09.06.2021
This week’s mix feature is the second instalment of detroit.dance live worldwide – where I feature a guest from outside of Detroit! This week’s guest is mearzie, out of Virginia. She is originally from Chicago which is where I met her in the crowd while seeing Adam Beyer (RIP The Mid).
She picked up DJing a few years ago and when the pandemic hit she focused on it even more – streaming on Twitch monthly/weekly and practicing in her spare time. Her sweet spot is melodic house – and her mix is just that – sweet.
She’s definitely doing the thing, and I’m looking forward to seeing what she accomplishes throughout the rest of 2021!
In her interview we talk about things like her musical journey, how she met her partner Mike (who taught her how to DJ), her Twitch streaming schedule and what she has learned from streaming, her thoughts on live events coming back + streaming them, Nano Leafs, her cats, a piece of advice she would give herself, and more.
I hope you enjoy her two hour mix and learning more about mearzie this week!
Each mix will exclusively premiere on Deep Space Radio at noon on Wednesday – and then be available on the detroit.dance SoundCloud as per usual at 3:13pm EST.
Be sure to check out her mix, on SoundCloud now.
detroit.dance: What do you do outside of music?
Mearzie: I just started a new job a little over a month ago, I work for a logistics company. My job title is Airport Coordinator, which essentially means that I am working with our clients and our agents in different countries to organize shipments to the United States, and ensuring that all of the steps are done properly. It’s pretty cool. I like getting to see the inside of the airline industry, from a non-commercial standpoint. It’s a lot of information and learning how to do things but I really do enjoy it.
detroit.dance: Yeah, you never really think about how many pieces to the puzzle that there are and what jobs are out there because people only talk about certain jobs. The behind the scenes stuff is the most interesting.
mearzie: 100%. I kind of fell into this when I was working at my previous job. I hit it off with one of the guys I worked with. He and his lady are two of my really good friends now. We worked through the thick of it together, blood, sweat, and tears. Fast forward two years and his new company was hiring. He asked if I was interested, and I said, “Let’s do it.” It’s not something I’ve ever done before, I don’t know anything about the industry whatsoever, but it’s pretty cool. I feel like if you don’t take the risk, how are you going to know if you really like it or don’t like it? I’m really glad that I took the jump.
detroit.dance: What are some other hobbies you have?
mearzie: Besides music? Definitely anything to do with my cats, spending time with Mike, traveling. I really like to go places, specifically for music events. So I can’t wait till everything is, you know, back to normal. We have tickets for ASOT 1000 in September, we just booked our AirBnb for that so now we’re watching flights to see if they’ll go down a little bit. Super excited to go back to Chicago and Southern California to see some friends, and to Boston… I just like seeing different places and experiencing different cultures. Appreciating what you have back home when you’re not home. I like being out in nature too but with all the gear and finding someone to watch the cats it’s a huge ordeal now.
detroit.dance: What is the ASOT event?
mearzie: A State of Trance. Armin Van Buren does this weekly radio show, and every 50 episodes he does a world tour. I’ve been listening to Armin since 2003 I think, and the episodes were in the two or three hundreds back then. So for most of my adult life I’ve been listening to him. Trance was one of the first genres of dance music I was introduced to, and it has definitely shaped me into the person I am today. The celebration for the 1,000th episode was supposed to happen in February of 2020, but obviously the world shut down then so it didn’t, but we’re very excited. It’s gonna be a really good time.
detroit.dance: Describe your musical journey.
mearzie: Well, the very first genres I was introduced to were euro dance, trance, and hardstyle. I listened to the radio all the time, and I grew up in central Illinois (farmland USA). We had Dial-Up internet until I was 20 years old. I would listen to the radio, and try to illegally download music on Limewire and Kazaa that took forever on Dial-Up. Castles in the Sky by Ian Van Dahl, Heaven by DJ Sammy, Days Go By by Dirty Vegas, Listen to Your Heart by DHT… they hit me and made me feel different than listening to NSYNC or Britney or Backstreet Boys – whatever pop nonsense was happening at that time. Then I was introduced to euro dance, and I was like, “Oh, okay, well this is really cool” And then I was introduced to trance, and I was like, “Okay, well this is a little bit better”, and I had blinders for trance for years. Armin came out with an album called Imagine in 2008 and that was my life saving and life changing album that was on repeat in the car. The CDs broke so I got new CDs.
I went to clubs in Chicago when I was still living with my parents, about an hour and a half away and would go downtown once a month to go out, and I became friends with a lot of the people that I’m still really close with today. These people really helped introduce me to the different genres that I wouldn’t accept at first. I moved to the suburbs on the north side of the city and started to promote shows. When you promote these club shows, it is advised that you go to them, so then I was going out three nights a week. I was exposed to a lot of music that I like, didn’t like and some that I still don’t like.
One of the most influential and important people in my life that I met at this time is named RJ Pickens. With him, if he recommends something, or puts a party together… you go. You don’t worry about it being something you like or you don’t like, you just know that it’s going to be good, because you trust his taste in music. He has his own record label that he throws shows with too called Vested. These parties started to broaden my horizons with different music and experiencing different emotions with that music.
The trance scene in Chicago was OK at the time. There were a couple venues that played it that were pretty subpar. You wouldn’t go unless you loved the artist. As I got older I developed my sweet spot for techno and stopped limiting myself to just trance.
Then I moved from Chicago to Virginia, for my job and for my partner Mike. And maybe, like six months after living here, he asked me if I wanted to learn how to DJ and I said, “Sure, if you have the patience to teach me.” So I started playing around with his lower BPM tracks, like 118 and I wouldn’t go above like 122 – which is not a very large range, but it’s scary when you don’t know what you’re doing. I really loved the tracks I was hearing and I had never really appreciated it before. I just dove in headfirst and really found this sweet spot with melodic house. On Beatport they categorize it as melodic house and techno which gives you a range of tracks to choose from. If you take the melody from trance, but then you take the beats of progressive or techno or house, you’ve got this super sweet combination of sounds and I love it – it’s perfect.
I discovered Boris Brecha a few years ago also, and he was a super big influence on finding this niche genre. He’s been DJing for like 10 or 12 years and started out DJing trance and following Armin and Paul Van Dyck and all of these really famous trance artists, and then realized it was very stagnant so he started branching out and did minimal techno and melodic techno. So, here I am, melodic house is where it’s at.
detroit.dance: How did you meet your partner Mike?
mearzie: Oh my goodness, my fairy tale story. I was in Prague for Transmission, which is a one day trance music event held at a massive arena in Prague (Czech Republic). I was at a pre-party where Ferry Corsten was the main artist of the night with my friends Kristof and Henry… and this beautiful human walks in front of me with a Groove Cruise hat on. This particular Groove Cruise hat I had specifically waited in line for four hours for at the merch shop. When I bought it they had 10 left out of 200 of them. And there were about 2,000 people on the Groove Cruise that year. So, seeing a human being, wearing a hat that I have halfway across the world… I was like, “I have to talk to this man.” We exchanged names, and then we went to the bar and he bought me a drink. We started chatting and found out that we had gone to the same events in Chicago 8 to 10 years prior. He knew about the club Vision and had gone to events there, somewhere important to me where I had evolved as a human which was really amazing. The night progressed and Mike and I exchanged numbers. We met up at the actual Transmission event for like an hour or two the next night. We watched Purple Haze, which is Sander Van Dorn, and we watched Marcus Schultz together. We had spent maybe two or three hours together, and kept in contact. I felt like I needed to know more about this man, there was something about him that made me super attracted. We ended up spending New Year’s Eve together. We went to a FSOE which is Future Sound of Egypt, a label created by Aly and Fila… it was FSOE 500 in Brooklyn, and then he asked me to be his girlfriend the next day, and three and a half years later here we are.
detroit.dance: For your project mearzie, what is your sound and how long have you been DJing?
mearzie: Melodic House is definitely my sweet spot. I have been DJing, with confidence, for less than a year, and learning for about two and a half years. I say “with confidence” because it’s really hard work. You have to be okay with so many things to be comfortable doing it. You’ve got to know what the knobs do, and how to navigate the controller or CDJs and mixer that you’re using. Something that took a long time for me to be okay with was making mistakes and being okay with making those mistakes. Staying calm when mistakes happen and fixing them… also training your ear to listen, and to know what you’re listening for. Once I knew how to listen, and what to listen for the game changed. I got significantly better. Practice doesn’t necessarily make perfect but it definitely makes you better. So I recommend, if anyone is aspiring to become a DJ, just do it. Don’t be your own worst enemy. Try and then keep doing it, because the more you do it the better you’ll get.
detroit.dance: Do you have any ideas or goals for mearzie?
mearzie: First of all, I never in my wildest dreams thought that I would be a DJ. I didn’t have the know-how, or the means or anything to learn how. When I met Mike I didn’t even know he was a DJ, he didn’t tell me up front. I’m very grateful for him. He showed me something that allows a creative thing within me to flow that I didn’t know existed. As far as goals, whatever happens happens.
Last August, I had my first guest stream on Fo Sho DC for the The Future is Female event. I came home after I played, and Mike and I went through my set again, and I had this epiphany – Here I am, playing music that speaks to my soul to other people, and they like it. Holy cow, what a concept. That was a lot of my motivation to keep doing it.
After that I kept streaming and doing guest mixes about once a month, and started my weekly stream in January of this year. I’ve been streaming 22 weeks in a row with that, which is a huge accomplishment. Being booked for in person events is definitely a goal. But whatever happens, happens. I’m not playing for fame or for attention, I’m playing for myself. And if things transpire because of that, then that’s great.
detroit.dance: You just mentioned what was difficult for you in the beginning, but what is something that you’re working on improving now?
mearzie: Different techniques. I have a very basic understanding of how the machines work. I can blend. I can use the EQs, I can make sure that the tracks are on beat. But there’s so much more you can do – you can add effects, you can add different types of filters, you can loop, you can do all of these things. I finally felt like I got comfortable with mixing and getting more music. The more comfortable you are with your music, the better you are playing it because you know when a drop is going to happen, or when lyrics are happening, or when there’s silence in the track. Using different effects is probably where I’m at right now and trying to get a good feel of how the track itself sounds, versus what type of effect can be used to intensify it without overusing the effects. I think that there’s a fine line of too much, or not using the right sound. That part I think is hard because most of the time when I am playing I am live on Twitch, and I don’t want it to sound really bad, so I’m a little more reserved. I did recently find a good combination that Mike suggested, but for me it’s about being comfortable with venturing out of the comfort zone that I have created so far.
detroit.dance: You have a monthly stream called “Our Love of Music, For Your Love of Music” – talk about how that came about.
mearzie: Mike and I were sitting around one day during quarantine, not much was happening…and I told him that I wanted to set up a monthly stream where we get all of our friends to play, and we bounce around the country or the world and go to different time zones and have no reservations whatsoever about what style of music is being played. So we decided that we were going to do it. In the future we also want to work with charities and raise money to donate, but that part’s super challenging – getting all of it set up and making sure it’s the right charity and it’s gonna go to the right place. We named it “Our Love of Music, For Your Love of Music” – Music For You shortened. We’re doing what we love with music we love and we assume that you also love it too. May’s Chapter Five just happened, and we had 12 and a half hours of music across 10 different streams. I’m really grateful for Twitch because it has the ability to bring people together from anywhere, I think it’s really special.
detroit.dance: And on top of that, you also stream once a week?
mearzie: I do Weekly Wednesday Hangs. I usually start streaming around 7pm Eastern time. Sometimes a little bit earlier, and at minimum it will be two hours, sometimes it’s three, sometimes it’s four. Depends on the day and depends on the flow that happens. It has become really special to me. I have a handful of people that are always there. I have one of my friends that I have known since high school that tunes in – he and his girlfriend make it a date night and they will make dinner while I’m on in the background. Some previous co-workers will have it on while they’re doing other things in the house. It’s cool because they are not people that listen to dance music typically that will listen. One of my oldest friends takes that time when I’m playing, and has “me time”, and I think that that’s super special. I think that it’s becoming something that I never could have imagined and it makes me so happy that just by me doing something that I enjoy, others enjoy it as well and keep coming back and vibing with me. It makes me so happy that I’m making my people happy.
detroit.dance: Have you learned anything from streaming or using Twitch?
mearzie: It’s complicated, until you do it a handful of times. It requires a strong computer, and having technology know-how. If you don’t, I can’t imagine how challenging that would be. You’ve got to have a good camera, you’ve got to be able to hook up your music equipment to a hard line to your computer that you’re streaming from. It’s super involved, and it’s scary to stand in front of a camera in a room by yourself. It’s weird until you get used to it. Personally, I act like the camera’s not there, and it doesn’t bother me so much anymore. Talking on the mic is weird for me, and I don’t like to do it while I’m playing – I think it takes away from the music. Some people do and some people don’t, if it bothers me while I’m tuning into streams then I’ll go to a different channel. For me, it’s about the music – I’m not there to have a conversation.
Twitch has way better streaming than Facebook. I tried doing that a handful of times and Facebook always cuts you off. Mixcloud Live is a good platform but I’m pretty sure you have to pay for it so I haven’t tried it.
There’s such a great community and reach you get on Twitch. We have friends in Europe that will come hang out in our chat and people we’ve met through streaming all around the world. You can talk to anybody at any time on the internet, and I mean we can do that with our phones now too, but if you go to an event, you’re at the event with the people who are there and that’s that…if I stream at 2pm on a Saturday, my friends in Europe can come hang out. Adjusting to the time zones is kind of a challenge, but when you figure that out the connections you make are amazing.
detroit.dance: People have been streaming sets and events for over a year now, and with live events coming back, do you think that the streaming of events is going to continue?
mearzie: I think it’s going to depend on the artists, the record label, the venue, and what is agreed upon between the three. I think that it is a good idea to keep streaming. But I also understand that it’s a business, and that there is money that needs to be made.
I know a couple of artists over last summer, they had events that they streamed that you could pay like 10 bucks to view. Burning Man had a digital event, Tomorrowland had digital events, and you paid to have access. I get it, if that’s something that you really want to be a part of, then you’re going to pay for it. I’m not going to pay for something like that, personally – and that’s okay. But there’s people that will, and that’s okay too. I think that it will in some levels be necessary at a certain point to do it, because there are some people that aren’t going to get vaccinated. From my understanding a lot of venues are going to require your vaccination card to get in. Not to separate those that are vaccinated versus those that aren’t, there’s going to have to be a middle ground somewhere and I think streaming the live events is the middle ground. I have faith with the amount of technology that has been improved upon over the last year and a half, that there’s going to be something put into place.
detroit.dance: So you already curate your own monthly lineup for an online event, but if you were to curate a live event, what would you do?
mearzie: It would be a daytime event outside. Ideally a rooftop setting if possible. I would have my local DC friends that are DJs come play. We would just have a good time. I know when you do events that there’s costs involved – you’ve got to have an agreement with the venue or you have to rent the space, or whatever that would be. I would ask my friends if they would be okay with playing for free so we could take the money that was made that day and donate it to a charity.
detroit.dance: Is there a particular track combo that you’ve been liking a lot lately?
mearzie: I don’t like to structure any of my sets anymore. The first couple of streams that I did, I had a time limit, so I knew I had to practice playing certain tracks in a row to structure the flow. The rest I have just winged it. Usually when I’m preparing on Wednesdays I’ll play two to five tracks to warm up. It helps to not have the first transition be live because they’re always the worst. I maneuver through my music and go with the flow. If I have a track in mind that I want to get to, then I hope that I get to it. Sometimes I will want to end with a specific track. But as far as specifically playing a couple together, I’ve got a Nora track that I play with this great African tribally track. Another one is Hanging Tree with Idols by LMNL.
detroit.dance: You have a bunch of Nano Leafs on your wall, would you fill a whole wall with them if you could?
mearzie: I totally would. But they’re really expensive. I got a set of them for Mike for Christmas, our first Christmas together. I got them on Black Friday or Cyber Monday. The price that I paid per panel was pretty reasonable. I don’t recommend anyone to buy them when they’re full price because they’re a lot of money. We actually have a total of 51 panels, and I would love to have more. I think it’s one of the best purchases that anyone can make for their home because it gives you accent lighting. There’s a computer app that you can download that allows you to screen mirror. So say for example you’re watching a music festival on your TV, or through your computer to your TV if you’re casting it, you can have your Nano Leafs match the color of whatever’s on your If I could have a full wall of them, it would 100% be overkill but it would be really awesome
detroit.dance: How many states have you been to?
mearzie: I think about 32.
detroit.dance: Would you rather have a moose or a bear as a pet?
mearzie: I think a moose. They’re real cute, and the mom is real protective and they’re huge.
detroit.dance: Talk a little about your two cats that love to go outside!
mearzie: They’re the best kitties. We have two tuxedos and we rescued them from a shelter in DC. They were found on the streets in DC and they were about six to eight weeks old. Dakota, the boy, is our chunky man. He is named after Mike’s favorite DJ Marcus Schultz, his darker alias Dakota. Mecca, the girl, is named after the club that Mike and I met in in Prague. She’s this dainty little thing who prefers us to pet her with our eyes, and they both come to us when they want affection, and that’s pretty much it. They rule the house. As all cats do. They’re my babies for sure.
detroit.dance: What is a piece of advice that you would give to future mearzie?
mearzie: Don’t be so hard on yourself. One of the best people I’ve ever worked for, someone whom I call my mentor. I worked for this man at two different companies and still go to him for advice on life and work things. I was having a rough couple of days once and he pulled me aside to have a chat. He said, “Amanda. We’re so similar, but please don’t be so hard on yourself.” and I never really understood what that meant. Until you get to a certain point in your life, you don’t understand a lot of things that people tell you as advice. I did a lot of soul searching in the last six to eight months or so…I feel like COVID and all the things that came with it have really indirectly/directly forced a lot of people to look inside themselves and evaluate things. I think being kinder to myself and not being so hard on myself, is something that I need to listen to on a daily basis. I think living presently is very important…the things I have now are things I dreamt that I would have in the past, and being appreciative of what I have today instead of reaching for more tomorrow is important to remember.
detroit.dance: If you could describe the feeling music gives you in one word, what would that be?
mearzie: What a challenging question. Oh my goodness. I think it makes me feel free. I don’t have anything that I need to be connected to. You become one with the music and then you feel like you’re floating.
Make sure you check out mearzie’s Destination Worldwide (Virginia) – Home and her Recipe by Request that will be posted on Friday (Taco Dip).
Keep up with mearzie on her socials: