MOTORMOUTH RADIO EP. 46: HALLOWEEN SPECIAL 2024

LISTEN 

Vampire Island - Drexciya

You Cast A Spell On Me - The Satintones

Mr. Power - The Pleasure Seekers

Mr. Hell - L-Seven

Somebody's Watching Me (Instrumental) - Rockwell

Sister Midnight - Iggy Pop

Trickin' - DJ Assault

Zombie's Playing Dead - Detroit Grand Pubahs

Meet The Creeper - Destroy All Monsters 

Ghostrider - The Gories

Ghost In A Beat - DJ Godfather

Plagued by Fear - ADULT.

Dark Arts - DJ Stingray 313

North Hex - Erika

Bela Lugosi's Dead - M.C. Nightshade & Theater Bizarre Orchestra

MOTORMOUTH RADIO EP. 45

LISTEN

On My Own (Feat. Moodymann & Kasan Belgrave) - Jon Dixon

Contact - Edwin Starr

Spank - HiTech

Safety Net - Andrew Younker

Kingston - Rod Modell

Scapegoat (Pole Rework) - Mike Schommer

Meaning Matters - Luke Hess

Vertigo (G-Man Mix) - Keith Tucker

Cherish - Babyface Ray & DJ ESCO

Undisputed - Boldy James & Conductor Williams

Rave Jit - Soltera & Santiago Salazar

Anion (Eris Drew's Body Rock Mix) - Erika

I Call Upon (Mike Servito Pump Mix) - Love Letters

She's Evil (DJ Minx Remix) - Third Culture & Hiroko Yamamura

Ghost of Fun - Majesty Crush

MOTORMOUTH RADIO EP. 44

LISTEN

At Your Leisure - Füxa

Kissing Through The Veil - Clinic Stars

Mitsubishi - Neu Blume

Worry Clay Man - Craig Garwood

Hip Hop Jazz - Sean Deason

Something - Martha Reeves & The Vandellas

We Can Work It Out - Stevie Wonder

And I Love Her - Smokey Robinson & The Miracles

My Sweet Lord - Edwin Starr

Telephone Blue - Moodymann

No Se Siente Normal - Soltera & Santiago Salazar

Star Cross (Derek Plaslaiko Remix) - Bileebob

Lash Out - Cybersonik

The Savvy Provocateurs Of Parallel 42 - Jeff Mills

Woodward Walker - DJ Nasty

Ladies Leave Your Man At Home - DeJ Loaf & Kash Doll 

YOUNG MUSCLE INTERVIEW

Back in August, we sent Detroit music enthusiast and journalists breW out to Red Door Digital with a Zoom Recorder to have some conversations with DJs playing a stacked show that evening. 

A couple weeks ago, we released the first interview with AK which you can check over here. Next up, we're dropping their conversation with Detroit's toughest selector: Young Muscle. You can listen to their conversation about deep admiration for the UK scene and Interference Detroit, or read the transcript below. 

BREW: Hi! …We’re outside of Red Door NOTION’s gonna play after AK right now…Initially, what got you into mixing music?

YOUNG MUSCLE: I've always been into electronic dance music. When I was a teenager I was on imageboard websites downloading music and when I moved out of my mom's house at 18, one of my friends brought up that I had such a deep knowledge of dance music that I should try my hand in deejaying. She helped me get into mixing, taught me the ropes.

How old?

I was 18 or 19. It was before I was allowed into the clubs. I would get people to sneak me so I could deejay.

Was it around the area you grew up?

I grew up in Sterling Heights, which is about 30 minutes outside of Detroit. Then when I moved down here, I was deejaying primarily at places like City Club which are right in the heart of the city.

So that was kinda the start of your deejaying career?

yea that was definitely the start. My friend Cory, Cory P…. specifically, teaching. Shout out to Cory

Does she still do anything with it?

She doesn’t deejay anymore to my knowledge, but she is the person who helped me get my foot in the door.

From that style around then and with what Corey introduced you to, how would you say it has evolved to what you say is UK techno. How does it embed Detroit sound or Cory’s sound?

When I started playing and mixing I was more traditionally like strictly techno and strictly house. Over the course of a few years, you know, I’d always know about UK Bass music– specifically like James Blake and Burial and other UK artists.

Was it based off some of your discography?

Yes, more so my digging. I would say my discography is based off of my digging and my influences that came up.

Did they go hand in hand? Which ones the chicken, which one was the egg?

It feels sacrilegious to say but–I love Detroit techno but my brain is overseas in the UK. I think that UK dance music is so fascinating and there is so much variety and interesting sounds coming out of London and Bristol. It's really, that’s where my heart is.

Even though you are bringing sound over, which they are all embedded with each other, it doesn’t really matter cuz we all feed off the spaces we are in/ the music we listen to. With that and your influences– being resident of Interference Detroit, how do you think it is shaping you as a deejay?

It definitely pushed me to play outside of my normal boundaries. I saw a meme about how DJs always play the eight same songs during their set. Sometimes it can feel that way when I deejay. I feel that way.

Do you think it is a tempo or a rhythmic pattern?

I would say it challenges me to play slower and faster when there are different headliners and it also challenges me to play outside of my comfort zone…you know? I don’t spin a whole lot of electro. I don’t spin a whole lot of strictly techno. When I play interference I have to push myself into a zone where the music that I’m playing matches what the crowd expects. As well as that, Nick Dagher, the genius behind Interference, and I have a perfect synergy. When we deejay I feel like I don’t have to think about what I'm doing. We can just instinctively go from one place to the next without really focusing too much. It's just very heady, very instinctual.

Sometimes there are expectations when you’re on a bill… and how do you normally impose those on yourself? Is it information based on who is booking, based off of who’s headlining– you kinda said that?

Usually who is headlining. I’ll kinda– if it’s someone I am unfamiliar with– I'll go through and listen to some of their mixes and see what kind of things they play. And then, kinda fine tune my set so that it is appropriate for the night. But I also like to put my own spin on things so I never try to stick to the rules too much.

It is important to be flexible. So you did a lot of City Club starting... Where are some of your favorite places to play?

Some of my favorite places to play…I really love Marble Bar, I love playing on the patio so much.

New speakers (inside)... have you been on those yet?

I haven’t been on the new speakers yet. I do– I can’t say too much but I do have a gig coming up. It hasn’t been announced yet but I will be inside on those new speakers.

Very exciting. That was a half-promotion. Anything else you are working on?

I have a few things in the pipeline right now. I just sent a handful of demos and dubs over to a few different figures. I have a track coming out on a very well known UK bass artist label sometime, I think, in September. It hasn’t been announced yet as well so I can’t say too much. I can say this because the secret’s kind of out already. Nick Boyd who runs Sorry Records in New York, him and I have been in talks about putting out an EP for a track that I have called “Looney Tune” which kinda made the rounds through Dekmantel and other festivals that have been going on… Thank you so much!

MOTORMOUTH RADIO EP. 43: 1 YEAR ANIVERSSARY PT. 2

LISTEN

No Ego

Love & War - Amp Fiddler [Weona Ryder]

SENSOR DATA - DJ Stingray 313 [Jomo]

Anti-Capitalist

Thought 2 - Underground Resistance [Weona Ryder]

Get Live - Waajeed [Jomo]

Communal 

No One Can Love Me (The Way You Do) - Johnnie Mae Matthews [Weona Ryder]

Mothership Connection - Parliament [Jomo]

Homage To An Artist

The Day We Lost the Soul/Tribute! - Moodymann [Weona Ryder]

Sonic Rendezvous - BMG & Derek Plaslaiko [Jomo]

An Artist With Discovered Tapes

Perdida - Martin Solis & Los Primos [Weona Ryder]

 A Drop in the Bucket - The Deacons [Jomo]

ONE YEAR OF MOTORMOUTH

Weona Ryder, founder & host of Motormouth:

feeling worlds of gratitude writing this reflection. it feels surreal that we’ve been on the airwaves for a year, but we are just getting started. our work here is not done, as our love for detroit will never fade away. we truly cherish every single song, artist, album, space, collective, labels, etc, that we highlight on motormouth. and i would like to take some time to talk about this…

2-3 years ago, me and dj jomo would ride our bikes around the city at night, blasting everything from drexciya to laughing hyenas. this was also around the time i got off all social media. what was really infuriating to me at that time was not knowing of any shows, releases, interviews, etc, because everything gets posted onto “the gram.” however, i soon began to realize that this is merely a surface level issue and there are bigger problems underneath it all.

dj jomo and i would have extensive conversations about this on our nocturnal bike rides, as we were learning more about techno’s history and the philosophy behind it. we felt like we were getting a commercialized experience rather than experiencing a communal one. where profit, marketing, and branding are prioritized, rather than connection and collectiveness. we were inspired by Mojo, an anonymous radio host back in the day that truly was about the music and nothing else. with his midnight funk association, he would have the entire city lighting up their car headlights, porch lights, bedroom lights for the landing of the mothership. there was a true sense of collectiveness through the music. however, being born in 1999… to actually experience the midnight funk association was a ghost of a chance. i’m left with only the anecdotes of techno titans illustrating how essential and important it was for the city to have underground, unrestricted, and uncompromising music on the airwaves. around this time, DJ jomo wrote Acid Detroit and would talk to me about Mark Fisher’s conception of hauntology, “according to Fisher, society is haunted by the remnants of lost futures, leading to a cultural landscape where nostalgia and revivalism are predominant on a superficial, aesthetic level,” which really resonated with me because i had felt like I missed out on the “good” days and they were not coming back. i didnt want to romanticize the past either, because there was a plethora of hardships in the city throughout the 20th century. however, the difference between then and now is that we are lacking, deteriorating, and trading off our collectiveness and togetherness in the name of profit and individualism. so then the next thing i thought was, are we going to be a part of the problem or are we going to be a part of the solution? you can’t do both. in todays current situation, there are spaces in the area (and honestly all over) that have weaponized phrases like “community”, “safe space”, “family” but are actually being pretty deceptive about the profits they’re raking in. there is nothing familial or communal about making money off of peoples vulnerabilities and/or the exploitation of artists. this is not new, and hasn’t been for a very long time. the exploitation we see today though, it is meant to look pretty at face value and to deceive people into self-willingly giving money or time to it. the same exact places and “collectives” are the ones that have dominated the nightlife circuit, leaving it narrowed for any new, up and coming collectives & DIY spaces.

so, that is when motormouth was born.

we don’t want to play “the game.” we have other ideas of success and none of those ideas include profit. we wanted to bring back old traditional ways of media. in the age of streaming services and social media, digging up dead mediums like radio programming, blogging, hand-made zines, and word of mouth, might seem mindless to some. but to us, we see it as mindful.

instead of having to make constant posts daily to beat the algorithm, wasting away creative energy for the sake of marketing/branding, and upholding the fast-paced consumption model we are forced to use, we have adopted these dying mediums to reject and remove the hands of robber barons that have tainted, exploited, and nearly destroyed our respective & communal scenes. the sonic landscape of detroit, both from the past and present, is truly sacred and must be protected from these soulless entities. long story short— if you have made it this far in my reflection, i would like to express my gratitude to you for taking the time out of your day to read this. please talk to a stranger today. please pick up a magazine or a vinyl record today. please connect with someone or something other than swiping up on a story or doom scrolling on shorts. you will be surprised when you clear your head from the online algorithm and see all the gilded features we are consciously and subconsciously perpetuating. we do not have to accept this decadent lifestyle. we can’t relive the days before iphones and tik tok, but we can be intentional with the technology we have access to in our daily lives.

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Jomo, editor & co-host of Motormouth:

As we mark one year of Motormouth, I reflect on how far this little experiment has come. What started as joining my great friend Weona Ryder in co-hosting a weekly radio show, “dedicated and devoted to all things Detroit, both past and present,” has slowly evolved into a multi-faceted operation that now includes guest writers, artists, show reviews, think pieces, and interviews. We live on the airwaves, with a new episode of the show airing on 99.1 CJAM every week. But we also live virtually, here, on our blog, and physically in the form of three self-published zines. 

In some ways, reaching this milestone isn’t surprising—Motormouth was built with sustainability in mind. We’ve always envisioned this project as a long-term effort, so hitting the one-year mark passed quietly, largely uncelebrated. In some ways, there was little more to say than “back to business as usual.”

But this isn’t a business.

Motormouth is driven by a deep passion for the intersections of Detroit, music, art, storytelling, and—if I may be so bold—political and philosophical ideals. We remain committed to our values, including maintaining anonymity as much as possible in a panoptic world. We will continue to keep Motormouth off social media in an effort to bypass dominant models of information dissemination and gatekeeping. We will continue to celebrate Detroit’s brilliance and tell the stories of those who’ve made their mark here. And, of course, we'll never play the same song twice.

Here's to another year of curiosity and discovery.

MOTORMOUTH RADIO EP. 42: 1 YEAR ANNIVERSARY

 

LISTEN [episode starts at 1:44]

An Artist That Made You Want To Dive Deeper Into Detroit History

People - Moodymann [Jomo]

Flowers of Romance - L-Seven [Weona Ryder]

An Artist That Got Their Flowers In Retrospect

Brand - Majesty Crush [Jomo]

Where Do We Go From Here? - Death [Weona Ryder]

An Artist That Didn't Compromise Their Sound & Vision for Money

Astronomical Guidepost - Drexciya [Jomo]

Thunderbird ESQ - The Gories [Weona Ryder]

A Detroit Artist That Is Not Actually From Detroit

Nightclubbing - Iggy Pop [Jomo]

Eastern Market - Yusef Lateef [Weona Ryder]

Detroit Magic 

Everything I Want - Laughing Hyenas [Jomo]

Phase 4 - Jeff "The Wizard" Mills [Weona Ryder]