Barry Weaver - Bassrush - Los Angeles US - Feb 2002

Biography of Barry Weaver

DJ Barry Weaver, who at 30 now stuggles like any rocker at his white middle-class parents' urging that he get a real job, tells this story: 'I have a friend who's a substitute teacher. He called me one day and said, 'I just have to tell you something.' At school one of the kids had doodled 'Barry Weaver' on the cover of a book, exactly like it was the name of a rock band. Underneath my name they had written 'Doc Martin.''

Barry lives in a Crenshaw-area commercial space, a storefront down the street from the offices of Urb magazine (the bible of the scene), where the neighbors don't mind if he jams at all hours as loud as he likes. His mixer and turntables are set up in a concrete-floored living room dominated by several thousand records, huge steel industrial fixtures and 5-foot speakers.

Unlike Doc, who is known for warmer, 'tribal' house grooves, Barry leans towards hard-edged techno. Internationally the Los Angeles sound is so identified with heavy techno that the Belgian team that produced 'James Brown Is Dead,' one of the genre's biggest hits last year, named themselves LA Style, a gesture intended as both as homage and target marketing. The record's biggest sales were in Southern California.

Barry particularly likes the 12-inch singles coming out of Detroit, where the earliest records were made. Standing behind the living-room tables, he casually cues a few records near the top of his stack: Meng Syndicate's 'Sonar System,' Robert Armani's 'Magic Tricks,' Phuture's 'Acid Tracks': 'This shows where they've gone to, which is real repetitive trance beats, with all the percussion up front, abrasive. A record can be built around one acid noise that develops. The kind of sound, the kind of techno that I'm playing personally, is very repetitive. Kids that are really into it get really _inside_ of it.' A slender, energetic man with WASPish good looks, Barry's more comfortable standing over the living-room turntables, sorting through crates of records, than sitting on his couch, where he fidgits.

'On a record like 'Acid Tracks,' whatever change happens is mostly through my manipulation. Something like this I would never play out through the whole thing, I would be bringing in other things to bring about the change.'