Certain DJs have the uncanny ability to reflect your musical taste
almost exactly while also expanding your knowledge and appreciation of
styles that you’ve yet to explore. For me, and many others, one such DJ
is JD Twitch (aka Keith McIvor) of the group Optimo. With partner JG
Wilkes, Twitch has been running the Optimo (Espacio) club night every
Sunday in Glasgow, Scotland, since 1997; they also maintain a label
called Optimo Music. Wilkes and Twitch don’t sleep much.
Twitch is the opposite of a specialist. His expertise extends over
several musical genres: psych rock, dub, various African styles, early
electronic music, punk, funk, soul, disco, experimental, jazz,
post-punk, Tropicália (in 2007 he collaborated with Os Mutantes
in a project called Trocabrahma), house, and techno. Eclecticism is all
well and good, but if you have crap taste, diversity is a scourge.
Gratefully, Twitch possesses exquisite aesthetics and an insatiable
curiosity that leads to frequent discoveries of hidden sonic treasures
(he possesses about 25,000 records).
Twitch’s ascension to the elite echelon of selectors didn’t result
from cool calculation, but rather almost from chance. “I neither wanted
nor intended to be a DJ,” Twitch says via e-mail. “When I was 18 or so,
I was always getting asked to provide the music at parties and play
alongside bands, as I suppose I was renowned for having a lot of music.
Then a good friend of mine talked me into playing alongside him at this
club night (this was way before I discovered mixing records together).
Next thing I knew, I had fallen in love with playing music for people,
and it gradually became what I did for a living. I was more inspired by
giving an outlet to music I loved that people hadn’t heard before
rather than by any particular person.”
Twitch snagged his first major professional gig as a DJ at Club Pure
in Edinburgh. If you scan the track lists for mixes he’s done in the
’00s, you could predict that playing only techno and house every week
would not suit Twitch forever. In retrospect, it’s a miracle he endured
at Pure as long as he did.
“Pure lasted for 10 years,” Twitch says. “For the first seven years
I loved it. House and techno were constantly developing and even then I
would throw in other records from outside those genres. Around 1997, it
all got a little dull for me. The records that were coming out weren’t
inspiring me, and the crowd [was] increasingly becoming more
narrow-minded. So I got burned out, and that’s when Optimo started and
the idea of doing a club that wasn’t genre-specific or that was
freestyle in the literal sense of the word came into being.”
Twitch has had the good fortune to find a DJ/business partner who
augments his own rarefied, ravenous tastes. “Our tastes complement each
other’s, but are also quite different,” he clarifies. “I’m sure if you
blindfolded anyone who came to the club regularly, they could tell you
which of us was playing. We play separate sets rather than
back-to-back, except at the end of the night when we play back-to-back
for the last 20 minutes or so. With regards to running the night, I
deal with all the booking of guests and running the website and
[Wilkes] does all our design.”
Those Optimo (Espacio) nights typically begin with an hour of
un-beat-matched songs that, Twitch says, “are about setting up an
atmosphere for the dancing to commence. After that, if there is
something I want to play that can’t be beat-matched, I won’t really
worry about it and will happily cut to something completely different,
but not just for the sake of it.”
With an eclectic, freestyle DJ like Twitch, one wonders if there are
any genres he won’t touch and what elements are crucial in tracks that
form his sets. Surely there must be limits. Twitch’s criteria couldn’t
be simpler: “If I like it, I’ll play it. I look for music that moves me
or that has a certain energy I like. While I don’t like using the term
‘soul,’ I’d say everything I play has to have been made with passion
for the music.”
That passion amply blossoms on mixes like Optimo Present Psych
Out, How to Kill the DJ (Part Two), and Mx6: Twitch’s 60
Minutes of Fear. Psych Out reveals psychedelia’s surprising
expansiveness, with Optimo finding fortuitous connections within
unlikely segues, such as the Stranglers’ “Bear Cage” into Mr. Fingers’
“Washing Machine” and Herbie Hancock’s “Raindance” into Sweet
Exorcist’s “Mad Jack.” How to Kill the DJ features unprecedented
transitions like Miroslav Vitous/Soft Cell/Carl Craig and Nurse with
Wound/Blondie/Ricardo Villalobos. The rampant stylistic shifts somewhat
resemble those of Girl Talk, who’s also playing Seattle this week, but
Optimo delve deeper into the underground and don’t cater to ADHD
dancers like Gregg Gillis does.
Twitch has been DJing since the 1980s, but he has no secret tricks
that guide his crate-digging.
“I spend an inordinate amount of my life seeking out music both old
and new. My intuition guides me. A valuable lesson I have learned is to
not chase the records everyone else is playing and to pay as little
attention as possible to what everyone else seems to be doing. I don’t
feel part of any scene (nor would I want to), and while it can be hard
not to be influenced by anyone else, I truly just try to plow my own
furrow.”
With such a varied palette at his disposal, Twitch could lay down
almost anything at his Seattle date. Care to let us know what’s in
store at Re-bar, Mr. McIvor?
“I have no idea what I will play anywhere until I get there and get
a feel for what is going on,” he reasonably responds. “The differences
between what I play at Optimo and elsewhere can be vast or not that
different. I feel very fortunate that I get booked to play at disco
clubs, techno clubs, rock ‘n’ roll nights, house clubs, psychedelic
nights, and even on the odd occasion punk-rock gigs. It keeps things
interesting and challenging for me, and I like that I can usually pull
off playing completely different styles.
“Usually, however, most of the sets I play are more similar to what
I play at Optimo, although there is some crazy shit I play at Optimo
that I might not be able to play elsewhere, as it took our crowd a long
time to fall in love with it and it probably wouldn’t work outside that
context. Also, there is a big strain of pop music that runs through
Optimo nights that I might cut out elsewhere. Finally, we often play a
section of dancehall at Optimo, and I tend to only do that there.”
Finally, I must ask: Twitch, what’s the stupidest thing anyone’s
said to you while you were working?
“I could write a book on this subject. All the usuals, such as being
asked to play something more funky while playing James Brown, but my
favorite is this guy who kept on pestering me while I was in the middle
of a mix. I gestured to him that I was busy, but he wouldn’t get out of
my face. Finally, in exasperation, I muted the monitors and asked him
what he wanted. His answer: ‘Two vodkas and Coke and a whisky please.’
The stupidest thing a punter has done is set off a tear-gas canister on
the dance floor. That happened at a club in Madrid. I went back again a
year later, and it happened again!”
Seattle: Please leave the explosives to Twitch, okay? 
