Rafael Gonzalez-Posada joins an illustrious lineage of college dropouts who founded tech startups. There’s just one small difference between him and the likes of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. Instead of building a dorky software giant or a morally dubious social networking platform, Gonzalez-Posada is making records.
The 21-year-old dropped out of Seattle University last year to focus on his burgeoning music career, inspired by the L.A. Beat Scene and our northern neighbor on the Canadian Riviera. As DJ Zumba, the Burien-born, Alki-raised fresh face in Seattle’s electronic music underground is the creative force behind one of the city’s newest record labels: Tech Startup. The boutique imprint specializing in melodic house and techno celebrates its sophomore release by Vancouver BC’s Teo Mattress on Friday, February 1 at Timbre Room.
Gonzalez-Posada started the label, which has thus far provided financially sustainable with nary a dollar of venture capital, after years as an obsessive record nerd who lionized the curatorial vision of the record label.
“I was always looking up to the guys that ran record labels more so than the artists themselves,” he said. “I’m going to look through the label catalog before I look through the artist’s discography because I trust the labelhead’s curatorial vision more than the artist’s body of work.”
As a teenager diving into the back catalogs of Stones Throw Records and obscure jazz purveyors like BYG Actuel, Gonzalez-Posada was ultimately turned on to the mid-2010s emergence of the downtempo Vancouver house sound that rocketed to international acclaim just 120 miles north of the Emerald City.
Not that the underage fan could actually see artists from tastemaker labels when they came to town, thanks to the stateside dearth of all-ages electronic music events. However, Gonzalez-Posada had the benefit of spending most summers in Spain to visit family, which afforded ample opportunity to check out the club scene.
“Here I didn’t have access to live dance music but when I was in Europe I was able to experience dance music in a freer form because there you can stay out late,” he explained. “It definitely made me want to turn 21 as fast as possible.”
As a Red Hawk, Gonzalez-Posada played his DJ mixes on student-run KXSU 102.1 FM and threw the Rocksteady party at roving art gallery LoveCityLove. But it was an article in The Stranger on Seattle’s short-lived experiment in UK-style pirate radio that pushed him to take his hobby to the next level. The day he read Dave Segal’s June 2017 profile of the creative power couple behind Orphan Radio, Gonzalez-Posada burned some mixes to CDs and chatted up the duo. He bluffed his way onto the team—as a laptop-only producer at the time, he didn’t even know how to use proper DJ equipment—and soon found himself handling much of Orphan’s day-to-day operations.
That platform gave Gonzalez-Posada the opportunity to start making connections across the underground dance music scene—including the Vancouverites he so idolized—and imbued him with the Pacific Northwest DIY mentality that there was nothing stopping him from stepping up as a DJ, promoter, and now labelhead to add another layer to Seattle’s compact but fervent musical underground.
“I wouldn’t be doing any of this if it wasn’t for Orphan,” he said.
Now Gonzalez-Posada finds himself on the vanguard of Seattle’s youngest generation of music fiends, hunting for new venues to play late-night experimental beats and 4 am trips down obscure sonic wormholes. The Kremwerk complex is a beloved stalwart for that community, but Gonzalez-Posada ranks it as the only formal venue in town open to sounds like Tech Startup.
“We’re scouring Craigslist rent-a-space,” he said. “Anybody that has a warehouse space for lease, we’re asking if we can do a private event.” They have had a few promising leads, but haven’t yet hit paydirt.
Tech Startup’s sophomore release comes on hand-stamped vinyl with no title, just the catalog number: TS000002. “I’ve always been interested aesthetically in serialization,” Gonzalez-Posada said. “With Tech Startup it’s not just about the one release but about how the release fits into the catalog.”
As for the label name itself, inspiration struck when he walked into the apartment he shared with his Seattle U roommates and saw they had arranged their desks in the living room à la WeWork. “Guys, it looks like a tech startup in here,” he said, and realized he had struck gold on the naming front.
Today’s Silicon Valley techno-libertarian elite are destroying the world, but once they were immersed in ’90s rave culture. Gonzalez-Posada hopes to tweak that history in the present day. “Did you go to that tech startup rave last night?” he imagines his fellow scenesters saying in a certain juicy double entendre.
More pointedly, he sees an opportunity to recalibrate our notion of what a tech startup can be—a tiny record label broadcasting digitally-made music is just as much a tech startup as a software developer, and more artistically enriching than an app that feeds your dog treats.
“It would be nice to have a tech startup that offers some cultural value to the city,” he said.