Published
Sun, Jan 14, 2007, 21:00
- Ronald Kohn checks in with minimal queen Madga in the Dominican Republic to talk indie, Run Stop Restore and the changing club scene.
Magda in a nutshell: born in Poland, grew up in Detroit, resident in Berlin and now an in demand DJ who seems to spend every weekend on a different continent. Given the huge rise in her profile last year, you might think Magdalena Chojnacka was a relative newcomer to the M_nus minimal sound, but the association actually goes back a long time: Richie Hawtin fixed Magda up with her first residency back in 1997, and if you’ve seen Hawtin on tour this century, and you arrived early, chances are you’ve also seen Magda.
Magda also (famously) spent the best part of the early twenty-first century at Hawtin’s house, painstakingly transferring his record collection over to digital to use with Final Scratch. It might have been during those long hours that she first saw the potential of the re-edit to meld DJing with production: her debut mix CD ‘She’s a Dancing Machine’ in 2006 surprised many by chopping and blending seventy-one (count ‘em) tracks, while recently she’s also been moving more seriously into production, releasing bouncy, bass-heavy cuts on M_nus, Mobilee and now her new label Items & Things, which she runs with longtime friends and fellow Run Stop Restore members Troy Pierce and Marc Houle.
Her sights might be set on more production, but with the international demand for her DJ services at an all time high, it’s a matter of finding the time. And in 2006 Magda got around: she played Europe, the US, Japan, Russia, Australia – but this weekend Ronald Kohn caught up with her further off the main circuit: in Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic.