This is a corrected version of the story that ran in the paper.

The real dirty Miami
S.F. house label Dirtybird Records gets off the ground and heads to the Winter Music Conference.

By Peter Nicholson


'SOUTHERN' DISCOMFORT: Hustin Martin, left, and Sammy D put their
heads together and came up with a collision of gritty house and barnyard
sonics for Dirtybird Records' first EP. Photo by Andrea Caldwell.
MARCH MADNESS MAY mean basketball to the mainstream, but to dance music freaks, it means Miami. For 20 years, a horde of British DJs, overworked label P.R. hacks, sketchy promoters, and a few genuine music lovers has descended on South Beach. The excuse has been the Winter Music Conference, a series of industry discussion panels, workshops, and associated showcases focusing on dance and electronic music. In reality, most people skip paying the $400 for a WMC badge and just hit the parties: with more than 1,500 DJs and artists performing at close to 300 events in 2005, there are plenty of parties to hit. This week San Francisco's Barclay Crenshaw will be back in Miami for the fifth year in a row, wading through throngs of sunburned clubbers with nasty rum hangovers as he promotes his new label, Dirtybird Records.

Like every head of a new house music label, Crenshaw wears a few hats to make ends meet. He also runs a DVD-duplication business and a management company and has a "day job" as a producer and editor of corporate videos. Oh, and he produced and directed his own independent dance music documentary, Intellect: Techno House Progressive, which was how he came to Miami for the first time.

"The first two years [in Miami] I was shooting my DVD," Crenshaw recalls during his lunch break from an editing gig. "It was a harrowing experience – I didn't know anything. I was carrying, like, 150 pounds of gear by myself. It was 95 degrees, running up and down the street with interviews planned every 45 minutes." Though by now he knows the ropes a bit better, Crenshaw's Miami experience will still be busy – he expects to hit more than 40 parties in the four days he'll be there.

His goal is to get Dirtybird's new releases into the right hands, the DJs whose playlists and charts drive demand in the world of vinyl 12-inches. Judging from the response to the label's first EP, Justin Martin and Sammy D's Southern Draw, an irreverent collision of gritty house and barnyard sounds, there should be some demand. "I printed 1,000 at first, and those sold immediately. I was really psyched. And then I just printed 500 more, and those are almost sold out. And then these guys want to rerelease it on Southern Fried Records, a U.K. label owned by Fat Boy Slim, and it got licensed in Japan. We're getting really lucky," Crenshaw says with a tone of bemused wonder.

Some of the record's success can be linked to Martin's rising profile, which in turn can be traced to Miami several years ago, when Martin's brother and Crenshaw were passing out CD-Rs. "We gave Ben Watt [Everything but the Girl, Buzzin' Fly] Justin's CD just on a lark," Crenshaw recalls. "Six months later he called back and signed the "Sad Piano" track, and that's why Justin's been able to really get bigger and bigger." "The Sad Piano" – an oddly irresistible pairing of a lilting piano riff, a huge house beat, and an ominously sawing synth line – was an underground house hit in 2003 and ended up on almost half a dozen compilations.

Reached via e-mail while on a DJ tour, Martin can't believe how much his life has changed. "[This trip] has been fucking crazy. I am in London right now recuperating. I played in Frankfurt on Friday night at this 3,000-capacity club called Cocoon. I have never seen anything close to this place. I was supposed to play from 2 till 4:30, but ended up playing until 6 a.m. The party was still packed when I left."

This year Martin will be DJing the opening night of M3's Sunset Sessions, one of the more high-profile events all week. And Crenshaw will be there, making sure the right people have the new records as well as promoting the artists he represents. "Last year I went down, and we signed all of Justin and Sammy's tracks. All of them. We took, like, eight tracks. This year I'd like to do the same thing and try to sign a couple of the new guys as well." The new producers include San Franciscans Galen from Pacific Sound, the mysterious Claude Von Stroke, and drum 'n' bass DJ Mal, who is the manager of record store Zen City.

Martin's Sunset Sessions appearance may also provide Crenshaw and Dirtybird with partnership possibilities. "That'll be a great opportunity for me too because there will be a lot of label people there from even bigger labels, like Astralwerks and all that kind of stuff," Crenshaw explains. Hooking up with a larger entity like Astralwerks, with its deeper pockets for promotion, is an eventual goal for Crenshaw. "We'd love to put out a compilation, but we definitely don't have the $30,000 or whatever to market it properly. I'd really like to do a CD if we could get an investor, but CDs just require advertising – they're not like records, where they cost this much and you can sell 1,500 no matter what."

That said, Crenshaw does see a gradual decrease in the demand for vinyl, although not along the "vinyl is dead" lines trotted out by retail industry wonks. "It is going to take forever to go away, but just from the group that I'm in, I see my guys playing a lot more CDs over the last two years."

He doesn't predict a switch to MP3 manipulation via programs like Stanton's Final Scratch, but rather to the CD turntables that are now a fixture of most club setups. So what does this mean to a label built on vinyl sales? Crenshaw can't envision Tweekin' Records selling Dirtybird CD singles for these CD decks – instead he already has made provisions for distribution via digital downloads. "Vinyl is tough because when something runs out and we get a reorder for, like, 20, we're not going to repress it. So it's only going to be on Beatport or iTunes – that way I don't have to have 2,000 records in backstock that aren't bought.

"Eventually digital is going to take over. I'm not sure how it's going to be in terms of how it looks and feels, but we're slowly getting over it. I know if I make a track and I want to play it, I'm not going to wait six weeks for it to come back from the [vinyl] plant." To that end, the Southern Draw EP is available on iTunes for $2.97, a presence Crenshaw arranged through his relationship with Utensil Recordings, which in turn has a direct iTunes account through another larger company.

One would think that all the myriad details and ensuing headaches associated with running a company that serves an unstable niche market might suck all the fun out of Dirtybird for Crenshaw, but that isn't so. "I love it," he says. "It's not like anything else that I do, like video editing or anything.... It's just really satisfying. I mean, it wouldn't be satisfying if no one wanted to buy it! But fortunately, it looks like we're doing OK so far."

The next release looks to continue Dirtybird's success, which has ironically benefited from the commercial excesses of house music as typified by Miami's nonstop partying while at the same time eschewing the plastic glamour of South Beach. Out next month, Swamp Thang, by Martin and Sammy D, rides a crisp, straightforward house beat before unleashing a flurry of increasingly bizarre elements: sliced vocal snippets, burping synths, and a trombone that sounds rather like a fart.

It's great, goofy fun and captures the creative, freestyle aesthetic that once drove house music. "We're really not trying to be anything," Crenshaw claims. "Just put out fun, crazy stuff, stuff that's kinda wild. And have fun – the whole point of it is to have fun."

To purchase the music featured in this article, visit iTunes:

1. ustin Martin and Sammy D, Southern Draw (Dirtybird) The Southern Draw - EP