Chrissy Murderbot

Chrissy Murderbot and MC Zulu know Chicago and -- more importantly -- Chicago knows them. An expert on the Midwest house music scene, Chrissy Murderbot began DJing in Chicago in 1995 and has since dominated dance floors at over 400 events in more than 15 countries. Chrissy draws fans in with his unique rhythmic style, which he describes as “booty-rave-jungle-house-bass-bashment-ghetto-garage-core” and his collaborations are just as diverse as his sound -- he’s remixed everyone from Delorean to Lemonade to Nate Mars to Noise Floor Crew. Chrissy’s most recent partnership has been with reggae artist MC Zulu, and together they blend Jamaican dance hall and disco into remarkably shakable beats.

The opening act of the second day at the Pitchfork Music Festival earlier this month, the duo managed to ignore the humidity and blaring sun to create a midday dance party like no other. Out chatted with Chrissy Murderbot and MC Zulu about mainstream success, dental plans, and why Chicago’s drama is all about the neighborhoods.

Out: The Chicago dance scene has been around for quite a while. Why is it such a big deal here?
Chrissy Murderbot: Dance music is a part of this city in a way that it is not in other parts of the country. New York has hip-hop and L.A. has West Coast rap. Here we have house music. That is what Chicago invented and that is our urban music that transcends. It goes through a bunch of different scenes -- whether that is white people or black people or Latino people or straight people or gay people or whatever. It is for everyone! As a result of that, people take it more seriously and it persists. We also have this next generation of kids inventing hard house or juke or ghetto house. We always have this generation of 15 year olds inventing the next style of house music and dance music.
MC Zulu: He’s actually an authority on this music. There are people who I knew personally, because I did house music before I got into reggae, and I did studio sessions with a lot of these people and he knew the kind of music and work they did. He has done his homework and gotten his credentials at the same time.
Chrissy Murderbot: I appreciate that!
MC Zulu: That is how I am for reggae. I live in Chicago but I was born in Panama and I am more of a fan of reggae than anything. I got my credentials listening to it and imitating. I wasn’t part of the establishment and that is why I have no problem playing with a DJ.
Chrissy Murderbot: What’s nice is being able to work on something that is a hybrid of sound system culture, Caribbean dance hall culture and Midwestern Chicago house. When you bridge them, then you have the biggest tunes and biggest bass and greatest crowd participation.
MC Zulu: It takes a certain level of expertise to know what is enough reggae and what is enough house music.
Chrissy Murderbot: It is all about mixing them in the right proportions.

Is the scene determined by the audience or the DJs?
MC Zulu: The only time I see a scene ever is when we play a show. That crowd becomes the scene but then it dissipates. I know that in Chicago there are a number of different scenes all over the place. It is a field of wildflowers.
Chrissy Murderbot: The scene here is great but it is completely fragmented. The footwork scene is determined entirely by the audience participation. The dancers are more important than the music. The traditional house scene is reliant on the DJ who sometimes picks up on crowd responses. There is so much diversity in this city that it can’t be summed up.

A lot of interviews I read called you a contradiction because you are white. This seems like a completely outdated notion.
Chrissy Murderbot: Yes!
Do you still witness race dynamics on the dance floor?
Chrissy Murderbot: Anywhere in the world there will still be ignorant motherfuckers. You run into less of that in Chicago because people who come from the house music tradition will expect black, white, Latino, gay, straight, male, female, everything! This scene has traditionally had so many people participating in it from all walks of life. The city is very segregated so if you go to a segregated part of town you might get, “What is your white ass doing here?” It’s not so much about the music; it’s more about a white kid coming all the way down to 87th street.
MC Zulu: That is unfortunately a huge part of Chicago culture --
Chrissy Murderbot: The segregation.
MC Zulu: It goes back to the Pullman days. They tried to keep workers and “normal citizens” to specific neighborhoods. It is still part of the culture and you can see it in the party atmosphere. They have managed to keep it that way. The Burning Man crowd is the crowd that has been the most successful with integrating all the people. They come together and get music: black, white, Asian, gay, everyone is there.
Chrissy Murderbot: The actual diehard house scene is also very integrated. All that segregation is not about black music or white music. It is - Out Magazine

One of the big advantages to becoming a music producer from multiple angles (be it a fan or as a DJ) is that you can already see much more of what’s going on around you, which allows you to contextualize it within your own music. Chrissy Murderbot is a prime example of an artist who has spent a lot of time as a fan, and worked his way through the glut of electronic music in the early 1990s as a DJ and a labelhead to emerge with a decidedly different approach to some classic sounds. A resident of Chicago, his sound on the new Planet-Mu disc Women’s Studies owes much to the city’s juke and footwork craze, but added in to the mix are a whole host of other influences that many other young producers might overlook, such as acid house, U.K. Grime, R&B, and even that ‘90s New Jack Swing. Considering fellow Chicago jukers BBU have already declared that “Chi don’t dance no more,” it’s nice to see that Chrissy Murderbot is not afraid to get buck and throw down to the contrary. Murderbot represents his city proper as one of the very few “hometown” acts at this weekend’s 2011 Pitchfork Music Festival.

1. A Guy Called Gerald - Black Secret Technology
This is basically the best jungle record ever made. I bought this when I was 13 and it absolutely changed my life. The drum programming, the composition, and the production techniques were all MASSIVELY influential on the music I would go on to make, as well as the concept that you don’t have to sacrifice the legitimacy or authenticity of this singles-based dance music world I come from in order to make a solid album that works as a whole.

2. Devo - New Traditionalists
Sometimes I get flack from people for this one, seeing as the hipster-approved Devo albums are really Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! and Freedom of Choice. Don’t get me wrong, those albums are great, but this one is more up my alley. It’s thumpy, driving, almost completely electronic, and it opens with "Through Being Cool," perhaps the best "it’s OK to be weird" manifesto ever written. That song, in particular, was really helpful if you were a super-odd 8-year-old growing up in Wichita, Kansas. Additionally, this album (and Devo’s early work in general) has a kind of self-aware sarcastic sexism to it that’s mocking men as much as it is women, which really informed my album Women’s Studies.

3. Erasure - Chorus
This is maybe my favorite band ever -- it’s not often that you hear a heterosexual male say that, so savor it. Seriously though, they had an unbelievable run of phenomenal pop singles in the’80s and early ‘90s, and several of those classics reside on Chorus. More importantly, I’d say Chorus is their only album that’s really perfect from start to finish -- there aren’t any missteps, even the non-singles are super-catchy and memorable, and I can’t pinpoint a single moment where I’d do it differently if it were my album. Still something I listen to on a regular basis.

4. Lime
Remember how I said Erasure was "maybe my favorite band ever"? I said “maybe” because Lime is PROBABLY my favorite band ever. Lime was Denis and Denyse LePage, a husband-and-wife duo from Montreal (with eerily similar names) who did everything -- they wrote, arranged, produced and sang on their own music (as well as a slew of other Hi-NRG disco hits by other artists). Think big, cheesy, synthy disco pop with huge 808 drums backing them up. Denis kinda sang like a leather daddy, and Denyse always sounded like she’d been huffing helium in the back room before her take, but still they were responsible for a lot of the changes in post-1979 disco that eventually led to house, techno and all these other new-fangled genres we have today.

SIDE NOTE: In a truly surreal experience, I was recently connected with personal hero Denyse LePage through my blog My Year of Mixtapes. She saw one of her tracks in one of my mixes and got in touch. She tells me that she and Denis are divorced now. They no longer speak and she says that Denis is a tranny. I don’t know if that’s a fact or the idle gossip of an angry ex...

5. Gamble & Huff
This Philadelphia songwriting & production duo are responsible in one way or another for nearly every awesome soul or disco song ever made. Seriously, like "Me & Mrs. Jones," "If You Don’t Know Me By Now," "Back Stabbers," "The Love I Lost," "Bad Luck," "Love Is The Message," "Do It Any Way You That You Want To" -- I could go on with this but I’ll just end up with three pages of Gamble & Huff songs and nobody wants that. Anybody who fancies themselves a writer or producer of popular music could benefit from a steady diet of these dudes. Oddly enough, despite the fact that these guys were obviously talented songwriters, their careers got derailed by a huge payola scandal. CRIME DOESN’T PAY, KIDS.

6. Patrick Cowley
A San Francisco-based synth genius who produced a TON of Hi-NRG bathhouse jams (pearl jams?) from about 1978 until his death from AIDS in 1982. First off, if you died of AIDS in 1982, - Dusted Magazine

Once I dodge the free swag (if another girl with angel wings offers me Axe body spray, I'll scream) and come up on the first act bumping on the Blue stage of Pitchfork's second day, I'm greeted by "festival madness," the first of many chants by juke rebel Chrissy Murderbot's collaborator MC Zulu. With a hint of a Jamaican patois, he riled the crowd with banter, shouts and sing-alongs while Murderbot cut dance track upon dance track.

To say Murderbot was just juking is to sell the set short. Classic piano-driven house, bass hybrids and "energy" (shouted by Zulu) better sum up this Chicago DJ's style. With his Cookie Monster shirt and disarmingly dough-boy face, the footwork renegade is serious, but all smiles. Juke was still heavy in the mix, as he rolled out tracks with incantations like "Feel my muthafuckin' bass in yer face."

Wafts of ganja floated by. Zulu asked, "Are you listening?" Toys flew from the stage to the crowd. Soon everyone was kazooing. Zulu upped local talent like Jeekoos and Seachl1te.

Even the security was working their feet alongside skanking hippies. Murderbot is one of the only DJ-driven acts this weekend. That's too few for us. He made for an energetic romp - Time Out Chicago

If anyone shows the world that dance music truly is in a state of permanent and wonderful flux right now, it's Chrissy Murderbot. Here, the Chicagoan producer combines elements of locally-born styles like juke and house with the sort of percussive insistence and badman vocal takes more usually found in London's funky house and jungle scenes, Ghosts On Tape sending things very Hardhouse Banton with his ornamental police wails and snare thwacks. The original version of "The Vibe Is So Right" appears on the B of Chrissy's debut single for Planet Mu, which is out this week and was produced with DJ Spinn. A solo album called Women's Studies arrives May 9 through the same label. - RCRD LBL

With his IT guy look and WASP genetics, one would never say that Chrissy Murberbot is the incarnation of an infinite hard disc of rave knowledge. However, take a look at his discography, which starts in 2005 with his jungle productions from the other side of the Atlantic, and you’ll realise that the curiosity and restlessness of the Chicago artist goes way beyond the borders of what a Windy City native interested in dance music could take on. The obliqueness of his preferences took him to start three different labels: the now defunct jungle imprint Dead Homies; Sleazetone, house of hot rhythms ready to shake some booty and, most recently, Loose Squares, which will release its first official reference shortly. And we’re not counting My Year Of Mixtapes, the blog where he shows off his DJ skills, equally eclectic as production style.

“Women’s Studies”, his third album, will be released next Monday on Planet Mu, where he ended up as the rearguard of the footwork battalion Paradinas has so fervently hired for his label. However, the only thing Murderbot shares with his label mates is the word “Illinois” on his American passport, and the passion for the endemic Chicago dance. His album mixes an endless string of influences and directions. Geographically, he looks at both British bass music and the trans-Atlantic influences of the traditional ghetto styles. On the other side, there’s the time travelling, because Murderbot is a veteran –apart from being a walking encyclopaedia– and he spits out everything he’s been absorbing over the years to brew a cocktail that tastes like the globalised future of club music.

From the night of the album launch, 29th April just gone, at the Big Chill Bar in London, we got this 90-minute set where a rejuvenated Adonis shakes his behind alongside Paul Johnson to the rhythm of Elvis Crespo’s meringue, while Daft Punk are parking their mopeds outside and Julio Bashmore is chatting up LL Cool J’s shorty. It sounds surreal, almost histrionic, doesn’t it? Well, that’s what this man’s sets sound like.

Your first productions, back in 2005, were focused on jungle; now, six years later, your Planet Mu material sounds closer to juke/footwork and Chicago ghetto house. How have you seen your sound progress? Is there any reason that explains the changes from one genre to another (being both quite different from each other)?

I've always been into lots of different types of music... jungle, house, disco, juke, booty bass, dancehall, and really anything else that strikes me. I've always been working on a lot of different types of music—even when the jungle tunes were coming out I was working on other things. I just happened to get attention for the jungle stuff before my other things saw the light of day, you know? This new album incorporates some juke & footwork sounds, but it's also very heavy on grime, bashment, and booty bass vibes. It's definitely catchier, more refined, and I'd say more artfully done than my early stuff. That having been said, it's still up-tempo, bass-heavy party music that fuses the sounds of UK and Midwestern dance music, and I think all my productions from the beginning to the present kind of share that common theme.



Your Dead Homies label is no longer active. Would anything make you resurrect it, such as a big jungle revival or something? On the other hand, you have two other labels, Sleazetone and Loose Squares: what are the plans for both of them?

Dead Homies is a label I ran which did jungle and a bit of dubstep. We had a great run, but in the end I shut it down because of a lack of interest in working in that scene. It wasn't about the waning popularity of jungle, because I shut it down before that scene got as stagnant and cloistered as it is today. It was more a personal decision based on my shifting interests and priorities—for that reason I don't see it coming back, but I suppose anything's possible! As for Sleazetone and Loose Squares, I'm definitely still pushing the two of those. Loose Squares does all sorts of fun uptempo booty music, and we have some great releases coming up from myself, DJ Lil'Tal, Juketastrafe, and others. Sleazetone is more about the house music side of things, and our next release is a PHENOMENAL 12” from James Braun.

Your “Women’s Studies” LP is being released this week. What will juke fans find in your album that they didn’t came across in those DJ Rashad or DJ Nate releases in Planet Mu?

This album is much more for the dancefloor—none of these tracks are really intended for footwork battles, you know? This is fun party music, plain and simple. Furthermore, it's really got a lot of other elements going on in it, from grime to UK Funky to bashment to new jack swing to 90s acid, so it's not even really a juke album as much as it's a heavily juke-influenced album. I'm really hoping to create some interesting hybrids here, and open up a channel for blending all of these genres into something interesting and new - Playground Mag

Chrissy Murderbot is the hyperactive lovechild of ’90s jungle and dancehall, credited with busting footwork and juke out of south side Chicago and over to us grateful suckers. His third album, Women’s Studies, is a fuggy sweatbox of grimy basslines and sleazy come-ons, a sordid affair that throws together ghetto house, disco and soul and watches them bump uglies on the dancefloor. Chrissie’s a motor-mouthed chap and self-described “hard-working motherfucker”, probably best summed up by the 52 breathless mixtapes he released in as many weeks last year. This, indeed, is a man who lives at about 180bpm.

Improbably, The Stool Pigeon managed to get Chrissy to sit still for an entire 30 minutes. He had quite a lot to say for himself.

* * *

I guess you weren’t christened Chrissy Murderbot. Where did the name come from?

My real name is Christopher but ever since I was a kid, my mom and pretty much everybody called me Chrissy. Like Ricky or Bobby, you know. And you’ve got all these DJs who have their hard-ass names to prove how gangsta they are, like DJ I’m-A-Badman-And-I-Murder-People-For-Fun, so I wanted something that poked fun at that. It makes people realise you’re not super-serious.

Your music is often associated with footwork. Do you welcome that association, or is it inhibiting?

Well, I’ve worked very hard to promote footwork music, outside of Chicago and especially in the UK and in Europe, and I’m proud of the work that I’ve done in that. But at the end of the day, I don’t really make footwork music. I prefer to play for a dancefloor, like in a rave or at a club or whatever. I don’t play for footwork battles because watching dudes dance competitively doesn’t interest me. Making a crowd of people dance is more my speed. So yeah, I’ve been careful in the latest round of press and whatnot to make sure people don’t get that mixed up. Just because I know some of these dudes and help promote their work doesn’t mean I necessarily am even a part of that scene. I’m just a guy who has connections to it, you know.

So, if your music isn’t footwork, what is it?

All over the place. Juke, ghetto house, jungle, classic rave, Midwest house and techno, Chicago classics, Detroit classics, disco, soul, dancehall. A lot of everything, you know. But if you narrowed it down to the main things that made me get into music and informed what I do the most, it would be like classic 1994 Jungle, classic British and Belgian rave music, dancehall and disco.

‘Bussin’ Down’ ft. DJ Spinn


Where did you originally find those influences?

I grew up in the Midwest, in Kansas City, Missouri, and started getting into dance music when I was about 12, around 1994. Right when hardcore was mutating into jungle. That was the new interesting thing at that point. I wanted to buy those records, but most of my record shopping in those early years was digging in the dollar bins because that’s what a 12-year-old kid can afford. That’s how I found out about old house and disco, dancehall and R&B records. All these things were before my time but they were littering dollar bins in 1994.

There seems to be quite a lot of ’90s fetishism on Women’s Studies…

Yeah, because those were really my formative years. There’s something about what you grew up with that informs what you do. But I don’t see myself as someone who’s appropriating the 1990s and making something cheeky or throwbacky. It just so happens that the music I make refers to the 1990s, even if it is new and modern. There’s also some ’70s and ’80s fetishism, though. There’s a lot of 1977 and 1985 in my music, but it doesn’t come out as much, because late-’70s early-’80s fetishism is so tired right now. DFA, electroclash and all those groups that list Gang of Four as their influence — whether they’re amazing or not, whether you think they’re good or you hate them, they’ve exhausted that era. It’s gonna take a new generation of kids who grew up under different circumstances and have a different relationship with that source material to bring new things to the table.

Do any of those ’70s and ’80s influences turn up on the album?

My concept of what a song should be and how it should be structured is very informed by disco. Either you have a four-minute pop track that’s fun and poppy or you have the extended version of a pop track, the dub version mixed together in a seven or eight-minute extended work-out. And all of my songs pretty much fit into one or two of those categories, in a New York disco kinda way. Even though you couldn’t call any of them disco genre-wise, structurally they owe a lot to the 1970s.

Speaking of extended workouts, I heard you posted a mixtape a week on your blog for an entire year.

Yeah. 52 of the fuckers!

Was it tough?

Well, I don’t have a day job, so it wasn’t a tough as a day job, I’ll tell you that much! Anybody who complains about having to do music for a living is a fucking asshole. So it wasn’t that bad, really. I put a t - Stool Pigeon

Except for a few noteworthy car and cell-phone branding campaigns and the loveable Kid Sister, juke has remained a predominantly Chicago phenomenon. Lifelong lover of booty beats, Windy City resident Chris Shively is setting out to change that—and then some. Not satisfied with merely bringing the hyperactive footwork beats to new audiences, he’s evolving the sound through his productions as Chrissy Murderbot, most notably on Women’s Studies, his new LP. We reached the 28-year-old on tour in the U.K. to find out more about where he’s taking juke and what his European audience thinks.

Have you focused exclusively on juke and footwork on this tour?
Not at all. I’m trying to make it clear that there are the true-school footwork artists—I’m outside that scene, even though I’m tied to it—and I’m more about playing all sorts of stuff. I’ve been playing juke and footwork, but also booty bass and post-dubstep and even a lot of house. I’ve been all over the place.

In ’09, I described you by saying, “in Chrissy Murderbot’s world, all music is created equal.” I was going to go back on that, but it sounds like I shouldn’t.
If you tie yourself to just one genre, even if you’re amazing at it, there is going to come a time when people’s tastes change. It’s going to make it harder for you to make a living. I’ve really made an effort to make people associate my name with being able to expect any kind of music.

Yet in press for your new album you call it a “juke and booty music game changer.”
I think it is. I think it’s going to open up a dialogue in terms of, “Who says you can’t mix juke and grime and booty bass and dancehall?” That’s really what I’m trying to do, is mix things up a little bit.

Your presence in Chicago has become very intertwined with the South Side juke scene. What attracts you to it?
Incorporating juke and footwork into my sets on European tours, I saw that it was helping building a response and I found a synergy with people there. I started wanting to take Chicago artists out into Europe and promote things. That’s what we’re doing now. This is the first time we’ve had footwork dancers come with us overseas and perform.

For the uninitiated, can you describe some of the nuances of juke versus footwork?
There’s a lot of overlap. It’s like asking what the difference between rap and hip-hop is. Generally, juke is more four on the floor. It’s the stuff you play at parties. Footwork is the stuff with the more sideways rhythms that are a little more varied. You’d play it at a battle and instead of having a dance floor, you’d have two dancers or four dancers squaring off in a circle.

It’s fascinating that this music is catching on overseas. Do you think that grime and dubstep help that audience relate to it?
A lot of U.K. artists are starting to pick up on elements of this and incorporate it into their work and I’m excited by that. It’s really nice to see that validation of what we’re doing in Chicago from an international audience.

Your new album for British label Planet Mu is a direct result. Tell us about the sexed-up, girlie elements of Women’s Studies.
They’re just poppy party tracks about girls and booties and stuff. I’m trying to walk that line of really poppy, fun, party music. I wanted it to have a theme, and what’s the most party theme ever besides talking about girlies and stuff? - Time Out Chicago

Except for a few noteworthy car and cell-phone branding campaigns and the loveable Kid Sister, juke has remained a predominantly Chicago phenomenon. Lifelong lover of booty beats, Windy City resident Chris Shively is setting out to change that—and then some. Not satisfied with merely bringing the hyperactive footwork beats to new audiences, he’s evolving the sound through his productions as Chrissy Murderbot, most notably on Women’s Studies, his new LP. We reached the 28-year-old on tour in the U.K. to find out more about where he’s taking juke and what his European audience thinks.

Have you focused exclusively on juke and footwork on this tour?
Not at all. I’m trying to make it clear that there are the true-school footwork artists—I’m outside that scene, even though I’m tied to it—and I’m more about playing all sorts of stuff. I’ve been playing juke and footwork, but also booty bass and post-dubstep and even a lot of house. I’ve been all over the place.

In ’09, I described you by saying, “in Chrissy Murderbot’s world, all music is created equal.” I was going to go back on that, but it sounds like I shouldn’t.
If you tie yourself to just one genre, even if you’re amazing at it, there is going to come a time when people’s tastes change. It’s going to make it harder for you to make a living. I’ve really made an effort to make people associate my name with being able to expect any kind of music.

Yet in press for your new album you call it a “juke and booty music game changer.”
I think it is. I think it’s going to open up a dialogue in terms of, “Who says you can’t mix juke and grime and booty bass and dancehall?” That’s really what I’m trying to do, is mix things up a little bit.

Your presence in Chicago has become very intertwined with the South Side juke scene. What attracts you to it?
Incorporating juke and footwork into my sets on European tours, I saw that it was helping building a response and I found a synergy with people there. I started wanting to take Chicago artists out into Europe and promote things. That’s what we’re doing now. This is the first time we’ve had footwork dancers come with us overseas and perform.

For the uninitiated, can you describe some of the nuances of juke versus footwork?
There’s a lot of overlap. It’s like asking what the difference between rap and hip-hop is. Generally, juke is more four on the floor. It’s the stuff you play at parties. Footwork is the stuff with the more sideways rhythms that are a little more varied. You’d play it at a battle and instead of having a dance floor, you’d have two dancers or four dancers squaring off in a circle.

It’s fascinating that this music is catching on overseas. Do you think that grime and dubstep help that audience relate to it?
A lot of U.K. artists are starting to pick up on elements of this and incorporate it into their work and I’m excited by that. It’s really nice to see that validation of what we’re doing in Chicago from an international audience.

Your new album for British label Planet Mu is a direct result. Tell us about the sexed-up, girlie elements of Women’s Studies.
They’re just poppy party tracks about girls and booties and stuff. I’m trying to walk that line of really poppy, fun, party music. I wanted it to have a theme, and what’s the most party theme ever besides talking about girlies and stuff? - Time Out Chicago

Chrissy Murderbot is about to be kind of a big deal. His latest record, Women’s Studies, out May 9, could be a career game-changer; it could potentially take his music beyond just the juke and booty scenes and into the broader “people who like to drink and dance” scene.
Murderbot’s been in the game for a while, though. He’s made several records, owned several labels, and remixed countless tracks since 2005. He spent a lot of 2009 and 2010 making a mix-tape a week and posting them on his blog, consequently highlighting the best of everything from U.K. funky to songs about weed and sex. Currently, he’s on tour in Europe, but will be back in Chicago this summer to play the Pitchfork Music Festival. The A.V. Club laid down the big bucks for a trans-Atlantic call to talk about Women’s Studies, Americans’ aversion to dance music, and, of course, 2 Live Crew.
The A.V. Club: I’ll just insult you right away: Do people ever think you’re a girl because your name is Chrissy?
Chrissy Murderbot: Occasionally, yeah, but I don’t know. Chrissy is like Billy or Ricky. I’ve been called Chrissy since I was little. It occasionally confuses people, but part of the whole reason behind the name is that so many people, especially people in kind of the juke/ghetto house/grind/bashment/dubstep/international bass music world always have these names that are so trying to prove to the world how hard they are, I guess, and I wanted something that poked fun at that a little. There’s a juxtaposition to the name, and it’s a joke that’s lost on some people.
What can you do? I did think about changing my name to Crispy Tater Tot at one point, but they don’t have tater tots in England.

AVC: Do you think you’re bigger in Europe than you are in the U.S.?
CM: Dance music, in general, is bigger here [in Europe] than in the states. I’m fortunate enough to be able to tour Europe—I think this is my ninth tour here—and I’m fortunate enough to go twice a year. I make decent money playing records for people, but in America that’s much more difficult. I’m just now getting to the point where America is paying enough attention to make flying me places kind of financially feasible for promoters.
The not-rambling answer is that, yes, I do better in Europe, but that’s changing.
AVC: Why do you think that is? Like, why doesn’t the United States “get” dance music?
CM: It’s always difficult in America. If I have to get really lofty and political, and perhaps a little controversial, about it, I think Europe has much more of a problem with racism than America does, and America has more of a problem with homophobia than Europe does. Anything that’s perceived as descended from disco is going to have a roadblock to its acceptance in America. There are a lot of attitudes about dance music or house or post-house, and even the really macho genres like juke or ghetto house or whatever, still, in the minds of most people, end up with these assumptions, negative assumptions whether people realize it or not, that grew out of 1970s homophobia. There’s drama around that. I think it holds dance music back in America, and it’s just less popular than rock.
Then again, it does go in waves. I think that a lot of those assumptions that people our parents’ age had about disco have become really irrelevant and almost forgotten. Hopefully we can get to the point where good, thoughtful, quality dance music is embraced.

AVC: I think that homophobia ties into Americans not wanting to actually dance, too.
CM: Americans drink a lot less than Europeans, which is another thing. Europeans are terrified of dancing as well, but they go so smashed that they forget to feel terrified. Americans are a little more ... I don’t know.
This is turning into a Yakov Smirnoff bit. “In modern Russia, Twitter follows you!”
AVC: Are you excited to do Pitchfork this summer, though? I think the kids will be dancing.
CM: That’s going to be big. I’m excited about it. MC Zulu is MCing with me, and that’s exciting.
The other big obstacle to dance music in America is that rock kids don’t really understand DJ culture. When you play something like Pitchfork—well, I come from a world where you’d never think to watch music happen on a stage. You listen to music and you dance to it, and the stage is completely superfluous. So, at something like Pitchfork, you have to find a way to make that translate to people who do want an onstage experience, and who want to view the process of music happening. DJs haven’t always been successful at giving those people that experience.

People who come from the tradition of rock music, hip-hop, pop music, whatever, need to be visually stimulated while they listen to music. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just not something that I came from, so it only makes sense to me in as much that I’ve noticed it’s a thing. I mean, can you provide that without becoming Deadmau5 and sacrificing art to be a visual experience? Dance music is so much more focused around c - The Onion A.V. Club

Chrissy Murderbot/Machinedrum
Tammany Hall
Thursday, May 19
Better than: Listening to deep sub-bass on laptop speakers.

Planet Mu has one of the more unique trajectories of any electronic dance label. Mike Paradinas founded it in the mid-'90s as a showcase for the sort of IDM he made as µ- Ziq. Several tracks took off from jungle's clipping breakbeats and heaving sub-bass, but the relationship with jungle's cultural matrix was minimal. But since the mid-'00s, when Paradinas began issuing serious dubstep singles (cf. Pinch's "Qawwali") and his more prankish understudies, Planet Mu has found a sweet spot between weed and Ritalin.

Women's Studies, the new album by Chicago DJ, producer, and label head (of Sleazetone Records) Chrissy Murderbot, is a model of the latter-day Planet Mu aesthetic. Born Chris Shively in Kansas City, Murderbot is an aggressive champion of all kinds of dance music—see his amazing My Year of Mixtapes project (52 weeks, 52 DJ sets, covering everything from Kraftwerk and its progeny and synth pop to then-recent selections of UK funky and dubstep)—particularly juke, Chicago's aggressively minimalist reworking of ghetto house (think Chi-town legends like Paul Johnson or DJ Funk). Women's Studies has plenty of juke (cf. "Heavy Butt"), but it expands outward and upward in ways you'd expect from a listener as omnivorous as Murderbot—not to mention someone signed to a legendary IDM label.

That was manifest in Murderbot's two-hour set. Like a lot of laptop DJs, he weaved in a lot of familiar samples (or remixes of well-known material—the difference can be blurry): among the tracks that popped out of the mix were Bell Biv DeVoe's "Poison," Rhythim Is Rhythim's "Strings of Life," Robin S.'s "Show Me Love" (rendered faster and stompier), Hardrive's "Deep Inside," Cajmere's "It's Time for the Perculator," and Cutty Ranks's "Limb by Limb." But it's how you play that counts, and Murderbot kept the pace bubbling without letup—and that evenness of pace was at odds with the room. Many of the attendees were friends of the artist (or his opener, Machinedrum, whose methods were much the same but with more of an emphasis on dubstep and classic jungle: Q Project's "Champion Sound," yes), and I have to admit—I felt kind of bad for the folks at the private party downstairs who'd wandered up and couldn't quite get a handle on the music, though a couple of women gamely booty-danced. Then again, however schizzy Murderbot's music can be, that's largely the point.

Critical bias: I've been friendly with Chris for a year or so now, after interviewing him over IM for a feature.

Overheard: [during second track of Machinedrum's opening set] "Hey! That's a remix of a song I made! I haven't heard it yet."—C. Murderbot

Also overheard: A waitress asked me what the deal with the crowd was: she was on bottle-service duty and, as she noted, might as well have stayed home.

Random notebook dump: Is that [Hot Butter's] "Popcorn"? Gawd. - Village Voice

The Chicago DJ Chrissy Murderbot set up a blog in 2009 called My Year of Mixtapes in order to release one mixtape each week, covering as many forms of his beloved club music as possible; he has also been one of the main conduits through which his city's juke scene gained global attention. Little surprise, then, that his own music skilfully draws on everything from juke's stretched-out synths and samples and rapidfire, stuttering beats to early 90s rave pianos and a sequence of guest dancehall MCs. Offsetting the lingering taste of eclecticism is the way he puts these all to the service of an overall aesthetic: in dancefloor terms, Women's Studies is booty moment after booty moment, Murderbot playing its components off each other with a light, skilful hand reminiscent of Basement Jaxx. Bussin' Down combines dancefloor exhortations with fluttering, girly vocals; on Bump Uglies, libidinal chants about the female form meet with the sweet coo of an Aaliyah sample; Warrior Queen directs the sexual energy back at the guys on Nice Lookin' Bwoy. It's a touch overfamiliar in places, but Women's Studies is enthusiastic, good-natured and likable. - The Guardian (UK)

It's really hard to know how to begin to describe Chrissy Murderbot, or his third album, Women's Studies. The Chicago-based artist is a virtual walking encyclopedia of the last 30 years of dance music, but this album is about choice quotes rather than sample overload. On "Under Dress," housey horn stabs from 1986 are paired with slack-talk princess Warrior Queen. "Pelvic Floor" features piano-house chords from 1992 with dancehall MC Rubi Dan riding a fierce flow over top. The music shouldn't make sense, but it totally does.

The running theme throughout all of Murderbot's music is the concept of sleaze. And dance music, especially dance music from Chicago, can be particularly good at embodying sleaze. It's awful. It's illicit. It's titillating and exciting. It's lurid, it's fun, it's omnipresent across all cultures, and yet no one wants to talk about it. This is the vibe that holds Women's Studies together, whether it's the opening crooned refrain of "Hey girl, when you gonna let a pimp break you off?", the crazy jacking beats of "Bump Uglies," or just the plain fact that there's a song here called "Heavy Butt." And yes, as others will remark, most of the beats are juke and footwork, albeit composed in a manner that's wildly innovative, energetic, and very weird. Ignore the sleazy fun of Women's Studies at your own risk; in the end it's your own ass that will be missing out. - XLR8R

Planet Mu's latest juke-related release comes from Chicago mainstay Chrissy Murderbot. While the all-purpose-party DJ/expert curator can hardly be called a footwork producer based on his varied previous work, his Planet Mu debut (ahead of a full album) is his own take on the style. "Bussin' Down" takes the tropes of the kind of footwork previously explored by Mu—stuttering vocals, flailing toms and hypnotically intense repetition—and applies them to a more spacious and warmer template. Featuring vocals from footwork master DJ Spinn, the track's sped-up easy-listening vibes quickly transform from gaudy gimmick to much-needed atmosphere. What's immediately apparent about Murderbot's production is how professional it sounds. Whether or not footwork needs to be dressed up is a question best explored elsewhere, but the result is satisfying nonetheless.

More crazed amalgam than genre exercise, non-album b-side "Braaain" stretches out a two-syllable vocal sample like taffy over a dancehall skank that quickly accelerates into frantic chaos, a thrilling subversion of footwork that mercifully settles back down by the track's end. The single is rounded off by two remixes of "The Vibe Is So Right" from the upcoming Women's Studies album, featuring excitable vocals from dancehall star MC Zulu. Bristol producer Atki2 is up first, and he gets a leg-up on the UK-referencing junglist vibes of the original, juggling the Amen fragments in a more traditional UK funky framework to uproarious results. Footwork royalty Spinn & Rashad go dark on their remix, turning it into a two-minute nightmare of taunting vocals, hollow percussion and literally nothing else. - Resident Advisor

Sick of footwork yet? It's not fair to dismiss an entire scene based around the endless gimmickry and outside appropriation it has inspired, but either way, reservations about the pseudo-genre shouldn't get in the way of Chrissy Murderbot's fantastic debut album for Planet Mu. No, Murderbot isn't a footwork producer—this is the man who was making ragga jungle only a few years ago, mind—and Women's Studies isn't quite a footwork album. It's an all-purpose party album, the kind of I-can-do-everything affair you might expect from the man who made a mixtape every week for an entire year, celebrating a different genre each time.

Footwork isn't the only thing going on here, but let's talk about it first. The album kicks off with "Break U Off," which turns footwork's tom-tom napalm into agreeable flickering as disembodied heads gasp and pant around it, sexualizing the near psychedelic effects of footwork's usual slurred repetition. It's easy to hurl accusations of dilution of a primal, visceral sound at this kind of prim-and-proper internalization of scene-local tropes, but when the results are this pleasing who cares? The album dives into the coked-up bassline whomp of "New Juke Swing" right after anyway. You can hear Murderbot's junglist urges rearing their head in the razor-sharp breaks that hide in the cracks of "Swing," and they emerge elsewhere, providing some refreshingly loose elbow grease to irrepressible album highlight "The Vibe Is So Right" and underlining the piano jangle of "Pelvic Floor."

Murderbot provides enough hackneyed and overused sample choices ("Bump Uglies," "U Got Me Burnin' Up," "Under Dress") to make any party alternate between confused looks and smiley bliss. Rarely is this kind of music so lowest-common-denominator appealing and blisteringly experimental at once. And that's really what Women's Studies is about: it takes a music almost rudimentarily fast and obnoxious, classes up the production values and then brings it right back down and dirty again with songs called "Heavy Butt" and lyrics like "hey girl, when you gonna let a pimp break you off?"

Sometimes the album's vigorous spirit gets sidetracked, with the second half dogged by the awkward midrange creak of Mungo's Hi Fi on "Nice Lookin' Bwoy" and the out-of-place "Sweet Thang," but for the rest of its duration it flies by pleasantly and quickly. It's the highest compliment that you can pay to Women's Studies. It's an album that melts together a number of rather extreme and often unfamiliar dance musics into a wonderfully populist and exuberant whole with very few missteps or valleys. As Coool Dundee intimates on the closer, just be cool, sit back and watch as he breaks the rules. - Resident Advisor

A mutation of ghetto house, juke is the soundtrack to footwork competitions in Chicago, where battling dancers perform frenetic displays that resemble – to the untrained eye – moonwalking over hot coals. But for anyone outside the Windy City, exploring the scene was liable to leave you feeling as clueless as if you’d just attempted a footwork dance yourself. There was plenty of footage of dance crews like HaVoC or tracks from producers like Traxman floating around cyberspace if you knew where to look; but many people’s introduction to juke and footwork came when Planet Mu released their Bangs and Works Vol. 1 compilation in late 2010. A sterling introduction to the scene’s main players like DJ Roc and DJ Nate, the collection was still hard work for the uninitiated, with 160bpm rhythms that initially seemed more like free jazz drumming with staplers than any conventional grooves.
Chrissy Murderbot’s Planet Mu debut is a more accessible – if less authentic – entry point, however. Although he’s based in Chicago, Murderbot hasn’t spent his entire life immersed in juke, his background more in producing proto-jungle and dancehall-influenced tracks similar to other Planet Mu artists like Venetian Snares, influences most apparent in the drum’n’bass breaks of New Juke Swing or Nice Lookin Bwoy’s rubbery bassline. He’s also got a sweet tooth for rave and pop. These aren’t new ingredients in juke, but whilst most juke producers slice pop samples into salami slices, Murderbot goes for a more melodic touch with the bright chords of Bussin’ Down or Sweet Thang, where retro-electro squelches make vocalists Johnny Moog and Coool Dundee sound like they’re trapped in some garish kids’ game show.
Not that Women’s Studies is recommended listening for children – the lyrics might not be as outright pornographic as many juke tracks, but Warrior Queen’s contribution to Under Dress should still be kept away from impressionable young minds – particularly if they’re already been corrupted by exposure to Heavy Butt’s vibrating beats. Spoonfuls of sugar might help Murderbot’s version of juke to go down, but Women’s Studies still contains more than enough dirt to drive Mary Poppins insane. - BBC

Chrissy Murderbot is your friendly neighborhood Diplo: a pan-global dance synthesist who believes that backing an entire four-minute track with a looping police siren is a good idea. Unlike Diplo or even Girl Talk, though, Chrissy isn't interested in connecting his genre obsessions with modern North American hip-hop or R&B, meaning Women's Studies features no hint of pop crossover. It's the difference between believing something like dancehall deserves a wider audience and believing dancehall is just really fucking cool.

Chrissy cut his teeth on rave, and Women's Studies bears the marks of 1990s dance culture: airhorns abound, as do the skittering 180-bpm rush of drum & bass and hi-NRG's gloriously tasteless synths. Genres are important to Murderbot (he's behind the outstanding yearofmixtapes.blogspot.com, a site that featured a micro-genre DJ mix every week for a year); he's not interested in perfectly melding his influences into the Chrissy Murderbot Sound™. When he blows an airhorn, he wants you to think of glowsticks, or at least to think of an iPhone glowstick app (you're welcome). The video for lead single "Bussin Down", which features Murderbot and DJ Spinn playing a dance-battle version of Street Fighter, isn't exactly coy about Murderbot's 90s-culture fanaticism.

The Chicago-based Murderbot has been an early, vocal advocate for Footwork. He's curates an excellent monthly dance party (Loose Squares, also the name of a label he's putting together) that regularly features Footwork and juke legends on the decks. Women's Studies borrows those hypnotic samples and Dance Mania's ruff vulgarity and is Murderbot's most focused work almost by default. Naturally he's not content simply mimicking, so he sets Footwork against cheesy lounge-jazz ("Bussin' Down"), or late-90s Warp skittering ("Jiggle"). Not only is Murderbot not above deliciously boilerplate dance mantras, they're basically his wheelhouse. Tracks "The Vibe Is So Right" and "U Got Me Burnin Up (Club Cirque)" fit him so well because he's so eager and utterly unashamed.

The flip side to any discussion about how much energy Chrissy brings is how much energy it takes to listen to him. Women's Studies is relentlessly uptempo, and Murderbot's idea of a pop hook is Warrior Queen's heavily accented, aggressive cadence. The vocals and guests sometimes feel tacked-on, perhaps in deference to original scenes and styles. (Even on a party record you know you're in trouble when Johnny Moog is dropping lines like, "What seperates me from y'all lames is I'm like Young Jeezy." Oh. That's what.)

It's easy to be cynical about this kind of musical colonialism, but Murderbot is effectively a man without a genre/country, and besides, he approaches his source material with nothing but love. I finally feel like he's gotten a bit lucky, with his most recent fascination (Footwork) coinciding with a rise in that fascination's profile. Women's Studies is a tiring listen by design, and its 43-minute runtime is the only bone thrown at the listener. Murderbot could conceivably do more to smooth out his productions, but what he wants to do is duct-tape his record collection together and find pleasure at the resulting contraption. If you share his obsessions-- or are merely curious about them-- you're invited to smile and dance with him. - Pitchfork Media

This features as part of our special Juke House Feature including 3 limited period digital samplers for £1 each; writing on the subject from Planet Mu's Mike Paradinas and Ghettophiles' Chrissy Murderbot; "Best of Juke" charts from some of Chicago's leading DJs; and brand new digital catalogue previously unavailable digitally.

"Like virtually everything in dance music, the juke phenomenon starts with Chicago House, a sound that absolutely dominated urban Chicago in the 1980s and 1990s. As Detroit was borrowing from house to create techno (and London, Sheffield, and Brussels were borrowing from house and techno to make rave, bleep, new beat, et cetera), Chicago kept doing its own thing, producing an incredibly rich dance music culture that (for the most part) stayed under the radar of UK tastemakers.

Ghetto House (or Booty House) was a huge component of this: by the mid-90s, Chicago DJs like Deeon, Slugo, Milton, Paul Johnson, Jammin’ Gerald and DJ Funk were speeding tunes up, stripping them down, and building on Chicago’s already-long tradition of mindlessly filthy lyrics aimed at the dancefloor. As a new generation of Chicago producers came up in the late 1990s, the tracks got even faster (150-160bpm), the rhythms got more intricate (and tom-tom oriented), and more hip hop influence found its way in—this sped-up, modern Ghetto House variant is what we in Chicago call Juke.

Over the past decade Juke has developed two pretty distinct halves: the more straightforward four-on-the-floor party bangers by people like Gant-Man, Nephets, and Waxmaster; and the more rhythmically varied, sideways-sounding “footwork tracks” from DJs like Spinn, Rashad, and Nate. Though Chicago’s unique footwork dance styles have existed for as long as I remember, the last five years have seen a sort of feedback loop develop—the music gets faster and more off-kilter, which inspires the dancers to get more intricate and experimental, which encourages the producers to make the tracks weirder still.

This all brings us to about 2008—the first time I noticed juke making an impact in the UK. I was playing juke at a Ruffnek Diskotek night in Bristol, and Headhunter (who I’d always enjoyed but assumed to be one of those strict dubstep-only types) starts gushing about juke! Turns out he’d planned to play a bunch of footwork trax that night, and been working on this side project called Addison Groove. When I got back to the states he sent me “Footcrab” and I realized that this music might finally have a chance in Britain. Maybe it’s the chance overlap with dubstep’s semi-halftime rhythmic experimentation and massive bass weight; perhaps it’s related to the UK underground’s long-overdue rediscovery of house music (via UK Funky / Tropical / Karnival / whatever you want to call it). Whatever the reason, Chicago dance music finally seems to make sense in the British context in a way that it hasn’t since the 1980s. And now Planet Mu is stepping in, snatching up footwork producers like DJ Nate, DJ Roc, and DJ Rashad, much like they snapped up tracks from Pinch, Vex’d, and MRK1 as dubstep started to break five years ago. Add to that the support from London’s Night Slugs crew, Numbers in Glasgow, and a small-but-rapidly-expanding juke scene on the continent, and things are looking very promising for us Chicago kids..." - Bleep.com

We over here at XLR8R HQ have been courting our reignited love for Chicago's awesome juke scene for a good while now, and now it appears that online electronic music retailer Bleep has caught the same love bug. If you head over to Bleep's website, you'll find its extensive investigation into the music scene of Chicago's Southside, and the residents making those strange, energetic dance tunes. Folks like Planet Mu's Mike Paradinas, DJ/producer/label head Chrissy Murderbot (pictured above), juke kings DJ Rashad and DJ Slugo, and more weigh in on the topic, contributing "Best of" lists, editorial introductions to the genre, and some cheap samplers of the music, among other interesting items. Check out the whole Bleep Investigates Juke House feature here. - XLR8R

Chrissy Murderbot, a favorite of DJ Donna Summer and the Trouble & Bass Crew, comes at you with a reference-riddled electro-bass number. Beginning with a slowed sample of Armando's "100% of Disin' You," the track continues with some heavy, bass-loaded breakbeat that all the kids are repping. - XLR8R

The future is always uncertain, especially when it comes to online music. Four years ago, at an "unconference" in Seattle (at least it wasn't a "webinar"), the topic was podcasts: digital files, audio or video, released in a series, nominally to subscribers. The focus was on radio-style programmes with music and talk. Because it was Seattle, a keynote speaker referred to podcasts as "the new grunge", to audible groans.

He should have said "the new rave". In 2010, dance-oriented websites and blogs such as Resident Advisor (RA), Fact, XLR8R, Bodytonic, mnml ssgs, Little White Earbuds, as well as club nights such as Brooklyn's the Bunker, have bolstered their traffic by podcasting mixes from new and veteran DJs.

The communication has been two-way, with house, techno, dubstep and other dance styles evolving as they spread via the podcasts. "Online mixes move so fast, they actually propel the culture forward – creating new connections and pathways and widening people's listening sensibilities at a supernatural rate," says Kiran Sande, an editor at the London-based online magazine Fact, whose twice-weekly mixes – posted on Mondays and Fridays – have been one of the format's most influential. "A mix these days is a far better way for an artist connecting with a large audience than any interview."

"In the context of blogs and social networking, web mixes are conversation starters," says Philip Sherburne, an American techno DJ and critic based in Berlin. "I also suspect that in the game-like economy of the social web, web mixes have a certain amount of social capital. Blogs and websites are racing to lock down exclusive mixes in order to shore up their own brand."

It's worked that way for Bryan Kasenic, the Bunker's promoter. "It helps familiarise people with the music, and gets them out more," he says of the Bunker Podcast, which features sets recorded at his parties. When he was in Europe last year for festivals, Kasenic says, "three out of four" people he met mentioned the podcast when they found out he was from the Bunker. "They've never been to the party, so that's their main frame of reference."

While it wasn't the first dance-music podcast, the format's standard of uninterrupted DJ sets, accompanied online by a short interview and (usually) a track list, was set by the Monday mixes from techno webmag Resident Advisor, which was founded in Australia in 2000. "We realised technically [doing a podcast] was relatively simple," says Richard Chinn, who books the DJs for the podcasts. The first RA Podcast, 84 minutes of minimal techno from Berlin's Troy Pierce, appeared in March 2006, and four years later, the RA podcast sits comfortably at the top of the heap. Few DJs say no. "They've got the traction and reputation to get people like Richie Hawtin," says Kasenic. "He's not recording podcasts, but he'll do it for RA. Same for Carl Craig." Hawtin mixed RA's 100th podcast; Craig, from Detroit and also a legend, recently mixed RA.200.

Soon RA had friendly competition. In late 2008, Fact began posting a loose, unrelated bunch of sets they soon began numbering. Like RA, the Fact Mix commissions a startling mix of talent, and unlike RA, Fact moves beyond dance music. That means occasional sets by rock bands such as Maximo Park, Fucked Up, and Blank Dogs, and wild cards like Bass Clef's joyous set of African pop.

But Fact's mixes are rooted in dance – particularly the London bass underground. In spring and summer 2009, sets from Brackles, Hot City, Cooly G, and Untold melted dubstep, funky, hip-hop, old-school rave, and tweaked-out R&B into something that felt like continuous updates from the most happening party in the world. That's what's earned Fact's podcasts an average of around 30,000 downloads each, with the most popular hitting 50,000.

"One of our strengths and interests is a kind of blow-by-blow coverage of what's happening in the London scene," says Sande. "One really senses the centrality of London to club culture and creative dance music at the moment." Sande counts Untold's mix as the series' watershed: "It was around that time that the whole world seemed to suddenly twig to the groundswell of post-dubstep creativity that was happening in London, and which we'd been tracking for some time, and the mix became a kind of emblem of that."

Fact's occasional rock mixes tie in with an increase in indie mix podcasts, such as Thizz.Face.Disco, run by Joshua Hernandez and Mike Melero in Oakland, California. Thizz.Face.Disco began running mixes in April 2009, including sets by cult rockers such as John Dwyer of Thee Oh Sees and Coachwhips and Vivian Girls guitarist Cassie Ramone; the latter's mix is the site's most popular. The duo hopes to attract film-makers, writers, activists, and visual artists for future mixes. Melero also admits that the podcast is there to boost traffic: "We noticed that the music posts were getting the most hits."

Though most I spoke with credited podcasts for much - The Guardian (UK)

Out now on Sleazetone’s “dodgy bootleg” vinyl series, “I Wish” is a standout on Chrissy Murderbot’s great four-song party plate. It’s a quintessentially Chicago track that re-imagines hometown hero Carl Thomas’ V103 staple as a percolating corn-popper of a juke track. Basically, if it repped the Windy City any harder it would have guest verses by Oprah, Michael Jordan and Barack Obama. Maybe for the Space Jam remix? - The Fader

Marc Richter collects records, makes records, and releases other people’s records. If you want to know what kind of records he makes, today is your first chance to buy “Alphabet 1968,” an album released under the band name Black To Comm. The foundation for Richter’s project is sound and noise, rather than songs, though the results are as sensually pleasing as they are baffling. I keep thinking “plump” and “slate-grey,” but that makes me think of a baby shark living in my bathtub, and this music is not sharky. Black To Comm is more like an abandoned museum of late-twentieth-century instruments whose exhibits are still running at half power. The music feels linked to the repetition and crunch of krautrock, so I was satisfied, sort of, to find this fantastic mix by Richter called “Fuck Krautrock” on the Type Records Web site. I assume the title means to acknowledge that he knows what his tastes sound like, while asserting he’s moved on. Krautrock was very 1993, which probably means it’s also very 2010.

The good people at Resident Advisor have posted a Halloween podcast from Karin Dreijer Andersson of Fever Ray. Of course Karin made a Halloween tape—LOOK AT HER. The tape is near-perfect, except for a hammy track by Zola Jesus. (Extra points for using David & Jad Fair’s “Nosferatu,” which is like “Monster Mash” if “Monster Mash” weren’t the most annoying song ever.) Neil Young’s guitar solos are almost better without a band behind them, and Suicide’s “Ghost Rider” is not aging.

When you’re done with all this grey, black, slate-grey, off-black, spookytown Euro boogie, go straight to Chrissy Murderbot’s My Year of Mixtapes blog. If you do enough downloading, you will never, ever have to make your own dance-party mixtapes. - The New Yorker

“Here’s a story for you,” says DJ-producer Chrissy “Murderbot” Shively as we settle in at Old Oak Tap’s patio to talk about his new album, Chrissy Murderbot Volume Two. “I was at a record shop in Kansas City the day Daft Punk’s ‘Around the World’ came in. The guy running the store puts it on and he’s like, ‘This is going to refashion the way everybody thinks about house music.’” With a chuckle, Shively continues, “And my exact words were, ‘It’s not like this is gonna be on MTV or anything.’”

While the anecdote proves his gross miscalculation about one of Daft Punk’s biggest singles, it also illustrates how Shively—a dance-music obsessive since the age of 11—has always marched to the beat of his own drummer, or drum machine.

The 27-year-old Kansas City native was introduced to rave-music culture by a sister ten years his senior. “It was ’91 or ’92,” Shively recalls. “That was when poppy rave, like Crystal Waters and Utah Saints, was popular. You know, when it really seemed like electronic dance music was going to blow up.” Shively then laughs at his own remark: Those years were, in fact, some of the most popular for dance music stateside.

Hoping to take advantage of Europe’s more thriving scene, Shively relocated for a short stint, but ultimately felt a pull to return home. “I was living in Amsterdam in 2005 and 2006, and it made me realize how Midwestern I am,” says Shively, who now calls Chicago home. “The only places that really get electronic music in a from-the-gut, raised-in-the-culture, in-their-blood kind of way are the U.K. and the Midwest.”

Shively’s foray into deejaying began with his exploration of Kansas City’s rich dollar-bin record culture. He pieced together a sizable collection spanning disco, classic rave, old-school techno, jungle and drum ’n’ bass—all while still in high school. “I grew up without a whole lot of money,” he says. “So dollar-bin stuff exposed me to things I would not have been able to afford otherwise. Imagine the disco shopping in a city full of flea markets that used to host the International Mr. Leather competition!”

As he cultivated his dance-music fixation, especially the low-end-driven sounds of early drum ’n’ bass and jungle, Shively also set out to make music of his own. “In the modern dance-music industry, you have to put out records for people to want to book you,” he says. “The DJ who isn’t a producer gets booked half as much as a great producer who isn’t a good DJ. You can beat mix like an amputee, but if your tracks are hot, people will pay to listen to an hour of you sounding like shoes in a dryer.”

In addition, Shively owns two record labels: Dead Homies, which he launched in 2005 to indulge his more urban-oriented, speaker-rattling drum ’n’ bass and dubstep inclinations, and Sleazetone, which he started in 2007 for poppier, but no less bass-heavy, dance sounds ranging from nudisco to juke.

After putting out his first 12" in 2004, Shively quickly tired of formulaic dance styles and set out to carve his own path. Culling his early, more genre-specific productions into an album in 2007, he’s now prepping for his second full-length, out this week. “This record is bits of all the stuff I’m into,” Shively says. “There’s a lot of jungle influence and a lot of classic rave, but there’s also disco, juke, dubstep and dancehall reggae. I’m just trying to synthesize those things into something new and fun that makes a statement about the value of eclecticism in dance-music culture and how you can be successful without pigeonholing yourself as ‘a dubstep DJ’ or ‘a deep house DJ’ or whatever.” - Time Out Chicago

When Christopher Shively, aka producer, DJ, and label head Chrissy Murderbot, was pursuing his master's degree in American studies at the University of Amsterdam in 2005, he had an epiphany. "I'm gonna sound like a horrible nationalist," he says, "but I became convinced that when it comes to dance music, midwesterners and also the British get it in a way that other people don't, because it's native to us and we grow up with it. You can do your homework and be really knowledgeable about it, but you'll never have that. It's like speaking a native language versus a language you learn when you're 15."

Just as native speakers are best equipped for subtle forms of wordplay, only a practitioner who really knows and loves dance music can treat it as unseriously as Shively does without sounding shallow—his approach can best be described as well-informed irreverence. It's something he shares with a few notable collaborators—including Scream Club, who appear on his new self-titled album, due September 1 on his own Sleazetone label—as well as with some of the bigger names he's opened for, among them the Bug and Kid606. So far most of the attention he's gotten has been from within the midwestern scene—he's old friends with Cody Critcheloe of Kansas City electro-punks Ssion and has recently fallen in with the local Ghetto Division crew—but despite his relatively low profile he's far from an inconsequential player.

Shively came to Chicago from Kansas City, which as far as I know has never produced a breakout dance-music star or even a hit track. He doesn't exactly dress the part either: though the club scene is intensely fashion conscious, his style is somewhere between preppy and nerdy, and his hair looks like his mom's been giving him the same cut since he was nine. But he really did grow up immersed in dance music, and his old hometown really does have a scene. "Yeah, I mean, Kansas City is a different paradigm than here," he says. "There's this huge hyphy scene in Kansas City. It's a trip. There's a house-music and dance-music scene that's very much in that kind of Chicago-Detroit-Saint Louis-Memphis kind of orbit."

Now 27, Shively got into dance music thanks to his older sister's taste for late-80s and early-90s pop techno. He places his musical awakening around "that moment when Technotronic was on the radio and Utah Saints were on MTV. It really seemed like 'Gosh, this is really gonna blow up! They're gonna be the next big thing!' And it never materialized."

By the time he was 13, Shively was landing DJ gigs with the help of a promoter who noticed him buying vinyl at a dance-friendly record store. ("A lot of the stuff was not coming out on CD," he explains.) He soon moved on to producing, though he admits he confronted a much tougher learning curve on that front.

"I had a bunch of ideas," he says, "but everything I made sounded like it was recorded in the bottom of a well—it just sounded like crap. It took me a while to figure out engineering and mastering and things like that. I guess it was about five years ago that I first put out a record, and I've just been plugging along since then."

He's being modest—it'd be more accurate to say he's been on a tear. The discography page on his Web site lists two albums, two EPs, and eight singles, plus around a dozen compilation tracks and remixes, all since 2005.

Just looking at Chrissy Murderbot gives you a pretty good idea where Shively's coming from. The cover tweaks the iconic sleeve art Columbia used for its disco singles—part of a woman's face in profile, her glossy lips almost touching the center label—by adding Magic Marker stubble and a curlicue of mustache. A song called "JACK YR BODEE" is followed immediately by "WORK YR BODEE," and a third is titled "Music Sounds Better With Me"—a goof on the 1998 Stardust single "Music Sounds Better With You."

The title of "100% of ORCH5" refers to the sampled Stravinsky "orchestra hit" that came with the Fairlight CMI, the first real pro sampler in the late 70s. (You can hear the original sound, which Shively re-creates persuasively here, on everything from "Owner of a Lonely Heart" to "Planet Rock.") In terms of dated cheesiness, orchestra hits are up there with Zubaz pants, but Shively's sharp ear for composition and skill at pulling together disparate styles make it easy to take his music seriously despite its jokiness. On one hand "100% of ORCH5" is a wink-and-a-nudge tribute to the blippy, corny pop-techno records he grew up on, but on the other it's a cunning fusion, incorporating a bit of drum 'n' bass in the form of a fuzzy, degraded-sounding snippet of the "Think" break (not as foundational to drum 'n' bass as the "Amen" break but still well-known) that adds a weird, dark tension to the track. Elsewhere on the album traces of Italo-disco, juke, ghettotech, and electro emerge, among a raft of other references and hybridizations.

"When an artist works across genres, sometimes there's a lit - The Chicago Reader

A few weeks ago I got an email from a Chicago DJ named Chrissy Murderbot announcing a new project: a year's worth of weekly themed mixtape. My Year of Mixtapes sounded kind of cute, but there's a lot of music out there, especially in the form of mixtapes and/or podcasts. I can barely keep up with the weekly podcast from the techno site Resident Advisor and the two offered Mondays and Fridays by London's FACT Magazine. That's not to mention both sites regularly point to other DJ sets, and that's not to mention this monster of an archive, which offers some 25,000 archived sets.

So what's one more project got to offer? In Chrissy Murderbot's case, a lot.

I haven't played all 12 of the mixes yet, though I'm working on it: finishing up no. 5, New Jack Swing, as I type this. It's fantastic—37 tracks in 67 minutes, the whole thing as smooth (or maybe I mean smoove) as that herky-jerkiest of R&B styles can be. New jack swing, after all, was the music that first merged R&B songwriting and harmonizing with hip-hop beats, and the meld could be awkward—have snares ever clattered so much in any pop style? But it sounds innocent now in a way no one at the time could have predicted—or, given how much coarser pop culture has grown in the decades since, necessarily have wanted to. Either way, the mix is great; special props for including Redhead Kingpin & the F.B.I.'s "Pump It Hottie," with its coda featuring Kingpin telling each hottie on the floor who they're going to pump it up for:

The other Murderbot mixes alternate between period and sonic through-lines, as with Week 1: Tin Pan Tape (juicy turn-of-the-'90s dancehall) and Week 9: Ambient Jungle (can't wait to A-B this with Woebot's wondrous FACT Mix 61), and thematic mixes such as Week 2: Robot Love, which contains maybe my favorite segue of the year so far: James Brown's "Sex Machine" sliding slowly into the Pointer Sisters' "Automatic." I've loved both songs for ages, and never thought in 100 years they'd work together so well—much less for the half-minute or so Murderbot uses to join them. Don't just take my word for it. - The Stranger / Line Out

Murderbot draws a loaded weapon and fires two exceptional soundclash sample-saturated ragga jungle hollowpoints. My ears gravitate toward the high-grade "Purple Skunk", which slices up Ricky Trooper's Louie Culture "Bogus Badge" dubplate before offering Tony Matterhorn's counter action. Mad! The rest of teh single is jammed with funky diced drums and surprising soul nuggets. - XLR8R

Hardcore ragga-breaks and old skool junglist specialist Murderbot, sometime label-mate of DJ C on Mashit and Bong-Ra on Clash, returns to the fray with the first new release since last year on his own Dead Homies label. This sick three-tracker rips open with 'My Streets', a gangsta-jungle tear-out that has been blowing up on dub for a while, held together with a sample from the intro of The Cure's 'Love Cats' cutting in and out, the inclusion of MC vocals also adds something of a flavour of DJ Zinc's seminal 'Super Sharp Shooter'. 'Take Me Away' is more on a soulful tip, reminiscent of a piano-free version of Omni Trio's early artcore cuts, with a rugged amen overlay and massive bass for good measure. Finally, 'More Guns' is a proper jump-up g-funk roller inspired by the fresh beats and patterns of '94 - '95. - Boomkat

Murderbot draws a loaded weapon and fires two exceptional soundclash sample-saturated ragga jungle hollowpoints. My ears gravitate toward the high-grade "Purple Skunk", which slices up Ricky Trooper's Louie Culture "Bogus Badge" dubplate before offering Tony Matterhorn's counter action. Mad! The rest of teh single is jammed with funky diced drums and surprising soul nuggets. - XLR8R

Most ragga junglists these days are pretty content to drop a Jamaican guy over an amen cut into a thousand pieces (it doesn't seem to matter how) and call it a day. Mashit, on the other hand, treat the new ragga movement more like a retelling than a retread, unraveling threads that probably bean as throwaway ideas in those early Nineties tracks. Murderbot's first two for Mashit are <i>lyrical</i> above all else, taking a cue from Remarc's expressionistic amen canvasses. But he isn't done at the drums, piling on hook after tuneful hook (some de rigueur, others charmingly kitsch) until the tracks blossom into songs--singing over a raunchy low-end that sounds like an analog tuba trio. You've never heard it mashed like this. - Stylus Magazine

Most ragga junglists these days are pretty content to drop a Jamaican guy over an amen cut into a thousand pieces (it doesn't seem to matter how) and call it a day. Mashit, on the other hand, treat the new ragga movement more like a retelling than a retread, unraveling threads that probably bean as throwaway ideas in those early Nineties tracks. Murderbot's first two for Mashit are <i>lyrical</i> above all else, taking a cue from Remarc's expressionistic amen canvasses. But he isn't done at the drums, piling on hook after tuneful hook (some de rigueur, others charmingly kitsch) until the tracks blossom into songs--singing over a raunchy low-end that sounds like an analog tuba trio. You've never heard it mashed like this. - Stylus Magazine