Eris Drew on DJ'ing All-Vinyl, the Motherbeat, and Being Under the Gun

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Let's get down to business: Huge fan of Eris Drew as a producer and a DJ, in particular she's put out some simply incredible mixes in recent years and her just-released contribution to !K7's long-running DJ-Kicks mix series is certainly no exception. I've wanted to talk to her a bit about her technique and personal history, and the hour-long convo we had earlier this fall was highly revelatory and fascinating. Check it out:

This mix is fantastic, and I honestly wouldn't expect anything less. Let's start by talking about how you put it together—the technical nuts and bolts.
It was quite a process. I had to pick 40 or 50 tracks. So much of my crate is old music—I'd say 80% older stuff and like 20% newer things—that I had to get licensed. It wasn't like Raving Disco Breaks, which I did as an old-school mixtape that wasn't distributed or anything like that. This was a proper, very legit, '90s-style compilation, so we only had a few months for the licensing process.

[!K7] reached out to me and I had to be lightning fast, because they had this goal to get it out by the end of the year. I was on my break here in New Hampshire after the touring season, and Maya was working on her album and getting ready for having and recovering from surgery. She's also an unnamed member of a class action lawsuit involving transgender passports, so we were dealing with a really awful situation during a really intense time when this opportunity came up—but, of course, I wanted to do it.

I had no idea what the success rate [for licensing] was, but they thought we might get every two out of three, or maybe half. Also, with my style and how I mix—doing longer blends with tracks with arrangements—it was hard, because it was a short time frame. So I was like, "Okay, what's going to end up on the mix is around maybe 20 songs, maybe a few more." In the midst of this, I was asked to write two original songs for the compilation, so I was trying to write songs that would work on this mix. Honestly, it was a lot all at once, as well as the opposite of how I would normally do things. I don't write songs for mixes—I write songs about subjective moments and things that are happening in my life. I don't even really mix my tracks as a DJ, because for me, it's a very separate exercise—so it was kind of wild.

I submitted the list, and then we had to work really hard to get the licenses, because it was really hard to find people. I had to rely a little bit on my network, doing research, and working with the !K7 team, who of course have a really good institutional knowledge regarding reaching out to folks and working with artists to get licensing. I should also mention that I was completely committed to this being an all-vinyl mix, which presented a challenge. While these two new songs had to get done really fast, they also needed to get mastered and cut on these special acetates.

There's a mastering engineer I work with on the East Coast who was a mono cutter in the '60s. His name's Carl Rowatti, and he's with a company called Trutone. He's real old-school. We talk on the phone, and he's my guy—he's very kind and he shares fond knowledge with me. So when it came time to get these pressings quick and to really trust that it was going to be right on the first try, I called Carl. He's a gentleman, and he got the work done fast. Even shipping them was super delicate—they travel in this special cardboard box where they're separated—so there were three discs, one song per disc, because Octa did a song too.

I've had a lot of problems, honestly, Larry—because I've done some remixes where the tracks weren't pressed to vinyl, and I've always asked if I could at least have an acetate for myself, because I'm a vinyl DJ and it's just weird to not have a copy of my track in the format I work in. Sometimes they come back with errors, or they just don't sound good, or you play them once or twice and they get skips in them right away. So once we finally got the acetates, we knew they sounded good, and I had the clearance list, then it was time to actually record the mix.

I'd come home during tour for a well-needed break, and I had to spend every moment I could on this mix. But one of the troubles with acetates is that you don't want to be doing 30 versions of your mix until you get it right, because they're gonna start sounding like absolute horseshit by version 30. So I had to really practice a lot. The whole mix is just two turntables, a mixer, and Logic. I got it done right before I had to leave, and I sent it out—and it was honestly kind of terrifying in its own way, because part of the reason I like releasing my own music and releasing with Maya is that things can be on my own regulated timelines. Whereas this was, "I can't believe I'm turning this in so fast."

When it comes to the moments where you do actually get to unwind, what are some of your preferred leisure activities?
Gosh, well, I'm sitting here in my studio right now, so it is my garden. Tending to it is totally a hobby—but I mean that sincerely. I spend time in here when I'm not working on production. We just totally reorganized my studio, and that was both necessary and very pleasurable. I also spend time in nature. We live in the forest, and it's beautiful here. We had a gorgeous, very transitional day the other day, and I was just cutting dried flowers, putting them outside, lighting candles, and listening to the chimes—Earth girl stuff. But I need to do that, because usually my life is, like, all airports.

Now that Maya and I are doing these soundsystem parties, we drive around in a box truck, and I'm filthy at the end of the events. We had a two-day project to clean our soundsystem because it was so dusty from the last time we used it. So cutting the dried flowers and listening to the chimes is really good for me. I honestly love to cook, too. Maya and I eat a plant-based diet, and we love coffee. We have all these ceremonies around our pour-overs. Something I love with Maya is that simple things become very beautiful things. She slows me down to actually enjoy life. I've been on hyperspeed for most of my life. Like, I'm literally turning 50 in two weeks.

As you're approaching 50, what are some notable things you've observed about yourself when it comes to what's changed and what's stayed the same?
I guess it's a cliché, but so much of life is constantly reminding yourself who you've always been—or, at least, recasting that story in a consistent way. I found that transitioning really realigned me with a lot of the things I cared about when I was a child that I, in some sense, had gotten away from as a young adult who was really lost and trying to find comfort.

I have a very simple love of animals that's always been there since I was a kid. One of my first memories was our cat dying. My parents' story was that the neighbor had poisoned our cat. I don't know if that's true or not, but I've asked them about it, and my memory at the time was that they made it sound very intentional. That was a pretty intense experience, so I had a strong sense about animals and a connection to nature that I'd gotten away from and I've since returned to.

I do have this weird picture of myself in the future, where Maya and I have a piece of property in Vermont and people can come there and practice pitch-mixing together. There can be workshops about different aspects of music practice or being an artist. People could do an artist residency, or group explorations of creativity, music history, and technology—but in nature.

I can't help but project into the future, because 50 is such an uncertain time. D'Angelo died at 51. Ron Carroll, the beloved Chicago house vocalist—he died, like, a week ago. These are just two of the most recent examples in my mind, but it's really uncertain as you move into this time in your life. Something can happen at any time in a person's life—but, I don't know, I can't help but think about how precious life is and what I want to do with the rest of it.

Going back to your general artistic practice as a DJ—I continue to find it very impressive that you DJ with only vinyl. I'm really curious to hear you talk about developing that skill.
I started DJing in 1994, and the DJ-Kicks series had its 30th anniversary this year, so I'm thinking about where I'm at in life and when I started DJ'ing, because I'm basically in my 30th year. It's still not comfortable. I feel like a tightrope walker every time I'm out there. I have an immediate adrenal response in the 10 minutes leading up to the start of the set. I do all this extra traveling to do soundchecks, and all this extra labor and effort trying to identify problems early with the sound team and building a rapport before the event, because very few people are doing it. You can't rely on the fact that maybe the person in front of you is also playing vinyl or something.

But I'm also at the point where I have a really sophisticated rider that, if followed, will let me play vinyl records on a soundsystem big enough for 10,000 people with no problems. But that requires so much foresight. When I first started touring heavy in 2018, I was getting my ass handed to me all the time. I had a point where I felt anachronistic. I was like, "Maybe I shouldn't be doing this." But, I have to be honest with you, I wasn't like, "Oh, well I'll go play CDJs." I've spent decades getting to the point where I can mix records live, and people want to engage with me doing this. I'm getting invited into spaces that are hallowed. So I wanted to rise to the occasion.

But I'd once cleared an entire dancefloor in Finland—my first time there—and closed the club early because I was having so many technical problems. Things were skipping. I wasn't familiar with the mixer. So I became more technical over the years. My first foray into that was a party that I threw at smartbar with my friends Justin Aulis-Long and Sevron and a whole crew of other really dope DJs. We found the booth, at the time, really difficult. It's been fixed now, but it would feed back and people couldn't see the decks. So we'd build a DJ booth on cinder blocks at the side of the regular DJ booth so everyone could interact in that way. It was really stable, it didn't feedback or skip, and we felt really connected with everyone.

It fell on me to really step up and learn how to isolate decks and get the best needles for airborne feedback. I could sit and talk for two hours about it. I went from the DIY approach of "Let's put them on cinder blocks" to working with this wonderful production manager, Dan Coia, who was doing sound at a lot of parties in the UK that I was playing around 2018. I was still having a lot of frustrating situations with decks, but I'd go play the the rigs that Dan was running, and everything was smooth. We got along well and started to build a professional friendship. Two years ago, I noticed that, even though I had a good rider and had gained a lot of technical knowledge, I was still getting into a lot of situations where equipment wasn't in good shape or things we'd asked for weren't there. So I asked Dan if he wanted to work with me, and we'd work together to get the monitoring really good—because, of course, there's no haptics with vinyl. If I can't hear, I can't mix well, so the monitoring has to be really amazing. I follow a really old way of mixing, where I basically listen to one track in my ear and then I'm listening to the blended signal on the monitors. My brain has to synchronize those and really trust that.

The truth is that I went from playing on busted decks all the time in situations where my stuff would feed back, to finally being put in situations where I'm playing for thousands of people. I knew I had to get the reins on it, and Dan's awesome for that. We have a lot of fun. I've learned how to get a sound check done really fast and be able to do my thing in so many different environments. And Maya's fully deployed on the same kind of mission. She's invested, and she works with Dan too. The nice thing is, I've been doing this long enough now where most of the people who would like to work with me are also very interested in getting it right, so do have a lot of help in the sense that people are really committed [to the proper vinyl setup]. I really want things to sound good. I really don't want feedback in the breakdowns. I don't want it skipping. I want to be able to really build and bring everyone into that State.

You mentioned smartbar, a venue of which you've had a longstanding relationship with. It's also a very storied venue when it comes to Midwestern dance music—a place where someone like Frankie Knuckles was playing in the '80s. Talk to me more about your history with the venue and how you've engaged with it over the years.
The first club I went to was Medusa's when I was 14, because back then certain clubs were teen clubs, and they were actually really amazing. They'd make everyone under a certain age leave before midnight, so we'd dance for a couple hours. I went from that to raves. I snuck into Shelter a few times, friends got me in. I very much identified as a raver.

So, smartbar is the club underneath Metro, which used to be called the Cabaret Metro when I was young. Because it's in this beautiful old cabaret building, smartbar can stay open until five in the morning, because they have a really special old cabaret license tied to the building. I started going to smartbar to see Miles Maeda with my friends in the early 2000s. I have quite a history there. A few years after I started going to see Miles play, Peter Saville was in town to talk at the MCA, and I was DJ'ing the opening party. I wanted to play really awesome music—I love Joy Division and that whole Factory Records thing.

I ended up getting in conversation with the owner of of smartbar and Metro,
Joe Shanahan—a Chicago legend, really. He was the first person to bring New Order to America, right around "Blue Monday." He loves dance music, and every year he has a Christmas party where he DJ's for everybody who's connected to the club and works in the space. That was the first time we talked, and I thought he was really cool. Within a few years, I'm starting to throw parties in the club, and Chicago was such an interesting place, because the rave scene—the warehouse scene, the early house scene—was huge.

And then, things changed. People got older, and there weren't a lot of spaces. There were a lot of very dedicated artists who really loved the music and honestly didn't know what else to do but live their lives through it, in a city that really couldn't support them as artists in a way that would be sustaining—where someone could have a nice studio, work all the time, and do that for 10 years. This beautiful thing, house music, that people treasured and valued and wrapped their identities around—it's almost political. But the scene changed, and this city changed.

smartbar is an interesting place. I call it a "Force Cave," because there's so much memory in there. So many lives have moved through that space. It's kind of intense and can be super bright, and it can even have its dark moments. When we started Hugo Ball, people were basically using the turntables in most clubs as stands for Serato laptops. It was a weird time—and this was before the CDJ reigned supreme. We decided to do a party that was all vinyl, and then with an all-resident crew. I got a chance to DJ on a really proper soundystem, in a club with hallowed history.

I don't think I'd be here today if it weren't for smartbar. There wasn't, like, a Plan B. Humans love stories, right? Qhat's one of the stories that we tell? We all know a DJ who's the best dj and who never plays—that's totally real. But the truth is, every DJ needs a space to learn how to DJ on systems and do what they do in their bedrooms so well in a more dynamic and chaotic space, with more entropy. Having a place like SmartBar, where I could go in, play early, be a little unsteady at first, and then resolve that with really getting into the flow and developing my skills through doing that—it was so important. smartbar was my bedrock.

It's interesting to hear you lay it out like that—reminds me of that meme with the guy pushing a domino that causes everything else to happen. That really is how life works.
I couldn't agree more. I always play this Janis Joplin a cappella from the end of "Ball and Chain" where she's just vamping to the audience. She does this great speech where she talks about how you really have to live in the moment, and that a single day could be your whole life. I just think sometimes—what if I hadn't gone to that party where like I got cracked open and heard the Motherbeat? What if my dad hadn't us moved to Chicago? What if we'd stayed in Kansas City? I think of all the things that led to this moment, and it's heavy.

Let's talk about the evolution of T4T LUV NRG and what it represents for you at this point.
It's evolved over the years, and it means so many things to me. Originally, Maya and I, because of T4T LUV NRG—and I mean that not as the label, I mean as a noun, a force in the world—it was our trans-for-trans energy, an alchemical concept. We wanted to create a label and release music by other trans artists and let them build the context they want around the releases—how the music's framed and presented. Maya and I, as trans women, find that it's really incumbent upon us to do those things ourselves, because expecting or even letting other people do that didn't represent us well in every case.

It doesn't really have a sound because it's a whole bunch of different artists who we just think are cool. As underground American artists, we've always just been drawn to people who are singular. We didn't really want to invest in a particular sound as much as we wanted to work with really interesting artists and hopefully present their work in a way that reflects who they really are and how they want to be seen.

T4T is itself a very sacred concept in the trans community. People have a lot of different emotions and investments in T4T as an idea. It's interesting. What it means to me might not be what it means to someone else.

When it comes to having to navigate changes in what things mean to people, what are some observations you've picked up on over the years?
A younger trans woman really saved my life, in so many ways. She befriended me when I was just coming out and letting people know that I'm trans. She reached out to me on the internet. I'd never made a friend online or done online dating—I was born in 1975. She became my first online friend that was actually a friend, and so much more. She really helped me unpack what was a lifetime of really intense binary thinking about gender and colonial perspectives. We were talking in 2016, 2017, and 2018, every couple days, about Palestine. Before her, it was just people somewhere else, to me. I'm embarrassed to admit that, but there's people for her that are people somewhere else. We don't know about every struggle.

She helped educate me about something that was going to be one of the most important human rights issues of our lifetime, and she helped me build language around my own transness—to have confidence in myself as a woman. Now, some of the people that inspire me the most are my young collaborators. We just did our first System Activate party in the forest in Vermont, and a bunch of our speakers are made by Faited, who's with Envelope Soundsystem. She lives in a loft with an amazing group of people, three of which did the lights for the rave. Everyone's very DIY on a very tight budget, and it looks more amazing than most festivals. My first interaction with them was their raves they throw in the Redwood Forest—true renegades, no permission or anything, and they're in and out, real tidy. You've got these 2,000-year-old trees standing above you, you're 15 minutes outside of Oakland, and it's 600 kids.

Touring and being a performing artist is intense. I have this guiding principle of the Motherbeat—this true belief in the power of raves, the power of this music to ontologically shock people. It's a wonderful culture, but it often fails to meet whatever that ideal is. To be with these young folks who are throwing the dopest raves...the spirit of this thing is so fucking alive, you know? I know The Guardian just posted that article about outside money, and it's so good everyone's talking about this. It needs to be challenged, it's a real fucking problem—excuse my language. But, also, that does not define the scene. It defines the industry, and those are two separate things, which people forget all the time. The industry can be so overpowering that people just assume it's a scene, which is obviously frustrating. The truth is, most artists really are struggling to navigate it. We need, more than ever, to do things together and away from that stuff.

There are times when I do feel a sense of a passage of time—not that I don't have a long life, but in a sense of rooting myself in other things. I'm also very engaged with things, but it's just some weird thing that happens when you get older. You can feel alienated.

One track of yours I've been obsessed with the last couple years is "Transcendental Access Point." It was one of my favorite songs of 2020. I'd love to hear you kind of talk about that song specifically.
I'm smiling, because it's been a long time since I've thought about making it. My friends BMG, Erica, and Amber from the Interdimensional Transmissions crew in Detroit really wanted to release my first proper EP as a solo artist and had been supporting me in very meaningful ways for many years. I was working on a demo right before I was touring really heavily, and I was still living in my parents' house because I'd moved home for a while and was trying to transition in so many ways—I wasn't going to refer to gender, that was happening too, but I actually mean from work and stuff. I didn't want to have an office job anymore, so my parents were giving me a stability point while I tried to change my life.

We lived in this Dutch Colonial from the '30s, so the rooms were small. I had a pretty small kit in my room—my Chroma keyboard, my Moog, a Mac Mini. Honestly, I was taking a ton of psychedelics and falling in love with Maya, and feeling my body and femininity in a way I never had before. The [monologue] in the song is Kathleen Harrison, who's probably most famous for having been married to Terrence McKenna—although she'll be remembered for something far more important, which was her botanical project in Hawaii to preserve species that were very likely to be wiped out in the rainforest. The [monologue] is her being interviewed about DMT.

It was an interesting time, because I was really heavily invested in the idea of synchronicity and trying to actively live as a surrealist—whatever that means. I was reading books about the KLF, spending time on psychedelics watching them burn the money. I was writing, journaling, going out into nature and riding my bike 25 miles a day, and finding my transcendental access points. It's really about these gateways—and I don't think I've ever publicly said this, but the transcendental access point is the body, too. I was having, for the first time in my life, intimacy where I felt seen and loved. I felt free, and sex then and does now feel really spiritual.

It was such an intensely transitional time in my life. If I had to sit down today and write it again, I couldn't. I was just going for it, I guess. I loved the way the KLF would take everything and form a mystical, mythical language out of it. I was just trying to kind of do that with my own life and influences.