As important to the clubkids scene as the clubs they frequent are
the
deejays, and the records they spin, fold, and manipulate. And while
many among
the populace might argue that Austin needs another music store about as
much as
it needs more road construction, the availability of club-oriented
dance music
has been a sorely neglected area for as long as can be remembered. With
only
the tiny and limited Clubland Records in the Fourth Street arts
district to
appease the market, both fans of indie dance music and the deejays
themselves
have been forced to travel to Dallas to get their hands on the music
they need.
That is, until now. With the recent opening of DJ Herb Agapetus’ Alien
Records
at 501 W. 15th Street, the scene finally, thankfully, has a music store
it can
call its own.
Formerly the dance music buyer for Waterloo Records, Herb, who
is also
DJ-in-residence at dance club Proteus, established the store as a place
that
caters not only to ravenous clubgoers hungry for the tracks they can’t
locate
anywhere else, but also to the rapidly growing group of local deejays
desperate
for the new releases. In addition to the racks of various club music –
jungle,
house, hard house, techno, ambient, and trance – Alien also stocks a
supply of
deejay-related necessities from new styluses to turntable mats and even
a
smattering of clubwear (the official Alien Records T-shirts are
the thing to wear at the moment).
“Basically, I just wasn’t getting a whole lot of support over at
Waterloo,”
says Herb. “They’re a big operation, and they just didn’t really care
about how
many 12-inchers they sold or the people who shopped for them there. So
it was
simply out of necessity, basically, that I opened Alien.
“Besides us, there’s really only Clubland, and he tends to cater
to the gay
crowd, which is over in that area. Roger [Wilson, the former dance
buyer for
Sound Exchange] is fixing to open up a store on Lamar where CD
Warehouse was.
Other than that, we’re it.”
Despite the fact that Alien is barely eight weeks old, Herb, who’s
been
deejaying professionally going on eight years, already has plans for
expansion
of the budding Alien Records operation. “There’s plans for a label
that’s going
to be starting out of the back [of the store]. I don’t know if it’s
going to be
called Alien Records, The Label, or what, but we’re going to have a
studio back
there, with samplers, drum machines, a new Yamaha digital mixer, a new
Ensonic
EPS-16 and ASR-2 – all that kind of stuff. These are projects that I’d
been
working on anyway, and we’re just going to move them down there, get
some more
people involved, have more equipment, bigger computers, that sort of
thing.
“That should be happening in about a month and a half. We just
laid carpet
in the back room, and as soon as I get to know and master the equipment
well
enough to feel I can do what someone might want, we’ll be opening it up
to the
public.”
This article appears in May 5 • 1995 and May 5 • 1995 (Cover).