The FabricLive mix series drops number 39 on April 14, with North London’s DJ Yoda behind the decks. Originally DJing under the name DJ Beiny (his first two initials and surname – Duncan Beiny), it was a Yoda toy that sat by his turntables that gave him a DJ name that stuck when he was 19. His combined loves of quirky pop and 90s hip hop became fused and intertwined on home-made mixtapes, at first distributed among small record shops. They eventually caused such a stir on the underground that Yoad caught the attention of Antidote Records, through which he released three consecutive volumes of an official mix series titled How To Cut & Paste.
“From around 2000, hip hop went downhill for me,” says Yoda. “It was getting a bit samey – for me, all the best stuff was out in the early 90s. It was the rawness, you know? Now I think a lot of middle-class, happy people are making it, whereas for me a lot of the best music comes out of frustration, anger and difficult times.
“To me, I’m a hip hop DJ but my understanding of hip hop means you play everything. It’s why I’ll play anything from TV themes to kid’s music to religious music – it can be anything. Irony pisses me off in music. None of the stuff I do is ironic. It annoys me when people say I’m trying to be ironic. I have simple rule: if I love a song, I’ll play it. It really is as simple as that.”
While Yoda continues to battle the constrictions of genres, he keeps busy with each finger in a different pie. He makes records, saying: “With The Amazing Adventures of DJ Yoda, I sat down and made a list of everyone I wanted to work with in an ideal world and managed to tick off everyone on the list. It was unbelievably lucky and I was so happy to have done that. Having worked with Biz Markie and the Jungle Brothers, I’m now looking forward to my second artist album.” He does A/V shows, he’s working on a How To Cut & Paste Country Edition later on in the year, and he’s even working on projects as unexpected as classical music. “A classical composer wrote a concerto for turntables which I performed with a 40 piece orchestra,” he says. “It was an avant-garde piece – obviously totally different to the music I normally play.”
And then there’s this Fabric mix, a fusion of old meets new, pulling together beats, bass and sounds from London to Brazil to Jamaica to Baltimore. “This mix is unique for me,” says Yoda. “After all these years and all the mixes I’ve done, this is the first mix that’s actually representative of what I do in a club. As much as the How To Cut & Paste mixes represent my style, the Fabric mix is the first time you’ll hear what I sound like in a club, as opposed to me sitting at home in my bedroom fiddling around with tiny pieces of music. It’s music you can dance to.”
FabricLive 39 is out on April 14. Visit www.djyoda.co.uk, www.fabriclondon.com and www.myspace.com/djyodauk
