian)
"Direct and to the point. Driving rhythms, hypnotic synths, washing textures, and a funky bass line underneath. All things I like in a track."
Planetary Assault Systems, "Radiance (Unreleased 1996 Drone Sector Track)" (BPM Japan)
"I always like to incorporate flashes of color in my sets to give the room some fresh air and hope, while keeping the rhythmic energy high. Planetary Assault Systems/Luke Slater has been a massive influence for my productions. I also found out recently he’s 1/4th Korean."
Jeff Mills, "The Dancer" (Purpose Maker)
"No list would be complete for me without including Detroit in some way. I especially love the funky Purpose Maker era of Jeff Mills. I like to play this after I’ve gained mutual trust in the crowd and have gone through the paces of harder, more testing material."
Crew/label affiliation: secondnature
"There has already been a fair share written about secondnature online, but my own journey into joining the collective is a bit different since I was not a part of the crew that originated in Tacoma.
"I first met Nick Carroll (co-founder of secondnature) at one of the Electric Tea Garden closing parties handing out fliers for the first secondnature outdoor. I remember him describing it as 'a renegade party where a ton of people lose it to techno.' I was immediately curious because this also came at a time when my musical interests were quickly shifting from UK-centric styles to focusing more directly on techno (I still love all that UK stuff, by the way). I missed the first secondnature event, but as soon as I found out about secondnature.02 at Kremwerk, a club that had just opened at the time, I knew I had to check it out.
"I went alone and entered the room to Nick Carroll and Eddie Lee (other co-founder of secondnature) playing rolling, atmospheric techno on a very nicely tuned KV2 system. I looked around and saw a lot of people around my age that I hadn’t really met or seen before. I was baffled, I was like, 'where did these people come from and where has this been this whole time?!' Bryan Zentz came on after and threw down proper, and I just couldn’t get myself to leave until the lights in the club turned on. At the end it was just Nick, Eddie, Kirsten Thom, and Zentz that remained. I just knew I had to meet these people, and see what secondnature was all about. I needed more of that in my life. Eddie asked me about the next time I was playing, which was a few weeks later at Vermillion Art Gallery for the now defunct Structure night.
"A few weeks later, surely, Eddie was there at Vermillion. He stayed the whole set and afterwards asked me if I’d be interested in meeting up sometime to have a mix. Little did I know at the time that it’s rare to get in the mix with Eddie, and that he was probably vetting my taste and abilities.
"Maybe a month later was the annual UPS Alder Arts Walk—a student organized showcase of music, art and festivities. I was going there to check it out and go to the afterparty where Nick and Eddie were set to play. The night of, Eddie calls me: 'bring your CDs.'
"So I sped down to Tacoma with my main man Raj Makker and upon arrival, Eddie told me that I should just take his spot because he had too many obligations early the next day. Maybe an hour into my set, place was going a bit crazy, Nick was going full beast-mode climbing on top of the speakers, and he comes down and asks me 'Hey. Do you want to be a part of secondnature?' I answered with a definitive yes.
"Skip forward 3.5 years and I’m currently living in Berlin. I am managing all the back-end for secondnature’s record label, doing the mixdown engineering for our records, graphic design for the inner labels, PR, and working with Berlin-based vinyl distributors Ready Made. I’m doing less work on the bookings back home in Seattle for now, but key decisions are still made within the whole group."
Styles played: "Currently my specialty in musical knowledge and technical style is in a certain strain of big room/warehouse techno. That’s a very wide playing field, but the tracks I listed above provide some insight into my taste.
"I started my foundation in music and ear training being a snare drummer in drumline and percussionist in percussion and wind ensembles. With this background my ear naturally inclines toward techno that focuses primarily on rhythm, pressure, texture, timbre, and atmosphere. It’s these kinds of elements that I feel I hear the most clearly and acutely, and are the leading elements in the techno I play and produce today.
"Generally, I like to play at faster tempos—around 133-135 bpm. Of course this will change depending on the venue and time slot. I wouldn’t play that fast as an opener. But if I’m playing peak time or the moment calls for it, this is where I like to go. As both a DJ and a dancer, this tempo has a certain momentum and urgency that pushes me physically and mentally in a way that can be very powerful and rewarding to work through. I like to work with three decks and do a lot of layering, so I always have to keep focus to make sure everything stays locked in. If I slip, overthink, or rest, the track will fly right past me and I will miss the right moment to combine all those layers to hit together at the right time for full impact. I thoroughly enjoy having to be on my toes and under the pressure of a mix completely falling apart at any given second. That’s usually when I do best."
DJing philosophy: "The DJs I hold the most respect for, that take me to magical places on a dance floor, have at least ~10 years of experience behind them. I guess as with most things, it requires a lot of life experience to reach a certain level of mastery and depth. I haven’t been doing this long enough to feel I can make a grand statement about having a DJing philosophy, per se—I only really started DJing about five years ago. But I can tell you where I am right now and what I’ve learned on the way.
"The parameters of my style are context-dependent. I prepare based on the time I’m playing, the lineup, and the size, lighting, and interior of the club. Before playing, I check the character of the sound system and how it acoustically interacts with the room: are the walls soft or hard? Is the floor bouncy or stiff? How fast is the attack of the sound system? These are just a few of the things that I check. Rather than see these as constraints, I see each situation as an opportunity to show different layers of my musical taste. Not taking the time and care to consider these factors would be underplaying the music and all the hard work required to make an event come together.
"How a DJ adapts is where it gets a bit more subjective. I am always mindful of the crowd’s mental and physical state, but I find that trying to play for the crowd at all times during a set can be too much of a distraction—different people have different tastes and unless it’s a very exceptional circumstance, not everyone will want the same thing at the same time. I think focusing too much on pleasing everyone can convolute the musical vision and narrative. It’s sometimes not possible in big rooms to see all the way to the back, and I’ve learned that what people in my immediate plane of vision want in that moment might not necessarily be good for the entire audience or the broader context of the party beyond my own set-time. It’s taken me quite some time to learn how to trust my own instincts.
"On the other hand, nobody likes a selfish DJ. And I’ve seen a fair share of DJs playing selfishly where they put themselves in front of the music with little empathy for the crowd for the sake of some predetermined motivation or aesthetic. But my best experiences as both a DJ and a dancer lie somewhere in between, when a DJ knows how to give but also how to take—can adapt to the ever-changing dynamics of a room but still hold a strong vision and is confident enough to push the audience past boundaries. I try to ride that line of having the confidence to challenge, the humbleness to listen, and the communicative ability to find resolve together in a common thread."
Format: "3 CDJs, 1 Technics SL-1200mk5, Xone 92."
Worst request: “'Play something we can dance to.' I don’t take music requests very personally anymore; I understand that people can have very different ideas and perceptions of a DJ’s role in a night, and that’s fine. However… I found this ‘request’ not only to be insensitive but also completely unhelpful. I believe the saying goes 'help me help you'—I had no idea how to help this person, meanwhile playing tracks that have their own history of moving thousands of bodies. In that moment I just laughed at the absurdity.
"The backstory is that three years ago, an old friend of mine asked me to organize the music for his birthday party in the U-District because he likes what my friends and I play. Sounds simple enough? I got together with Nick Carroll, Raj, US41, and Conduit and we hauled a full DJ setup and sound system to the house. I won’t get too into the details, but the night basically consisted of a house party with an empty dance floor, an uncomfortably crowded kitchen with conversation revolving around tech startups and VCs, and someone demanding that I 'play something we can dance to' and that I 'really should listen to them because they’re a UW computer science major.' No jokes here. Talk about being booked for the wrong gig.
"Not even two hours into the party, the night was officially over for us when someone brought a small guitar amp with an aux cable to the dance floor and tried blasting music over ours. The guitar amp was so distorted that I still to this day have no idea what they were playing. As we were packing everything up, there were maybe five people dancing around the amp in a circle chanting and fist-bumping, but a few distorted songs and two YouTube ads later it all just awkwardly fizzled out into nothing. Weird night."
Upcoming events: Aug. 12: The Lodge, Washington; Aug. 19: Sacred Sound Club at 333 Clark, Vancouver BC; Aug. 20: Fugal b2b Raj at Orphan Radio, Seattle; Aug. 24: The Lot Radio, New York; Aug. 25: Halcyon, New York; Sept. 15: Talinn, Estonia; Oct. 13: DJ Nobu, DJ So, Fugal at Ankali, Prague
Check out Fugal's mixes and productions here Listen to his Oil Panes EP here.