Digging deep in the record crate with DJ Thundercutz

DJ Thundercutz. // photo by Samantha Russell

DJ Thundercutz–Clint Martens–slices up the corner of Mean Mule during his Thursday night residency with hand-slung 45s on a single turntable. Crackling vinyl filters through a boom box straight from the 90s. I was there late October, enjoying a mocktail worthy of its craft and listening in on a wide range of genres in the good company of friends.

The name “Thundercutz” pulls from the ‘80s cartoon Thundercats. It’s his way to showcase the decade from which he comes, alluding to style rather than denoting genre, because he can play it all. Try to pigeonhole a DJ who throws Cumbia from afrobeat, falls gently into soul before springboarding into disco with a sashay into funk.
Growing up, sports was a big part of Clint Martens’ life. That gave him an interest in collecting cards in sports like baseball, basketball, and football. He’d get his allowance and head to June’s Card store, on the hunt.

“There’s a parallel between that excitement, that treasure hunt aspect,” he says. “Same feeling I get when opening a pack [of cards] when I was 12 years old is the same as when I’m in the store with a box of records. I’m filing through potential magic.”

Collecting now envelops a closet of vintage clothing, boomboxes, and a house of beautiful wooden furniture and back around 2011, it led to the start of what he so loves now: collecting and spinning records.

Even though he primarily grew up a “sports junkie” and didn’t play an instrument in childhood, his mother and the radio fostered the beginning of his love for older music on drives from his small hometown in Knob Noster to the bigger town nearby.

“We would just sing and act goofy, just sing the songs,” recalls Martens. “That was really impressionable on me.”

With his radio show on KKFI 90.1 Monday afternoons, 12-2pm, he gets to parlay this lived experience from the other end of the airwaves. It doesn’t hold the same live people element that Martens so enjoys with being a DJ. As a testament to his people-person virtues and humble man of good craft, Martens’ bookings are as organic as the next record change. People often find him by word of mouth, as did I.

Yet during the radio show, he finds a way to fill the in-betweens with conversation – about the record he just played or is about to play, about a story that segues into the next track. It leads to a little learning about the history of an artist or the time period from which the track came. He knows the background of the tracks he plays, not just the grooves of the song itself.

I tuned in the Monday before Halloween for a goofy set diverging from the typical. Across the airwaves I heard the static crackle of handpicked vinyl and a variety of funky Halloween songs I never knew existed. We traversed a fun absurd track of “The Mummy” where a beatnik is the only person not afraid of the mummy in a ‘so what’ attitude, and “Monster Mash” remixes–although not the Monster Mash itself, that one lurking somewhere amongst his sizable collection.

He curates around a specific genre for this shorter two hour show in a way he doesn’t live, but still picks songs as he goes, building from one vinyl to the next that leaves the other programmers in the studio mesmerized, “they’re like, ‘I don’t understand how you do it.’” As a listener the process is so seamless you wouldn’t know the intensity behind it. Only people of the same craft are best able to best highlight the ambitious nature of what he does.

When Martens started collecting records a friend asked him to DJ for a New Year’s Eve Party.

“Once that started, it spurred something within me,” Martens says.

He loved the interaction with people and music. A purchase of desirable Technic 1210 turntables from his mentor Rico Dejoie secured the destiny of DJ Thundercutz: “It just felt right.”

DJ Thundercutz selects. // photo by Samantha Russell

That first year he started collecting, he amassed around 200 records. He now owns an incomprehensible collection ballparked around 16,000. In a vault that big, detailed familiarity is the name of the game, yet he doesn’t take notes. He seems to know each record intimately.

“It’s controlled chaos in my brain, for the most part,” explains Martens. “If I’m looking for a specific record, I generally can find the record within two boxes. I might frantically and obsessively and neurotically look through them, but I generally can find it within two boxes.”

His DJ preference angles towards obscure deep-cuts. In a city that loves its cover bands, he has fun workaround to bridge the audience to his taste.

“I love taking popular music that people know but then finding a different version in a completely different genre because you hear the melody and it’s kinda familiar to a lot of people and then it could be this rip-roaring vocal,” continues Martens. “Clara Ward, she does this cover of ‘Help’ by the Beatles and her vocal is just fucking raw and beautiful and big and it’s just like–it’s different, it changes the listener’s experience.”

The way he talks about songs, you feel they are familiar friends he’s excited to introduce all around. In the set I attended, he plays a track in which Comb Edits do just that, reprising “Just the Two of Us” in a dub mix called “Por Amor.” The familiar chiming piano introduction is replaced by spirited trumpets. When hearing it in real time, it’s familiar but can’t quite be placed why. A head spin begins as a woman’s vocals sing in Spanish to the unplaced tune. Your ears question themselves. It curates a return to the Grover Washington Jr. and Bill Withers original with a new gaze, proffering a unique experience in this algorithm-driven world.

Even if you think you’re not listening closely, Martens is observing the room’s subtleties for feedback, especially in a conversational space like Mean Mule.

“I’m looking for the subconscious cues,” says Martens. “Just tapping a glass or their feet. Someone turning over their shoulder twice.”

He’s stoically deep in the music with an impassivity belying his investment to find the perfect transition.

“My brain is constantly stimulated, which I love,” the DJ goes on, saying that’s why he loves 45s–because they’re three minutes and thirty seconds. “It’s a short song, generally, and then I have to pick the next one, and that organic part of it is so freeing and creative for me.”

Martens says he’ll bring 250 records and maybe play 60 of them and, while he doesn’t know how the order is going to go, he knows he’s able to build it.

“If I change my mind up last second, I might have thirty seconds in front of a crowd of 200, 300 people,” Martens says. “And that’s exhilarating and terrifying at the same time. And I love it.”

DJ Thundercutz. // photo by Samantha Russell

A live vinyl show for a large audience occurred late summer in a surreal moment for Martens when he reached out to new-psychedelia funk artist Glass Beams and opened for them. The crowd engagement was beyond anything he had felt before.

“For them to throw me a bone was so humbling,” reflects Martens. “Still talking about it gets me giddy and befuddled at the same time…that was a seminal moment in my life.”

Clint Martens as DJ Thundercutz is a man of craft, artistry and passion, so wholly infused in transmitting the adoration he feels for the depth of what music can offer.

“I’m addicted,” concludes Martens, although, “It’s a happy addiction.”

You can find Clint Martens Thursday evenings at Mean Mule or from noon-2:00p.m. Mondays on 90.1 KKFI.