Showin’ Up
Track 1 by Konsept, from the War Won mix:
The scene: an apartment in Lawrence. The setting: the afterparty for Flosstradamus, a visiting pair of It DJs from Chicago who just rocked the Bottleneck. It’s crowded, it’s sweaty, and the leftover revelers are drawn to that magical place that attracts the most people at house parties: the kitchen.
The DJs are still spinning music, and the owner of the apartment, a hipster who goes by the handle DJ Iggy Baby, starts banging his teapot on the stove in time to the beat. Two college girls jump up on the kitchen counter and then leap into the crowd, surfing on the outstretched arms of their friends.
In the center of the kitchen, Edwin Morales yells, “No shirts are the new shirts!” Suddenly, everyone’s shirts disappear. Someone turns on the sink and begins spraying water.
The track on the turntables: Chuck Berry.
“The next day was like, oh, my God,” Morales says with a laugh. “That’s the kind of shit I love. All-out. Just fuck it, let’s just have fun.”
Whatever you call it — freaking out, tripping, getting your swerve on — it’s Morales’ goal. When he’s behind the turntables, which is often (the week that he spoke with the Pitch, he’d played records in clubs every night but one), Morales, who goes by DJ Konsept, isn’t satisfied until he sees people on the dance floor forgetting their stresses, their cares, their own names in the bliss of moving to the beat.
Morales’ most popular night is Neon, a Thursday-night dance party at the Bottleneck that some claim is this area’s longest-running regular DJ event. Most people think of Neon as an ’80s night, but Morales is quick to clear up that misconception.
“Two weeks ago, I played [Jim Jones’] ‘Ballin’, into Nine Inch Nails’ ‘Closer,’ to ‘Keep Their Heads Ringin’ by Dr. Dre, and then I double-timed it into this dark, hard-ass jungle track, and from the jungle track into ‘Bulls on Parade’ by Rage Against the Machine. That few minutes was so incredible, just the energy of it, you know?”
Morales taught himself to DJ with a friend’s pair of Technics 1200s in 1997 and played his first house party in Manhattan, Kansas, shortly thereafter. In 1998, he and his girlfriend, Allison Olewnik, threw a rave in Independence called Pure Joy: fairies on the flier, pirated electricity, 1,100 people, glitter, drugs — the works.
“I remember at, like, 8 in the morning, the ravers were starting to leave, and there was a church across the street, and all these families are coming to church,” Morales recalls. “They were passing all these strung-out ravers leaving the venue. The passing off of cultures.”
After the rave, Morales was hooked on throwing events. He interned under promoter Jeff Fortier in Lawrence with Kansas City promoter Bill Pile before starting his own company, Atreides, which later became Downplay Productions (marketed as .downplay).
While continuing to spin at clubs, Morales worked on bringing interesting bands and artists to Lawrence. His good friend DJ Sku (Corey Aguilar) says, “He knows a lot of people, which is good for this area. He’ll take shows the bigger promoters around here will pass up. And he’ll take losses for that sake, so people can see their favorite artists here.”
Sku and Morales rock a crowd regularly at 5401 in the basement of Lucky Brewgrille on Johnson Drive in Mission, on a night they call Flash Fridays. Together, they juggle four turntables and trade quips about the pet peeves of DJing.
“I’ll be playing fucking Smelly Potato,” Morales says. “Nelly Furtado. We call her Smelly Potato. I’ve had women come up to me and say, ‘Will you play Nelly Furtado?’ and I’m in the middle, I mean, the song is playing right now. That is annoying. Or, like, when people want to hear the same shit that they drove up to the club listening to on the radio, and they’re gonna leave listening to as well.”
Because Morales’ taste in music runs far and wide, from house to doo-wop to hip-hop and back again, he wishes that local partygoers thought of the DJ less as human iPod and more as tastemaker, the concierge of the evening, guiding the listener to all the right places in a groove.
“The way I see it, when I go to a place, I kind of have faith that the DJ is gonna do something, build it up, take us somewhere,” Morales says. “I honestly think that around here, a lot of DJ culture isn’t explained to people, and they don’t know that aspect of what’s going on. And that’s OK.
“What you have to do is, I think you have to show people,” he continues. “Actions speak a lot louder than words. You don’t need to get frustrated. Just show the way you can do it. And if they don’t continue to learn, I’m just going to continue to play, and you can hang out and dance and like it, or leave.”
Morales has been learning and transforming himself. Within the past year, he has cut off his signature dreadlocks, shaved his charcoal-black beard and dropped some pounds. He orders decaf soy lattes, egg whites and fruit for breakfast. He doesn’t eat meat, and he saves the drinking for Flash Fridays.
Living cleaner hasn’t diluted his edge, though. At a local breakfast spot on a recent Saturday morning, two Parisians who recently relocated to Kansas City paused by Morales’ table to chat. His colorful Reeboks and animated speaking style clued them in that he might know the better nightspots in town. He cheerfully informed them about Neon and told them to check out his MySpace page. They told him that they wanted to hire him to spin records at their downtown loft if they planned a party.
In May, Morales and his girlfriend are relocating to Chicago, where he has scored a residency at a club called Subterranean on Milwaukee Avenue.
Morales hopes to make it back to KC often and guest DJ with his many friends in town or fly in for a special gig at Blonde, but he’s excited to explore new horizons.
“I’m happy to leave on a good mark here,” he says. “All this good stuff that we’ve built up here after all these years, we feel satisfied. Now let’s move on to the next thing, you know?”
