ILL Pharaoh

A Tuesday night dance party can be a difficult thing to pull off, but Pharaoh and the Brooken Teeth crew manage to keep the intimate crowd moving on the little dance floor with a big system at Sin Sin in the East Village. Whether it’s the resident DJs shaking the sidewalk outside with some giant house tracks or the rotating cast of bass music headliners that make frequent guest appearances there, they definitely aim to make you forget that your work-week life begins again in a few short hours.

Ill Pharaoh began dabbling in music while studying piano and musical language during high school in Caracas, Venezuela. But at 17, his cousin, a hip hop producer, gave Pharaoh a sampler and a music program called Acid, and his life as a musician began in earnest. Producing hip hop for acts like 3 Dueños, Dj Trece, and Budu brought him all over his hometown. Then he started a band called Todosantos, which brought him to the U.S. when they performed at SxSW in 2007. He never went back after that.

“My girlfriend was already here, and it’s tough for youth in Venezuela, so I just stayed,” the 25-year-old says. He came to Brooklyn immediately with Todosantos, and has since settled in Bushwick after trying out a few other neighborhoods.

Todosantos made noisy, housey video-game genre collages with a healthy dose of bass. Just by looking at their last EP, which was released by Flamin Hotz, you can get a good idea of what they sound like. Although they’ve broken up and Pharoah is currently spinning primarily house music, he still adheres to that openness to anything that will make you dance.

“During all my different focuses, I’ve listened to everything at the same time,” he explains. “With house, it was always present, so one day I was like, ‘Why can’t I DJ it?’” So he did. And now that Broken Teeth is a record label, that ethic will be applied to their releases. “We want to put out anything that’s groovy or ravey. Anyone who has second thoughts about releasing, we’ll do it for them.” They begin releasing at most established music etailers this summer.

Pharaoh just had a mixtape posted over at Trash Menagerie this month, if you want to hear what one of his DJ sets sounds like these days. His new solo EP, Saturn Return, drops very soon as well. You can preview that on his Soundcloud page, and the track below is from it. Finally, Edinburgh’s DFRNT will join the Teef crew at Sin Sin the Tuesday after next. - Buswickbk.com by Mike Steyels