ROAD TO MOVEMENT SERIES
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This week’s mix by Vincent Patricola and Jesse Cory is the 3rd part of the Road to Movement 4-part series – it is my pleasure to have them on as a guest and I hope you enjoy their feature! Monday they mentioned some ways they were preparing for their Movement 2022 set, some tips for first-time festival attendees, memorable Movement moments, and some other details – check it out!
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Jesse and Vince are both very busy people, so I am thankful that they both took the time to sit down with me for an interview while at Spotlite one evening. Jesse is co-owner of the venue Spotlite Detroit and founder of the brand 1XRUN, and Vince is the founder of Detroit Electronic Quarterly, hosts his own events, and works at Spotlite as well. Two pillars of the Detroit electronic music community.
In their interview, we talk more in depth about 1XRUN and DEQ and what they are, how they met, their respective musical journeys, how it feels being a part of the well-loved and impactful Spotlite, what inspires them, their b2b style, the Spotlite 1 year anniversary event (May 13&14, 2022), and more.
Their mix is live now on SoundCloud, and their shared Recipe by Request – a smoothie – is also available in the Recipe tab on the site.
detroit.dance: How did you two meet?
Jesse: I think with a lot of people in the scene, you’re just around each other so much. There are some people that I definitely truly know where I met and how I met them, but there’s a lot of people that I don’t necessarily know how I met them or how I know them. You become familiar with people and then sometimes you just have a moment – it might be a private moment or some moment you’re able to share which then takes your relationship from knowing each other generally to the other deeper layers of a relationship.
With Vince, we knew each other a little bit and then I started DJing a little bit more and he was really encouraging me and asked me out to play some events. Vince had a couple of great nights pre pandemic that were really staples – Wednesday night in Corktown at Two James with 2 DJs was really special. Over the course of a couple years I was really a steadfast patron of Wednesday’s and that’s where I think we got to know each other better.
Vince: Yeah, that’s where everything cemented. We did some DEQ parties at Interstate Gallery early on, some at 323 which was Jesse’s old gallery… I think that’s where I first was formally introduced to Jesse because I DJ’d one of the events
My girlfriend and I also bought a building at the corner of Sylvester and Gratiot and Jesse and Roula came to one of my nights at Two James and I told them. Jesse and Roula just looked at each other, like, “Should we tell him?” And then that’s when they told us that they were going to be moving close to us, that we were gonna be neighbors. That’s how everything really started.
Jesse: We have his and hers commercial real estate in the same neighborhood.
detroit.dance: Now your relationship has blossomed to where you are now!
Jesse: We spend a lot of time running together and we spent a lot of time together even during the pandemic. When we were getting ready to open Spotlite, it was still in the middle of the pandemic. There weren’t a lot of public events. One day my wife said to me, “With this, you know, limited capacity thing, I think we’re gonna have to open a record store.” I was like, Oh, my God, I can’t believe she said that. I didn’t really even smile. I was like, “Yeah, that works”. Then I called Vince the next day and I was like, you will not believe this. She said we could open a record store!
Vince has spent so much time working with so many legends at Record Time. Would there be Detroit dance music without Record Time? Would it even be the same without Record Time? It would not. We’re continuing to kind of push that forward here in our record shop. The camaraderie aspect of it.
Norm Talley was here with Delano Smith yesterday fighting over the last Louie Vega Moodymann record that we only got five copies of, elbowing each other and blocking each other from it…and that’s the kind of stuff that we were doing 25 years ago. It’s really sweet to see that kind of playfulness among lifelong friends. To still be doing it today, I think is a real testament to how important a record store is to the dance community. The resurgence of vinyl helps. The resurgence of the coffee shop. The resurgence of I have to go out and seek and find stuff not just find stuff on the internet. It’s great that we can have a part in pushing that forward.
detroit.dance: Talk about your musical journey and how you got to where you are now.
Vince: I’ve been a fan of music since a very early age. My uncle was a big influence. We lived at my grandparents house and he would always be bringing music over, playing stuff during rides in the car and so on. Everything from Earth Wind and Fire to Santana. We used to get a radio station from Toronto in Buffalo, New York where I’m from and also some college radio stations, and I was trying to figure out how they were taking all of my favorite songs from MTV and seamlessly mixing it into another song. How did they do that? In suburban Buffalo, nobody knows. There was no culture there. I asked people in my high school and they’re like, What are you talking about? But when I got to the University of Detroit, I learned what a mixer was when I joined the radio station. And I was like, Oh, this is a mixing board. Okay. That’s how that works. And then I started DJing parties and stuff. I didn’t know how to mix. I didn’t really care. People didn’t. They weren’t really dependent on that. The parties I was doing, you basically just showed up and played music and made some money.
Then in ‘95, I went to Record Time to the dance room because I was bored. I wanted to learn and progress. I walked in and Mike Huckabee was playing The Climax by Carl Craig. So I said I want to learn how to do this. How do you do it? And then I started learning. I did a show on 89x when I was really learning how to mix and pre-recorded short mixes. With more practice under my belt, I started going to raves at Motor and playing with better people. I started doing my own gigs and creating a lane for myself and for others.
Jesse: As I was going through my youth there was music in my family, but not a lot. and then I ended up at my first System party at the Packard plant…. and I just lost it. It was so different. And I was like, What is this music? I really didn’t have any grasp on what it was. I mean, going to a party or going somewhere you shouldn’t be going and using infolines that you’d have to call into and remember the instructions. One of them was like, “Hey, 94 is closed. So you’re gonna have to go the long way.” I was like, ah, what’s the fucking long way? I don’t know.
I was dating someone who worked next door to Record Time at London Calling the hair salon (still there). And I met the owner of Melodies and Memories, because he was with somebody that worked at London Calling too. And he said, Yeah, we’re gonna open this dance room. And I was like, oh my god, I’m like, looking for dance records. I got most of my records at Melodies and Memories. I worked there for a while and spent all of my money there. Vince and I can date our records and remember where they are from by looking at the stickers on them.
When Kevin Saunderson played at Spotlite a couple of months ago, he played songs that were so nostalgic. I didn’t even know what they were. They were something deeply ingrained in me somewhere that felt so familiar. Maybe they weren’t, I don’t know. But there was something about it. 30 years of listening to dance music, you feel like you’re part of something that was really special and that it’s still happening.
detroit.dance: Vince, what is your involvement in Detroit Electronic Quarterly (DEQ) and what is it exactly?
Vince: I started DEQ in 2005. We feature DJs with articles in magazines, and records during the year in quarterly releases and also throw events. I had so many things that I wanted to do and I wasn’t doing any of them so I decided that I’d start one of them. At the time I had some background in sales and media, and some photographers and creative friends that were helping me out, and some people interested in buying ads. It was all an experiment. I wrote all the articles on the DJs using people I knew. Paul Randolph was our first cover. Paul’s a bassist and vocalist, and he’s the frontman for the Jazzanova band now. He’s also done stuff with larger artists like Alice Cooper.
I took a hiatus from 2008 to 2015 and while I was considering bringing it back I met with Mike Banks and Jeff Collins at the Underground Resistance building and they personally asked me to bring the magazine back. I told him that I felt irrelevant with how everyone had the ability to Google an article on whatever artist they were looking for. And he said it’s because we need a voice telling our stories. Plenty of DJs are overlooked or don’t get as much media coverage and they need their voices heard. That hit home with me. So I brought DEQ back.
I used to put CDs in my magazines, and it was just tracks that people gave me. But now I’m doing vinyl. Fast forward to 2020 and during the pandemic we became a nonprofit. We have a community garden that we are working on as part of a beautification project by our building on Gratiot by Faygo. We’re bringing back the print. We couldn’t do print during the pandemic or anything. It was just too hard. We’re a community supported magazine. Our advertisers are all local creatives.
We have an event coming on Monday the 23rd at Chroma which is on a club over on Grand Boulevard, right up the street from our building. We’re doing an event guide with The Detroit I Love. It’s got all the after parties and everything in it. Steven at The Detroit I Love is great, they do a great job with their curation. Wednesday the 25th we’re going to do our formal release at IMA Corktown. We have a brand new record coming out that day as well. Eddie Fowlkes, Claude Young, John Dixon, some spoken word artists, we did an article with DJ Holographic as well, some ambient music artists in there. We like to go all over the spectrum.
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We have two records affiliated with this issue. We had one before the pandemic. We did a digital edition of 17 and 18 and I put out a record. Then I decided to put out another record to supplement this because all the stuff we did pre pandemic is not in the new print. The Monday party will also have a big record fair with 15 vendors and Spotlite will be there. People can come find some new music and get ready for their sets at Movement.
detroit.dance: How long have you been doing the Movement event booklet with The Detroit I Love?
Vince: I think this is number four. Steven gathers all the listings which is the hard part. After the first one, we realized how popular it was and people loved it. We watched people read them in the crowd at the festival and ask people where they should go for the afterparty that night. People don’t understand how important Steven Reaume is for the Detroit scene and what he has done.
detroit.dance: Jesse, what is 1XRUN and what is your involvement in it?
Jesse: 1XRUN (One Time Run) is a publisher of fine art editions. We’re a record label for visual artists. We publish different print editions with our artists and we produce, market, sell, and distribute them. We are in the middle of transitioning over to the NFT space. The way that technology changes dance music, how the printing press changed the distribution of media and ideas… I think that the blockchain is going to be another way that’s going to change the way we interact with each other, and how artists express ideas. And so it’s been really exciting to work on that.
We started 1XRUN in 2007. It’s now 12 years later. My partner Dan and I started in the backroom of a gallery and we still work at a gallery today. That’s cool. We’ve shipped hundreds of 1000s of prints to hundreds of different countries. Over the years we’ve worked for a whole bunch of different clients like the NBA, the Bleacher Report, and Paxahau. If you go to the Mom’s Spaghetti store there are Eminem collectibles in there and it’s mostly stuff that we invented, created, published and authenticated. You can buy a bunch of our stuff there in the store.
My involvement with Movement dates back to the very first festival where I was a cameraman. It was live streamed through a company called Jump Cut. A couple years later, I came back and worked the pre camp days with Vanessa. We worked on this thing called The Analog Social Experiment, where we took a bunch of old netting and screens from the Paxahau offices, and we stretched them through the festival across the trees and we put sharpies on elastic rubber bands, and then people could write analog messages to each other like they were doing on Friendster and MySpace at the time. I still have it in storage and have pictures of it.
1XRun/I did all of the Movement merchandise for several years. 323 East was a vendor at the festival and we always had the biggest booth. I would be down there from load in to load out. We designed and built the merchandise tent that is still used today. The Movement logo that goes on top of the tent was built with a 3-D printer.
The last five years, we started the artists in residence program. The first artist was 2501 from Italy, who was a huge fan of Detroit electronic music. When he made his art on a conveyor belt, it created a sound and you’d put on headphones and paint and it was like the translation of art to sound. The next year we worked with an artist 1010 from Germany. He was a huge fan of Detroit’s electronic music scene as well and we did a projection mapping project. Then we worked with Weezy and we did a huge installation, and then in 2019 it was Kevin Lyons and that was really awesome. He made all these cutout characters and they were all themed after the early techno guys but cartoonish. This year it’s Sheefy McFly. We just had our entire inaugural opening here at Spotlite. Sheefy’s artwork is a big component of the visual landscape of Spotlite.
detroit.dance: What inspires you?
Vince: Friendships from music, and music. They kind of go hand in hand.
Jesse: We are really lucky to be surrounded by music all day. Wake up, music. Have lunch, music. Listen to other people, music. Find music.
detroit.dance: How do you guys feed off of each other in a b2b, and what do you think is important for DJs going b2b to keep in mind?
Vince: I think it’s just chemistry. It really is. Sometimes people get stuck playing together and they don’t know each other. The party only has a certain amount of time and they have a large number of DJs so people have to play b2b. I kind of like that too, because it keeps you on your toes. You have to anticipate what they’re playing, know their personality and generally how they play. Jesse and I are both in a similar mindset and we both have different backgrounds but we are also very much the same so it works.
Jesse: Don’t fuck up.
Vince: That’s really what it comes down to. Being prepared and understanding what you’re getting into before you get into it. Jesse and I know each other very well. He picks me up when I’m down. He knows.
Jesse: Our b2b is 2 records – mix into the other record, play one of your own, and you’re done. Two and two and two. We’ve done that for hours. It’s pretty natural. We can go from 4×4 dance to disco and soul. One of the most important things as a DJ is to think about the tempo that you’re in and what tempo you’re at. If you’re playing with somebody and you guys are at a different tempo it sounds like a disaster. I have some friends that play real slow, like 110 and under and I had to learn the process of how to get slow with it. You have to have different music selections.
detroit.dance: If both of you had to listen to one record for like 24 to 48 hours straight what would that one record be?
Vince: Whoa oh boy! One song?
Jesse: The Best of Dance Mania.
Vince: Life by Pepe Braddock.
Jesse: Harvest by Neil Young.
detroit.dance: Spotlite is a hub for creativity and expression – how does it feel to be a part of something so great and impactful?
Jesse: You know, it’s a culmination of a lot of things that me and Roula and our team and our friends have been working on. When you have a traditional gallery that’s just selling commoditized art that hangs on the wall, there’s a limitation to creative expression only to visual artists. Spotlite is really about everybody’s expression. Roula worded it really well in our one-year anniversary event announcement when she said that the people here are the biggest expression. They are all the art. That’s really what this place is about. A judgment free zone.
I think as you get a little older, you realize that if somebody isn’t creating those unique and authentic underground experiences, then will people still carry underground culture forward? I almost feel indebted to and I have the ability to do it with our partners and my wife and everybody here that does it. We were lucky to have the capacity to go through the city and get permits and do all the paperwork and go through all the hassle that it takes to actually renovate a warehouse into a legal class C liquor license establishment. It’s hard, but that’s my skill set. So, if my contribution to the music scene is that I can do the paperwork so somebody can get up there and DJ, I’m gonna go right back to sharpening my pencil and do more paperwork. I want to create more opportunities for people to create those bonds.
They say sometimes you plant trees or seeds under trees you never sit…and I hope that there’s people here that have fallen in love and created a lifelong bond or a family, whatever it is. We don’t know that those things happen, but I would assume that they do. One person came up to me about four or five months after we opened, and this person said to me, “I just love this place so much. I just came out to my best friend and I told her that I loved her. And she told me that she loved me too. And like I felt this was a place where I could do that.” What? That gives me the shivers. If this place didn’t exist, would that experience have happened? I’m not really sure.
Loud music and dark places and intense emotional feelings like those are all part of dance culture. Without the intensity of it, maybe you’re not feeling the deepest emotions that you may feel inside. The lights are bright and they flash and the music is loud, but all of those are eliciting some emotion inside of you that you’re not tapping into by listening to your headphones or driving in your car… and that’s why we congregate together to have a spiritual life altering experience.
Vince: I love the idea genesis and how important it is to put your legs behind your ideas. Like Jesse said, it does create those opportunities and things that happen from it and growth like you can’t even imagine. Spotlite is so special in a lot of ways, but it’s the overall vibe that we put out which is something unique. It’s consistently soulful, and you can always feel comfortable here. It’s a great platform for everybody, old and new. It’s really a wonderful addition to our city.
Jesse: You always need new venues. It’s inevitable. When you go to some cities there’s a venue on every corner. Detroit has some venues but not all venues really cater to underground dance culture. There’s a really great scene here. People go downtown looking for club culture and we really have a bar/dance culture. You can’t just show up in Detroit on a weekend and think that you’re going to have a life altering Detroit experience. It may take weeks before you find that party. You really have to go to a lot of events to feel that special moment.
I’ve had artists from all over the world stay with us for our residency program and the ones that had the most rich Detroit experience got a bike and hung out for months. I’d ask them how they found a particular after hours because I didn’t tell them about it or go with them, and they would say they met some random people that took them there. They said Detroit blew their mind because they literally got on a bike. They found like-minded people, and they ended up in somebody’s backyard or in somebody’s basement. The true essence of our dance scene is that everybody’s got a set of turntables, or a way to play music in their house all summer long. Spotlite is another component of that. It’s another piece of that puzzle.
detroit.dance: Spotlite’s one year anniversary is coming up on the 13th & 14th, what are you guys most excited about?
Jesse: It’s my birthday! And it’s a CRAZY lineup. We have our own mini-festival going on. Being a part of that is awesome. Being on a bill and having a place where we can share what we do and learn from others is super amazing and a great experience. If you pinched me and told me I was dreaming, I would probably believe you. I feel like we spend so much time in the music scene and the creative scene that it only made sense to try to take all of those passions and, and provide a gallery at its core. The essence of the gallery and philosophy of a gallery is that it’s a white wall. What does that mean? That means that whoever enters that space will become its energy. With this space, the energy is always consistent, but yet new and fresh. It can be a new crowd, but they’re all here for the same reason.
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detroit.dance: If you could only wear one colored shirt for the rest of your life. What color would your shirt be?
Jesse: Royal Purple.
Vince: Black or blue.
detroit.dance: How do you wind down after a busy day?
Vince: Sleep
Keep up with Vince, Jesse, and Spotlite on their socials:
Vince:
Spotlite:
Jesse: