Cale Parks on the groundwork for Crispy Reds ahead of Friday’s release show at In the Lowest Ferns

Cale Parks. // Photo courtesy Parks

Had it not been for an audacious lie nearly two decades ago about his deejaying experience (or lack thereof) Cale Parks may have never found his place here in Kansas City as one of the area’s most dexterous dancefloor DJs and producers.

But what could have gone wrong? As far as Parks was concerned back then, his skillset and ear for music, honed as a vital member of the experimental indie-rock band Aloha, his years as a touring drummer for Brooklyn weirdster rock outfits Yeasayer, Joan of Arc, Passion Pit and others, along with a general mindfulness of melody, clearly qualified him to be a DJ. Moreover, the prospect of earning extra cash between touring gigs didn’t hurt either. Still, he had never deejayed before. No problem.

“In New York, bars are open from 10 a.m. – 4. a.m, so I would be on for six hours straight,” says Parks. “That’s the best school you can go to. You’re in a bar. It wasn’t a club. You’re playing tracks for people to vibe to. A couple of people get up and start dancing, and you have to learn to play another song. After that, that keeps them dancing because that’s what keeps the money coming for the bar, and you get paid more. It’s really trial by fire. I went from playing bars to playing clubs. Then I moved here, met Austin Goldberg (DJ and co-founder of NOMADA), then decided to dust off the old deejay skills and see if I still have it.”

It wasn’t until 2019—three years after Parks relocated to Kansas for family reasons—that the KC-based performance art collective Quixotic recruited Parks to play live percussion alongside NOMADA co-founder Goldberg’s live DJ set for one of their events.

In preparation, Goldberg shared a Spotify playlist with Parks to give him an idea of what kind of music they’d be playing together.

“I was like, ‘oh shit,’ other people in Kansas City like the same type of music I like—house and disco,” says Parks.

He soon found himself in the company of KC’s eclectic and closely-knit dance DJ heavy hitters, including Sheppa, Coughman, and many others, servicing dancefloors in spaces such as El Pozo, The Ship, Crossroads, and In the Lowest Ferns. Despite being a newcomer to KC’s emerging dance music club scene, in the several years prior, Parks had already experienced the seminal success of his own dance-centric music releases on the Brooklyn electronic music label Have a Killer Time (HAKT).

Most notably, he dropped the 2015 vinyl-only Diego Maradona EP, which included a club-ready “9G (Eddie C remix)” on the UK-based Rothmans label. Additionally, his 2013 single and personal favorite “N1”, initially a melodic spacewalk phased by nu jazz keys, was transformed later for dancefloors by the French electronic music duo Paradis on their “Contours” remix.

“I never thought I could play some of my past solo releases in a dance set or DJ set,” says Parks, reflecting on some of his early, global gems that tended to sway more atmospheric than energetic. However, over the past several years, to the delight of any DJ with a penchant for drawing from a wide range of genres, a 30-year-old subgenre of electronic dance music called Balearic House has become a draw in nightclubs across America. Named after the cluster of Spanish islands that includes house music mecca Ibiza, this open-format style provides DJs and producers like Parks with the opportunity to draw from a wider range of genres such as house, disco, funk, afrobeat, and more.

“There’s always a kind of breeziness to it. It’s so hard to pin down to just one sound. It’s not like disco, which has an octave bassline and a hi-hat on the off-beats. When you hear it, you know it’s disco,” says Parks, keen on speaking in the parlance of an experienced percussionist and Bowling Green State University jazz studies ace rather than in the tongue of electronic dance music’s newbie knob-turners. “With Balearic, there’s always a melody, whereas a lot of house and deep house is bass-focused. I love a melody, and I love it when deejays aren’t afraid to throw a melody into their set. That’s what defines Balearic—melody, a lot of percussion, and maybe some samples to give it that tropical house vibe.”

This approach ultimately laid the groundwork for Parks’ newest treasure trove—the five-track EP, Crispy Reds, Parks first release on the Barcelona-based house and disco label, Apersonal Records.

In January, Parks released the solo single “Planet of the Year”, a subtle and breezy lounge groove that coalesced around pleasured plinks, ultimately edging alongside a velvety vocal sample as enticing as the track’s melody. But unlike anything from Crispy Reds, the single may have been designed more for ambiance than a summons to shake something. That’s where Crispy Reds picks up the slack.

Drawing inspiration from overseas sources like Berlin-based house music label Toy Tonics; having the EP mastered by Italian audio engineer, Federico Fontana; and especially by enlisting Apersonal labelmates, the Portuguese two-man groove unit, Cisco Cisco, to cook up two remixes to the EP’s title track, Parks “across the pond and beyond” approach to perfecting his sound profile comes across elegantly on Crispy Reds.

“You can find electronic music everywhere you go in Europe. Here, in America, especially at electronic music festivals, there’s mostly just a bass, EDM, and dubstep scene happening,” says Parks. “You can even tell from the font on the posters or flyers that it’s a very American EDM event. It just doesn’t look and sound the same, and I think that it’s just a very general thing that they get in Europe. It’s almost like it’s in their blood.

From Cisco Cisco’s sassy, soul-clapping version of “Crispy Reds”, to Parks’ original rendering of jungle-funk hallucination, it’s precisely this project’s ability to appeal to a melange of moods for club consumption. If those aren’t affecting enough, then Parks’ predisposition to live percussion riles the spirit with the ambling congas that appear on Crispy Reds’ trundling opener “Smooth Glisten”. Everything here markedly stays away from militant dance tropes, instead offering a more emancipated and opalescent dance music experience. Parks offers a unique proposition: the most esoteric and pliant house music with a flair for being on the verge of a dance frenzy—from Kansas City to the Balearic Islands, or however far away a good old-fashioned lie can take him.

The release party for Cale Parks’ Crispy Reds is this Friday, June 7, at In the Lowest Ferns with Dansclvb, Bodmon, and General Slime. Details and tickets available here.