Bass for your face: Is Charlotte becoming Electronic Dance Music central?

DJ Odi stands behind the turntables at Crown Station Pub in Elizabeth, scratching and mixing, pumping out 175 beats per minute of drum-and-bass, the skittering subgenre of electronic dance music that peaked in popularity during the mid-1990s.

Odi is working the crowd of 150 people hard on this crisp February night, until a couple of overzealous patrons bump into the DJ table. The music halts. “Everyone needs to take a step back,” Odi yells, then kicks back in, trying to re-find his rhythm. The momentary lapse generates as much excitement in the crowd as it does frustration. And it is that uneasy dissonance that creates mad frenzies on dance floors the world over.

When Carlos “Odi” Castillo relocated to Charlotte from New York City in January, the pioneering drum-and-bass DJ knew that he was moving into a flourishing EDM scene. “Charlotte is one of the most powerful major-micro markets,” he says.

It’s the day before his Crown Station gig, and Castillo is having a pint at Jack Beagle’s in NoDa. His calm tone mirrors the Southern culture he’s had to adapt to since he moved here, although his Mets jersey reveals a still-strong tie to his home state. “There are four colleges within 20 minutes of Charlotte,” he continues. “That’s an incubator for music.” What’s more, he adds, Charlotte “is diverse, culturally.”

That diversity may be one of the key reasons the EDM scene in this area has exploded so much over the past two years and is now reaching a fever pitch. It wasn’t always like that. In the early ’90s, the electronic dance scene in Charlotte revolved around one club: Mythos. Artists ranging from Sasha and Digweed to Little Louie Vega, Grandmaster Flash, Doc Martin and Jellybean Benitez all came to town thanks to the efforts of one guy, Andy Kastanas, who has been DJing locally since 1980.

Over the years, clubs changed names, changed styles, and found new audiences and new niches. The idea of one club serving all dance-music fans faded. Two decades later, EDM has expanded into a variety of venues, from traditional dance clubs like Halo (which presents Rave Wednesdays) to rock-oriented spaces such as the Neighborhood Theatre and Fillmore (both of which have hosted Mindelixir’s Bass Church events). There’s also Le Bang at Dharma, ID Saturdays at Phoenix, EDM Wednesdays at Marigny and Wednesday Humps You at the Chop Shop.

“In the ’90s, there was a lifestyle around EDM,” Kastanas says. “It created fashion and a vibe. That’s what’s missing now. Hopefully, as time goes on, the [new scenes] will come together more and be more united and cohesive. There’s a lot of great local DJs and a lot of great national names that have settled down in the area.”

Indeed, DJ Odi isn’t the only dance-music innovator who’s relocated to Charlotte to plug into the energy. The producer and DJ David Heartbreak, a leader in the D.C.-spawned EDM subgenre moombahton, moved from Brooklyn to the University area four years ago. And house DJ Peter Presta, who has produced or remixed hundreds of tracks, most notably the Queer as Folk title track, “Proud,” moved from Long Island to the northwestern outskirts of Charlotte five months ago.

“I’m here to give people something different — I’m big into tough, pumping, filtered disco tracks and party tribal,” says Presta, who is now a part-owner of Marigny and has worked with DJs from Moby to Victor Calderone, and remixed nondance acts ranging from Sade to (get this) David Hasselhoff. “There are clubs here that are playing underground music, and it made me realize that I can definitely do something and be a part of it here,” Presta says.

Heartbreak moved here to help give Charlotte an “identity,” but he says the people “have to want one.” He notes that there are a lot of DJs in Charlotte, such as Kevin Focus, who don’t get the credit they deserve. “It’s hard to build a foundation for people who come and go,” Heartbreak says.

Charlotte’s longest-running regular EDM event is Mindelixir’s Bass Church. Started at the Neighborhood Theatre in 2010, the show has become a showcase for local and national DJs from a variety of genres. Bill “Mindelixir” Schimel uses the monthly event as a sort of education tool for EDM fans to learn about what’s new, hot and happening on the EDM scene. “It’s not just Charlotte that’s coming together for this,” he told CL last year. “It’s kind of the whole Southeast, which I love to see.”

In December, Odi started Konkrete Jungle, his monthly gig at Crown Station Pub, along with a friend, the Charlotte DJ Spencer Sapien. It’s an offshoot of the popular New York City event of the same name — the longest-running weekly drum-and-bass throwdown in the world. The February Konkrete Jungle event at Crown Station was Odi and Sapien’s biggest yet, and Odi says part of the reason is that his sets appeal to older dance music fans who loved drum-and-bass during the genre’s heyday and want to revisit the sound, but with newer and fresher textures.

“I used to play more aggressive, techno-influenced stuff,” Odi says. “Now, I play more organic, bouncy stuff, but I mix in everything in between.”

Drum-and-bass, also known as jungle, is the ultra-fast dance-music style that developed out of the U.K. rave scene of the 1990s. In New York City, its skidding and clattering, 160- to 180-beats-per-minute onslaughts dovetailed naturally with the city’s breakbeat scene, and by the middle part of the decade drum-and-bass was the hottest thing in dance music since Detroit techno or British acid house. It produced genuine stars — Goldie, Roni Size — and bubbled into the rock world when David Bowie incorporated the sound into his 1997 album, Earthling. By the late ’90s, D&B’s hip factor had waned, replaced by dubstep, which ushered EDM into the 21st century. Today, says Odi, drum-and-bass is enjoying something of a resurgence, due in part to the nostalgia of clubbers in their 30s.

A pioneer of the drum-and-bass subgenre hipstep, which adds more hip-hop to the D&B mix, Castillo is currently building a studio in NoDa to produce, record and engineer music for himself and other DJs. But his priority is performing. As DJ Odi, he headlines a handful of gigs for crowds of 250 to 500 in cities like D.C. and New York each month. Those shows pay Odi’s bills, while his Crown Station events are more about having fun and helping to expand Charlotte’s EDM scene.

“With Konkrete Jungle, Spencer and I are trying to give people who grew up loving raves and drum-and-bass shows the opportunity to go out again,” says Castillo, who is 36. “This is the music we grew up on. Life gets in the way, but people can go out again.” He also says that younger people in their teens and 20s who currently like dubstep will likely get tired of the more experimental nature of that style and gravitate back to the more energetic sounds of drum-and-bass. “It’s always a party,” he says. “It’s not a listening party.”

The son of a bass-player father who hosted one of the first Latin-jazz radio shows in the country, and a salsa-dancing mother, Castillo always had music coursing through his veins. He grew up in a lower-middle-class part of Harlem — a block from the projects, where hip-hop was thriving, and three blocks from the Apollo Theater. He was 9 when he discovered the excitement of dance music. His babysitter was a DJ who lived in an apartment below the one where Castillo lived with his mother, who by then was divorced and single. Castillo would go downstairs and spend his time surrounded by his babysitter’s comic books, vinyl records and DJ equipment. “I thought, ‘He’s so cool!’ I wanted to be like him,” Castillo says.

Two years later, Castillo was singing with the Boys Choir of Harlem. One day, after leaving rehearsal and calling his mom from a pay phone across the street, he was hit by a car and badly injured. He spent the next four years in hospital beds and wheelchairs, during which time he had little more to do than take the elevator down to his babysitter’s apartment and practice his mixing and scratching. “By the time I was walking again, I had mixtapes and was soon DJing in my neighborhood,” he says.

When Castillo wasn’t hanging out at his babysitter’s place, he was at home listening to DJ mix shows on New York radio stations — Little Louie Vega on Hot 103 and Frankie Bones on B96 FM — until 2 a.m. “You hear, ‘Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery,’ but it’s also the best way to learn any art,” he says. “A new guitar player is going to learn ‘Stairway to Heaven’ or ‘Hotel California.’ It’s the same thing with DJing culture. I learned how to scratch by copying other DJs and learning patterns.”

At 15, Castillo was just another latch-key kid living in upper Manhattan, getting into drinking, doing drugs, skipping school, not coming home for days. His mother was at her wit’s end. With the settlement money from his accident controlled by the courts, she told a judge she couldn’t handle her son anymore and wanted to send him to military school. The judge’s reply: “How much do you need?”

New York Military Academy helped calm Castillo down, but not by his choice. “You know all the horrible stuff you see in movies about academies? All that happened,” Castillo says of the hazings and beatings he received. After graduation, he enrolled in a pre-college program at Columbia University, but that only lasted a couple of weeks. “My ride to the rave was leaving,” Castillo jokes. “I can always go back to school. I think I made the right decision in choosing to be a DJ instead.”

Castillo dove into the dance scene as both a fan and DJ. He started blending hip-hop, house and freestyle — “taking a beat and finding an attractive girl to sing a love song over it,” he says. “That’s what I heard in my neighborhood every day.” From there, he learned more and more about breakbeat culture, techno and house. It was a natural progression that led him to more aggressive styles. “In the ’90s, electronic dance music was the only music that was consistently pushing its boundaries,” he says.

At first, Castillo performed as DJ Techno C, but his friends gave him a hard time about the name. A retired graffiti artist allowed Castillo to use his tag — Odi — and Castillo began playing records and working on scratching patterns with a former junior high schoolmate, DJ I-Cue. “One of the things that DJ I-Cue and myself are known for is creating hipstep — it’s a joining of hip-hop and rap with drum-and-bass,” Castillo says. “We grew up listening to dancehall reggae and hip-hop and combined them into a new sound.”

The sound helped to put Castillo on the map as DJ Odi, and he quickly became a fixture on the New York jungle scene, including the original Konkrete Jungle and clubs such as Vinyl and Ozone. DJ Frankie Bones remembers those years well. “Odi comes from the original N.Y.C. scene and also paid attention to techno and rave, which gives him a serious edge in his own game,” says Bones, who’s often referred to as the Godfather of American Rave Culture.

By the late ’90s, Castillo was spending his days working at 36 Chambers, the studio where Wu Tang Clan had recorded their classic 1993 debut Enter the Wu Tang (36 Chambers), and his nights performing at clubs across the city as DJ Odi. While he says he could have become a “poster boy” for electronic music, Castillo found himself turning down offers, including a stint as Moby’s keyboardist.

“I was scared and not taking myself as seriously as I should have,” Castillo says. “I’m just a really lucky Puerto Rican kid from Harlem that got out of the neighborhood. I count to four for a living and have gotten paid ridiculous amounts of money to do it. I never wanted to have to make decisions based around what someone else thought would be better for my career.”

Castillo says he made the move from Brooklyn to Charlotte because of the lower cost of living, access to a major airport hub and what he sees as a hard-working ethic. He had played his first Charlotte show in 1996 and formed numerous friendships over the years, including the one with Sapien. The two licensed the Konkrete Jungle name as part of a franchise that offers DJs a network of venues throughout the country. While Castillo is behind the Konkrete Jungle events in Charlotte and Charleston, S.C., there are also franchises in other cities, including Philadelphia, Baltimore and Minneapolis.

As DJ Odi, Castillo has released singles and remixes via Jungle Sky and BML Records over the years and still works on his own new music, but his passion is standing behind the decks at a club, controlling the rhythms of a dance floor.

“A DJ in New York taught me one thing — when you’re DJing, no matter where you are, it’s ladies first,” Castillo says. “If you get the girls dancing, the guys will come out on the dance floor. I play bangers and I make people dance. It’s the only music that consistently challenges me. Jungle and drum-and-bass has always kept me working and sweating.”

As Castillo takes another swig from his pint glass, the EDM elder statesman says he still has a lot to offer, part of which is to help Charlotte continue growing its already formidable scene. “I’ve never looked back,” Castillo says. “My mom and dad say I could have been anything I wanted, but when I bring them out to one of my shows and they see what I do, they’re OK with it. I made $150 at my first gig and went home and gave it straight to my mom. There’s no better experience in my life and nothing like the feeling of getting paid to DJ. I love what I do.”

KonKrete Jungle

With Klute, The_Sheist, DJ Odi, DJ Sapien. $5-$10. March 9. 9:30 p.m. Dharma Lounge.

www.dharmacharlotte.com

This article appears in Mar 6-12, 2012.