DJ Entropy

One day, when Ian

Scott was 8 years old, his father Vinnie, a guitarist since age 16, handed him

a 12-string acoustic guitar, and said, "Play, son".

And he did.

When he was 11, his father bought him his

own guitar, and by age 12, he decided he wanted to play bass. He played bass

in many bands throughout junior high and high school, playing gigs in various

punk, alternative, metal, and hardcore rock bands for up to 3000 people at the

early ages of 14 and 15, and recording in professional recording studios many

times from ages 14 to 17.

But he was never satisfied with just plucking strings.

At age 14, he got a Tascam 4-Track Portastudio

(a small, personal, home recording studio). He spent hours upon hours experimenting

with sound manipulation and the art of music recording. He released a project

of his music a year later at age 15. It was created with the 4-Track, one working

guitar, one guitar held together with duct tape, a bass guitar, some effects

pedals of his father's, a skimpy used drum machine, a keyboard, a small bass

amp, a microphone, and lots of unorthodox ways of recording. He would run his

guitar through the amp, and then run the sound through a paper funnel and a

PVC tube into a filled bathtub and mic another tube and stick that in the water

and run it back to the Tascam. He would half-tape down buttons on the Tascam

to get variable tape speeds while recording. He would hook up as many effects

as possible and turn them all up as far as they went, while overdriving the

Tascam to complete redline. He would hum into the pickups, or bang on them with

objects to produce desired percussion sounds. And so on. His tape was only sold

in small local shops on consignment, but did manage to sell about 200 copies

in the Seacoast, NH area. He was also asked to solely open for a large local

band performing his self-made material. This was, of course, not possible, but

it did give him a desire to perform solo at some point in his life. He always

wanted complete control over the music........

And

he would eventually find it.

Way back in the fall of 1989, Ian grabbed

a Seventeen magazine out of the trash in his 6th grade classroom. "Something

to read on the way home, I guess", he thought. When he opened it up though,

there was an article he could not put down. It was a lengthy article on the

"Summer Of Love" in the UK that past year, which was the culmunation of the

early Acid House scene. He saw pictures of 20,000 person events, with people

wearing crazy outfits, dancing all night to DJ's spinning "Techno", and taking

some crazy new drugs. "Wow", he thought, "I want to go to the UK and be a part

of this sometime!" Little did he know at the time, that that was just the BEGINNING

of the Rave Scene, not the end.

A year later, in 1990, he left WUNH-Durham

on in his bedroom; the college station for the University of New Hampshire.

There was a DJ on that station that would play early Hardcore, Japanese Noise,

and Ambient. He was transfixed by this new music, which encapsulated the essence

of sound manipulation and configuration. He listened whenever he could, and

would record the music whenever possible. He gathered as much of this electronic

music as he could, and the straw that broke the camel's back came in early 1992.

A friend of a friend had started going to Raves in 1991, and had accumulated

some various mixtapes. Two of these tapes were by DJ Overload, a DJ from nearby

Biddeford, Maine. They were both Hardcore, with one opening up with "Narra Mine"

by Genacide II, and the other containing such tracks as "Head Strong" by Awesome

3, "Positive Feedback" by The Clepto Maniacs, and "DJ's Unite Vol 3" by Seduction

and Phantasy. Ian fell in love with these tapes. He finally saw Rave Music spun

by an "actual Rave DJ", and not just played on a college station. This music

would cause him to see music in a new way, and as a result, would cause many

disagreements in the bands he was in at the time.

A group of his close friends began going

to Raves around that time as well, and would always ask him to go. He knew that

once he would go, he would never stop going, and so he waited. He helped hand

out some flyers around town for events in 1993 and 1994, yet he had never actually

gone. But the day would come, and it finally did.

January 14th, 1995: Ian attends his first

Rave, just three weeks after turning 17. It was called "Funrise", and was in

Portland, Maine, thrown by the now-legendary Kris Clark (KC & the Sunrise Gang).

As most people are, Ian was truly astounded by what he saw: new and crazy music,

people gathered in a place without predjudice, revolutionary ideas, disregard

for written laws, and basically a truly Tribal experience. He was also lucky

enough to see DJ Overload perform at this event, and was fixated on the tables

the entire time. This was the era of Hardstep Jungle, and the energy was intense.

Ian left that Rave with an even bigger appreciation of what new music and a

subculture can accomplish.

He went to a few more parties that winter

and over the spring and summer, and collected as much of the music as possible.

As he started senior year of high school in fall of 1995, he began going to

a LOT of events. His friend that took him to Funrise bought him cheap record

players from yard sales and wanted to make Ian a DJ, as he had extreme faith

in his musical ability in whatever he did. Ian gathered these record players,

and started buying records in the fall of 1995. His friends would buy him records

whenever they went to Boston to go skating, and he would travel down sometimes

and buy them himself as well. He finally had saved enough money to buy one Technics

1200 by the winter of 1995, and kept saving and saving and finally sold his

bass guitar and amp to buy another one in March of 1996. His days in bands was

over, as his personal ambitions for music was set on a much different goal than

anyone he could find.

He

had decided he wanted to spin Jungle, and would buy the craziest and most erratic

records he could find. He decided on the name "DJ Entropy", as Entropy was a

concept he had always liked, whether in the Chemistry, Philosophy, or Sociological

interpretations. The idea of matching up different parts of the music came suprisingly

easy to Ian, as he had experience in doing just that from an early age. Regardless,

he practiced and practiced and practiced and practiced, every day, for up to

7 hours at a time, and strived to inject his own musical ability into DJing.

He played his first house party that summer,

in his hometown of Portsmouth, NH, for a small group of people. Finally, Ian

had accomplished what he had always dreamed of doing: performing by himself,

without the constraints of other people. And he then released his first mixtape

called "I ate the Jungle" in August.

But

that was just the very very very beginning.

He moved to Boston to attend college that

fall, and the world of Rave was MUCH easier to get to. He lived a mere 5 blocks

from the Boston record stores, and was very close to all the weeklies in the

city. He continued to practice, and made a couple more mixtapes. He gave them

out as much as he could, and played many house parties and loft parties in Boston

and the area. Finally, he snagged his first non- house party gig, at "Energy",

on August 19th, 1997; the home of local DJ's Venom and Myth and run by Volume

Productions. Venom saw Ian as a promising up-and-comer DJ in the area, and gave

him a chance behind the tables. Ian went up and performed for his first paying

DJ gig, getting $10 and a decent-sized crowd. He was playing a mixture of Hardstep

and Jump-Up, mixed with cheesy 80's records; a style he had dubbed "Cheesestep".

"Cheesestep"

was a creation by Ian, as two things were happening at the time: One was that

Ian was needing more of a challenge in DJing, and non-quantized records are

much harder to mix than quantized ones......and also Jungle/DNB was getting

very minimal and moody and Ian perceived it as moving away from the happier,

hands in the air, crazy-type vibe he had fallen in love with it for. To solve

these two problems, Ian started really focusing on ideas that he had been playing

around with since he started spinning: mixing in non-Rave music to make Rave

Music more erratic and just plain wierder. This was, of course, done in the

early days of Hardcore to some degree, with sampling and the like, but the "fun"

and "no rules" aspect of the music had started to be lost as Jungle/DNB approached

1997. So Ian spent a lot of time trying to keep the happier side of Jungle alive,

at least in his area, and managed to be successful while doing just that, despite

much criticism from the Jungle/DNB scene.

He played a few more events in 1997, and

then quite a bit more in 1998, even landing a residency at a small club/bar

in downtown Boston in the summer of 1998, as well as playing all around New

England and even into upstate New York. His DJing "career" was picking up, and

it was only a matter of time before he made himself into a staple of the New

England Rave Scene, playing events around the area almost every weekend by the

summer of 1999, and even started to get slightly noticed outside of the area,

getting his first "flying gig" in October to Washington, DC.

But

something else was calling him. Something that had always been there, lingering.......

In June 1999, he finally got his own computer,

and loaded it up with over 5 CDs of music production software. He had dabbled

in his friends' studios here and there making Jungle, but he could finally produce

at home again. It had been quite a while since he had laid down a tune by himself,

ever since th