Welcome to the latest edition of our series of interviews and mixes affectionately titled Talking Shopcasts. The majority of media and fan attention gets showered on the artists who create the music we love to listen to/DJ with/dance to, and for good reasons. But without the hard work, keen ears, and business savvy of label staff we might never hear these tunes at all. For our eighth edition we visited Bridgeport, Connecticut, home of Jus-Ed and his Underground Quality label. While Chicago and Detroit may be the first cities that come to mind at the mention of American dance music, New York has a long and storied history in house music and the Underground Quality crew are undoubtedly the faces of today’s New York house scene. The label introduced many of us not only to New York faces but also a couple of Russian newcomers in Anton Zap and Nina Kraviz, who have become some of the most hotly tipped producers out there. Our chat with Ed delved into both the troubles and the benefits of running a label, especially in the U.S., and while wisdom was being shared we sampled some of Ed’s extraordinary ribs. We also provide an exclusive mix by Anthony Parasole, Deconstruct Label boss and one of New York’s finest DJs whose Club House party next Friday will feature both himself and Ed in the mix.

How did Underground Quality start?

Edward McKeithen: The name was established by Vic Money. There’s a cat in Detroit who did the logo, DJ Tresor I think, but the building of Underground Quality was Vic and me. Vic was head of a big marketing company, doing both high-end, elegant marketing as well as using street tactics. He employed underground cats to DJ at events and stuff; he cared a lot about the scene. He was also for quite a few years a 98.7 Kiss master mixer. So I knew Vic by name and from the radio. He was doing a party at some bar, a 98.7 Kiss party playing R&B and house, so I was like “I gotta go down there, I wanna meet Vic Money!” I went and we hit it off, he gave me a CD and his contact info because he was going down to the Winter Music Conference. This was 2001. So we met up in Miami and hung out, and he was on all the guestlists and we got to know each other. He said he was doing a residency at the Ludlow Bar on the Lower East Side and he wanted me to come down. I told him I had retired, that I hadn’t DJed since ’85, that I didn’t even have any records, but he said, ‘Just bring what you have.’ So I showed up with like seven records I got from the Winter Music Conference, and he asked where all my records were. I told him that this was all I had, so he said, ‘Just keep playing them then!’ Two or three records in it was clear I could DJ, so he asked me to get down on the residency.

Vic and I felt that the scene needed a different look and a different atmosphere for parties. Even today you can go to six different parties in New York and hear the same records, so what makes any of those parties special? The powers that be weren’t interested in opening up the scene for any new talent, so we just decided to do something about it. UQ was just the mark of a good party.

And when did you decide to start releasing records?

2004 is when we turned it into a label. Vic retired around 2002, got rid of all of his records, and that worried me because Vic was like the passageway. I was literally just Ed. I wasn’t done though, so I took over and then released my first CD album in 2004. My home base was at Halcyon, the old one on Smith St., and I did a Underground Quality radio show for like two years. The last event I did there I had eleven DJs play in three hours. They came from as far as Boston and DC. I would try to name them but would probably get in trouble for forgetting someone’s name, so you guys know who you are. [laughs]

I sold about 10 copies of my first album that night, and the original pressing was only 100. I saw it on eBay recently, someone was selling it for like $60 or something. I’m not even dead yet! I didn’t think it would get to this point.

How do you decide which records get released on the label? You release from both local artists as well as overseas ones such as Nina Kraviz, Anton Zap and Smallpeople.

First I establish a report with potential artists. I’m not an email person, I want to at least talk to people on the phone. Everybody that I’ve dealt with has been struggling or shitted on by the industry, and they all have an extensive history with music. Nina’s young but she’s been around music her whole life, and Anton was in a band and is sort of the originator of deep house in Russia. They’re driven, and these are qualities that I identify with, because I’m there with them. And when you hear the music…

So it’s very intimate. I was talking to Dan Bell about how labels used to be run, and they used to pigeonhole artists. There were also the understudies who were told, ‘Do this and you’ll get released,’ but never were. They were hypemen, assistants, but always waiting. That was always so irritating to me. You give a DJ a track, they say they like it and that they’ll play it, and you show up and wait all night but they never play it. It takes a lot of courage for someone to make a track and give it to you. We’re sensitive about our material, because you don’t want to put shit out. You want your music to sound like you and be quality.

One of the stipulations of releasing on Underground Quality is that you’re going to establish your own label. There was like a big forest fire that just burned down all of the house music in the US. How do you help? Well, when there’s a forest fire, you need people to go out there and plant new trees. This is my strategy. The old time labels, they probably got tired with the influx of garbage music, and people only looking to get that one hit. People walk around like they’re the shit, but it’s only one record, there’s nothing else after that. So the money get is to put this together and take care of my kids. I looked at the twelve step programs, where each group is autonomous. If one group does something outside of the norm, it just affects that group, not the whole body. Everybody who has released on Underground Quality is autonomous. The connection is there, but they make their own decisions. The worst thing you can do as a new producer is ask people what they think, because they will give you their opinion based on their tastes. There’s one or two nuts out there who think that I’m lucky. That’s probably the worst thing you could say to me, because I’m not lucky. I’ve been working hard since 2001, and nothing has come easy for me in this industry.

Jus Ed in the mix

American house music has made a comeback over the past couple of years after some time in the wilderness. Do you think this has more to do with a recent surge of quality music or is it just the franticly changing tastes of the dance music scene?

For me to answer that, I would be taking on a position that I’m not qualified for. That should be left for more of a veteran. I will say that what goes around comes around. There’s a saying that “there’s nothing new under the sun.” It’s just a timing thing. Broken beat will come around, drum and bass will come back around. It’ll come back in a different form or shape, but it will. The big contributing factor to U.S. house music becoming big again is the fact that Europe has embraced it. I mean, this is the reason that I’m being interviewed by you. No one in the States was interested in Jus Ed. When Germany heard my tune on the FXHE compilation, they kept asking who “Joos Ed” was. [laughs] They were interested, and that’s why I love playing in Germany. We have the Smallpeople party in Hamburg and then I get to go to Scotland. I’ve wanted to go there for a long time.

As an american label, do you find it particularly difficult to get distribution, both in the US and worldwide?

Well distribution is, in my mind, like organized crime. You have the different families and everything. They’re not bad or good people, they’re just effective or they’re not. If they’re effective they’re pushing your music to the world, not just easy-sale areas. It’s difficult, because they have more shit music coming in than quality music. I hear so many copycat tracks, and I have records sitting around that are seven years old that sound much better. I’ll dust those off instead. Some people might be offended, saying that I’m not supporting vinyl or something, but I am. My whole radio show is dedicated to new music, and to new artists. But if you send me garbage, come on. I’ve positioned myself in the industry to do what I want to do.

In all fairness, each distribution has its right to do right by artists. Taxes and shipping fees, they get hit in the head with that. Even if they’re getting a record at wholesale price for like $4.25 per record, after they pay for those it’s up to about $6. And then once it gets to Europe, these records are very expensive. One of the reasons I went with Rubadub is because a large part of my market is overseas, and they can get it at a lower price and pass it on to the record stores. For the U.S. I just do it myself. If a record store pays €6 wholesale from a distributor, he’s supposed to be able to double his money. So he’s selling the record for €12, and people just don’t have that kind of money. I never had money for records, but I made it so that I could buy them. I bought a Cadenza record here for $18, a single sided one, because I wanted it, because it was dope, and because I knew a lot of people wouldn’t have it.

Underground Quality presses vinyl but avoids making mp3s available aside from the handful on the UQ mp3 shop. Why is this?

I started my website in 2004, and my goal is to be self-sufficient. I want it so that if all else fails you can still get my music. A good number of people have gone direct to my site to buy the records, and in the last two years I did an exclusive with Beatport for my back catalogue (just the CDs) and then I offer some mp3s on my site. But the model is this: vinyl is to stay vinyl. Digital is digital. That’s the way I’m living and I know plenty of other guys who feel the same. It just kind of lessens the value of the record if two weeks later it’s available digitally (or if it comes out digitally and then they try to press it later). People say vinyl is dead; vinyl isn’t dead, it’s just condensed. There’s not a lot of room for shit music anymore. So it makes everyone step up their game. There are only so many tracks you can press. Having a record means you do research. You bought into that artist’s vision. Vinyl will never be abolished since it was really the first popular form to capture sound. It’s like saying the telephone will be dead, that we’ll all just have chips in our head instead. It’s just not happening.

But I plan to expand the mp3 store in the future. The only problem with digital is just that I make more money with vinyl than digital. There’s you know, one in every five-hundred producers, who makes a track that keeps selling and selling digitally and they make thousands of dollars. And that’s dope, but it doesn’t work for me. I just sell a couple digital files myself since it’s so easy to sell digital files yourself. It takes time, you have to go at it with more than just a passion, because it’s a business as well. I’m still learning, I learned that on my website I lack keywords so that Google picks it up. I’m learning, but I still have to keep my daytime job.

Running a record label is no easy feat these days. In the face of the economy, shipping costs and illegal mp3s, what keeps you going?

The illegal downloads have gone down since I got with a publishing company, so they’ll go after people illegally selling my stuff. The real people who respect hard work and effort will search out and buy the records. I had one guy in Zurich come up to me and apologize, saying that he had downloaded some stuff illegally and that he felt bad and wanted to buy some stuff from me. The Internet just makes people less personal; they feel detached. They’re in their room alone, and feel like nobody cares, so they can just take things. More artists should speak out and let people know that this is hurting them. I mean, I can’t make music if I can’t make at least some sort of living off of it. And people will say, ‘Oh, but you’re not in it for the music then, you’re in it for the money.’ I gotta pay for electricity to run the machines that I bought.

I’m also flying overseas to play gigs. I’ve got kids and a family, what if something happened? What club will send your fee to your family with some flowers and say that they’re sorry? I was with people who were complaining about DJ fees, and when I brought this up the table went silent. No one wants to look at life the way it is. I think the volcano incident recently provided a reality check. When it went off a lot of clubs lost money, a lot of promoters lost money, I lost money. That’s just mother nature. I play gigs because I love it and it helps pay the mortgage; maybe if I were single I would be saying something different.

Anyway, the mp3 thing will still keep going on. Before digital files it was bootlegs. Distributors repress stuff, this will always go on. What I count on is people supporting what I do and supporting the label. If I didn’t trust people I would quit. I almost did. Two days after I shipped the House Goodies Vol. 3 CDs to the distributor it was on three different websites. Already I’ve seen the Next Level CD on websites for free. The free thing is what really gets me. I saw on one site there was about 200 downloads of the CD. That’s almost $2000, a mortgage payment for me, that I’m not getting. Maybe these people do this because they want to be popular, or they’re lonely, they have nothing better to do. But I believe in karma, it comes around.

What are a couple of your favorite releases on the label so far?

They’re all special, they all have a meaning. The Time Waits For No-One EP, with me, Jenifa and Fred, was great because Fred worked really well with Jenifa. It was important for both of them, really. The first Unity Kolabo record was a unification of East Coast with Midwest, with Omar-S…err, DJ Snotinburg and Kevin James. UQ-004, the Getting Ready EP, was the worst selling record I had put out. And then all of a sudden everybody wanted it, and it’s now caught up with all the others. Establishing the Russian connection was important, and at the time all I knew was Anton was making some great house music. I mean, if you hadn’t seen him you would have sworn he was black and from wherever I said he was from. It just shows you the soul in the music, and that it is a black thing, but it’s not a black thing. There are certain restaurants you can go to and the food just has soul, doesn’t matter which culture — Indian, Thai or whatever.

The Nina Kraviz record was really great because she’s so talented and she really performs when she DJs. And then there’s Levon. I knew Levon would be the great savior. And he got mad at me because I told him he would be more popular than me, partly because he’s white. I’m not racist or anything, but I’m not ignorant either. What matters to me is that the guys remain grounded and they stay true to their art and themselves. They need to keep the door open for the next person, and remind the powers that be that there are still artists who are business minded, who don’t have tech riders that say, ‘I need two bitches, a case of this, and an ounce of that.’ If people are inspired to do something, they need to take the higher road. I put myself into retirement in ’85 because of drugs, and there was nothing wrong with my talent. You show up at a gig wearing the same clothes for two weeks, there’s a problem. I’m almost 48, I dunno how much longer I’ll be hopping planes and shit. People ask me how I do it, playing at one club one night, a different one the next night, and then flying home. Well, I drink a lot of water and eat salad and get sleep. I’m here to do a job; I can vacation later. Mismanagement takes down clubs all the time, and its not just financial mismanagement. There are so many documentaries about this, you’d think people would remember. I mean, Panorama Bar/Berghain, they’re involved with the arts and the government. That’s handling your business, I take my hat off to them. That’s good fucking business and provides longevity. More people need to think on that level.

Back to the question, “Sweetness” was a big one, and people really gravitate toward it. It was inspired by Fred’s remix of “Voices,” and I made that one with my daughter in my arms, and the music soothed her because she didn’t want to go to sleep. Each record has its own significance. On the Next Level CD, the track “Play Date” was made while some kids were over with my son on a play date. And “Listening In” was made while Levon was listening in on the phone. It was really important to me when I got recognized on the end of the year label list on Resident Advisor, not because of the number but because I made an impact and was being recognized. I mean, I have an ego when it comes to DJing, it’s how it was when I was coming up. We had battles; it was all about your records. I’m just still trying to hone my skills.

We’re doing this interview at your home, so I was wondering how your family life impacts your music?

My drive for my family was due to a lack of family. I came home from prison in ’99, and you can’t forget where you came from. I’ve been given my life three times, and I’m not taking it for granted. When I go dance, I dance as hard as I can, same with playing out and work. You have to keep yourself grounded and keep shit simple. I teach my son that if you make a good choice you reap the benefits and if you make a bad one you pay the cost. That’s a golden rule, and somehow it eluded me for a number of years.

What does your studio look like, and how do you express yourself through your gear?

I get this all the time. If it don’t sound right, keep fucking with it until it does. You have to have a vision first. I understand how I want my music to sound. That took a minute in the beginning. I was so anti-whatever everyone else was doing, so I just let it flow. I have a good taste in music, and I have a musical education. A minor one, but I understand that things have to make sense, even if they don’t. My music makes sense, even if it doesn’t. There’s a rhythm there, a clarity, an emphasis on one or two parts. It’s based on what’s in my blood, I was raised up with this. You can see it with my son, if I put some music on now he’ll work it out. This is just part of our culture. Just hand claps from jump roping; I used to double dutch, and the hand clap rhythms would mesmerize me. [Ed’s son Dustin starts clapping] See? Handclaps. There’s always something there.

It took until 2001 for me to actually embrace my talent. It’s easy for me to DJ, but to do it as a career, I’m still learning how to do that now. There’s still so much for me to learn, like publishing. Shit, I had like 100 songs out, and I’d say maybe 30 were getting played on the radio overseas. Once I got educated about that, I had to bring the whole crew up to speed as well. I don’t just limit myself to the Underground Quality people either. There are plenty of artists out there who I sit down with and help critique their mixdowns. There’s an art to mixing, to arranging a track. You could take the dopest elements and if you don’t know how to do the mixdown right it’ll be a bunch of noise. Just do your thing, and be the best at what you do. That’s success, because you’re happy. I don’t make music so people like me, I make it because I think it’s good, and I’m gonna play it.

Mark Farina said it in a magazine in 2001 or something, ‘Don’t be afraid to mess with your knobs.’ That’s the answer to my productions. I try shit out, and trust my ear. I make a lot of music based on where I am in life. I haven’t had time to make new music in about two months, and once I get this new computer up there’ll be some new shit coming out. The beauty of having your own label is you can decide if it gets released or not. There’s enough talented producers out there, that if they just trust the process of creation and believe in what they’re doing they’ll have their day.

We just got a record in from Juno called “The Freeze/The Meltdown” and it said it was by a popular New York DJ.

Yeah, they sent me that one! I’ve been playing it. I like what Juno did. They took a shot on an artist. I think it will encourage something that’s fallen off in the U.S. and around the world, where retailers take a risk and get behind an unknown local. That’s what underground is about. “Where the hell did that come from?” Doesn’t matter, because the music is hot. I was like the first one to have that because of the radio show. It’s surprising, I got like four artists record deals by playing their tracks on the show. The next thing I know they’re telling me, ‘Thanks man for playing my stuff on the show, they’re gonna press my shit!’ That’s excellent. Or sometimes it gives them the confidence to press it themselves. I’m always pushing artists, because I can’t take everybody. People need to take the time and spend their money. If you really believe in what you’re doing, spend your money on it.

Well, when I spoke to Levon, he was talking about the fact that he was sitting on top of the pressings of Double Jointed Sex Freak, and anxious about the fact that he had spent all of his money on it.

I do it every release. I’m in it to make a living, yes, but I’m not in it to get rich. If i get lucky and Sony wants me to do a remix or something, that’s awesome. But nine times out of ten, whatever money I get (ten, five, two grand) it’s already spent. The game is trying to get ahead. These cats in the ’90s could sell 100,000 copies of a record, seeing 150 grand on a release. And that’s just on the first run! The repress is even cheaper! Quality control is so key. I don’t sell records based on my name. Distributors and retailers sell them based on my name. I sell them based on the quality of the music.

Is there anyone you want to work with?

I mean, I get requests for remixes or collaborations, but I’m sticking to supporting my label. I mean, if Herbert or Charles Webster or Pépé Bradock or Kerri Chandler wanted to work with me, you know, just to name a few. If they asked me to do something, hell yeah. There’s shit from me to learn there, and to be even in the same realm would be an honor. These guys don’t need me. But as far as aspiring to make music with the big names, nah, that’s not my vision. I’m pushing me, my stuff. I’m a purist in that sense.

What does the future of Underground Quality look like?

Underground Quality is just gonna continue. Gonna do an EP with Steffi, there will be a DJ Jus-Ed versus Joey Anderson record, a new Tazz EP. And then vinyl releases from the Next Level CD. I’d like to be able to touch every part of the world musically. Hopefully I did my contribution to the scene, helping the scene grow. I’m excited about Kyle Hall. I heard him play and I said, ‘There’s no way he’s 19 years old.’ He’s doing shit we did in the ’80s, and he’s drawn a completely young crowd into the scene. Kids like him are our future, I just hope it continues.

Talking Shopcast 08: Anthony Parasole (70:43)

Tracklist:
01. Steve Reich, “Come Out”
02. Link Wray and His Ray Men, “Rumble”
03. Morphosis, “Musafir” [M>O>S]
04. Joey Anderson, “Booth For Country” [CDR]
05. DJ Qu, “Tunnel Vision” [Strength Music]
06. Diaries, “Sketch 3” [CDR]
07. Newworldaquarium, “The Force (Âme Remix)” [NWAQ]
08. Pacou, “Multipass” [Cache Records]
09. Donnacha Costello, “Grape A” [Minimise]
10. Slam Mode, “Autumn Disorder” [Desvio]
11. The Nova Dream Sequence, “Dream 14” [Compost]
12. Nicholas, “On My Mind” [No More Hits]
13. DJ Sprinkles, “Sloppy 42’s” [Comatonse]
14. STL, “Vintage Hunter” [Something]
15. The White Stripes, “Little Acorns” [XL Recordings]