Misstress Barbara - Dance Department Podcast 191 - May 2009

Biography of Misstress Barbara

Born under the Sagittarius sign in Sicily, Italy, in 1975, Misstress Barbara (4 's' as a word game between miss and stress) moved to Montreal at age 8, where she lives since. She holds a degree in Communication Studies, specialized in Cinema, and a glider and cessna plane license. Her creative involvement with music began when she picked up the drums at the age of 12 and started playing in bands. For the next seven years she was absorbed by classic rock, punk, and all the hard music of the time.

Then in 1994 her musical interests shifted to techno and a year later she traded in her drum kit for two turntables and a mixer. In the spring of 1996 she got her first booking and hasn't looked back since, playing all the major cities in North America as well as Hong Kong, Philippines, Italy, Germany, UK, Brazil, France, Spain and soon to dominate Australia and the rest of Europe and Asia. In just four years of DJing, she's played alongside artists such as Masters at Work, Carl Cox, Sven Vàth, Richie Hawtin, Marco Carola and many others. Misstress Barbara's various music tastes brought her to play many important clubs such as Twilo and Tunnel (NYC), Velvet Underground (London), Rex (Paris), Motor (Detroit), Sona (Montreal), Industry (Toronto), Aloca (Sao Paulo), just to name a few. She has also played many big events but one of her highlights was playing at 'Fashion Cares' in Toronto; a 5000 person AIDS benefit fashion show party hosted by K.D. Lang and Rupaul.

She likes to describe her main style as 'drummy funky pumpin' techno' and her most important musical influences come from the shuffling of Jazz and from the repetitive grooves of Latin music. Regardless of the influences her typical hard beats have always been the driving force in her music and have always come first. These elements are immediately recognizable in her productions, yet she can be very different from one production to another but never lose the thread between shifts in sound or style. This is also true for the records
she chooses to play and how she builds her full-tilt nights.

Barbara begun buying studio equipment shortly after the beginning of her DJ career and she spent the next twelve months familiarizing herself with the equipment and working on original tracks without really finishing them. The real work started once she finished school and dedicated herself full time to studio life.

She plans on running two labels, her techno label Relentless (www.relentlessmusic.com) established in 1999 and a house one for her Barbara Brown projects, unnamed for the moment but scheduled for late 2000. They will have different names but will be coming from the same mother, her company called Energia Productions. She also plans on doing music for films, video games and more radio oriented remix projects. Those are her plans so far, but this is only the tip of the iceberg as her future is looking very bright and her DJ schedule is constantly moving forward, as well as her studio work which promises to bring us more of the cutting edge music she is known for.

http://www.myspace.com/misstressbarbara
http://www.iturnem.com/
http://www.myspace.com/iturnem