It’s easy to see why Austin DJ D:Fuse is blowing up bigger than the West Bank right about now. In the modest North Austin home he shares with wife Jenny and a smallish dog, he mixes a protein shake after the morning’s run and sits down to tell me about life in his world, which is to say life on the road as the biggest DJ ever to come out of Austin.
That may not sound like much — Austin is known for its world-class DJs like it’s known for its skiing — but D:Fuse, with a new 2-CD set titled People out on legendary Brit DJ Paul Oakenfold’s Perfecto Presents: label, a national tour, and his own radio show on the new XFM Satellite Network (“I hope it’ll turn American radio on it’s head”), is having it, mate. It surely doesn’t hurt matters that the guy looks like he just stepped out of a Calvin Klein ad, and the ever-present cowboy hat (when he’s behind the decks, anyway) adds a certain Texan flair. All this is secondary, however, to the man whose career spinning deep trance and assorted sub-sub-genre artifacts happened overnight.
And to think it only took 10 years.
Top of the World, Ma
At 32, D:Fuse — who prefers that his given name not be used, at all, ever, and we mean it, pal — has graduated from local residencies at Sixth Street dance clubs like Amazon and Treasure Island to a two-year run at the former Twist (now Texture), and from there, almost immediately, to a pair of global tours opening for the aforementioned Oakenfold, who despite his predilection for wearing his thick black mane in a mullet some years ago, is widely considered the single most popular DJ in the world.
D:Fuse went from spinning trance grooves for a few hundred people at local clubs to winning the hearts, minds, and Diesels of 15,000 people in stadiums and clubs across the globe. It’s a stunning success story, really, and one that’s wholly original in the often chaotic local music scene. Back in the early/mid-Nineties, though, D:Fuse was splitting time between classes at Southwest Texas State University and Culture Industry, an industrial duo he played in with friend and production collaborator Jeff Moeller.
“It was one of those situations where we were doing the wrong music style too late in the game,” he says. “We were writing industrial music a year after it had already started to change. I was being influenced by older stuff like Front 242, Ministry, and Skinny Puppy, and there wasn’t a very big market for it, certainly not in Austin. But on top of that, we didn’t know a lot about how to work hard, how to market, how to work smart.”
Working “smart” is a topic that D:Fuse comes back to time and again in our conversation. He’s clearly on the ball now, but back then, with a mass communications degree under his belt, he was maybe a little more interested in just making a living. Various gigs as bartender, model, and mobile DJ came and went throughout the Nineties, until he hooked up with another Austinite by the name of Shane Howard. A producer with whom D:Fuse shared musical tastes, Howard and he later formed Expansion, an umbrella moniker for the duo’s work on their first 12-inch singles, “Feel” and “Listen” in 1998.
As D:Fuse tells it, he and Howard sent a copy of the singles to Chris Fisher of San Antonio label/record store Underground Sound, who then sent them on to various heavy hitting DJs he was in contact with, including the wildly popular British duo Sasha & Digweed, who immediately began spinning the tracks in their nightly sets. Things took off almost immediately.
“That happened really quick,” notes D:Fuse, “and that’s what is great about this scene: You don’t necessarily have to be on some big label to get your stuff heard. The scene is amazing, really. It’s not nearly as commercial or jaded or money-driven as the rock world.
“From there Noah Ark booked me as the opening DJ on the Moonshine Over America Tour, and I ended up hanging out with Steve Levy, the President of Moonshine, all day every day. I gave him a mix CD, and he heard that I was charting with some of the bigger names and that led to him signing me to Moonshine. And it all just grew out of that first little break, really, those first two singles getting some play.”
The Moonshine tour paved the way to even bigger things for D:Fuse, among them a pair of Moonshine discs — Psychotrance 2000 and its follow-up Psychotrance 2001 — and more importantly, an introduction to Oakenfold through his manager Nick McGeachin, who thought a pairing might be in order.
“Nick knew Paul was looking for a new opening act,” recalls D:Fuse, “and he said, ‘Look, this is a good press angle: instead of picking a guy from the UK to come to the U.S., you’d be picking a guy from the Heartland of the United States to come tour with you.’ So Paul and I hooked up; he had me open for him in Chicago, and then later that week gave me a call and said, ‘Let’s do it.’ And now I’ve released two singles on Perfecto, I’ve done two tours with him, and I’ve had a great time. When you travel with Oakenfold you travel in style — champagne every night, limos driving you everywhere, and every single club is sold-out.”
He looks the part of the globe-hopping Texan, too. Fit, tan, and lanky, it’s hard to imagine this guy back in the day, listening to Skinny Puppy and sitting behind a rack of keyboards pounding out industrial tracks, or for that matter, spinning to a crowd of drunken fraternity boys at former Fifth Street dive Abratto’s. The mold has clearly been broken somewhere down the line. Still, the upstart DJ superstar is quick to point out that those days were at least fun, if not entirely profitable.
“Sure, there were actually some really great nights in those early days, where by the end of the night I would be playing some really amazing beginning-stages-of-trance music and spiritualizing people out there on the dance floor. That, to me, was what the music was always about.”
Things have changed, obviously.
“The last two or three years have been like living a Hollywood movie. I’ve always been an extremely hard worker, even when I was doing Culture Industry. After the band broke up, I got in the real world for a while, and did some time working for Lotus software; I began to learn the value of marketing and target marketing. Basically, I just started working smart and hard at the same time, instead of just working hard. You need to do both if you really want to make it.
“I was at a point where I said, ‘Look, I’m 26, my window is closing rapidly because — let’s face it — what I do is very youth-oriented, and what can I do to make it happen for me?’ So I quit my job, began to promote my skills, and just focused to the exclusion of everything else on my DJ-ing. And it worked pretty well, I’d say.”
Indeed. After two tours with Oakie, reams of favorable press from industry stalwarts URB, Mixer, and DJ Times, plus a recent, high-dollar signing to Richard Branson’s Virgin offshoot label V2 — which is set to release a collection of D:Fuse’s soulful studio work — he’s ready to move to the next level, headlining his own U.S. tour and then tackling the rest of the world.
Superman vs. Batman
“When I first started it was all about partying,” says D:Fuse, “and I think it’s that way with every DJ. You’re just fascinated with the beat and what it can do. You want to be funky, you want to be hard, but once you get past that, you want something a little bit deeper, a little bit more spiritual, and that’s what attracted me to trance originally. It was so intense for me, and it was something that no DJs in this area were really playing.
“So I decided that was what I wanted to do, and I began searching out music like that. I’d drive all over the place to find the type of records I was looking for. I’d go to Atomic in Houston, Oaklawn in Dallas, Los Angeles, wherever. That’s where my heart was, and that’s how I began developing my sound, that trance sound, that serious, almost melancholy chord progression that’s kind of sad, but inspirational at the same time. That’s what got me.”
Trance, house, progressive — the world of dance music is rife with arcane and interconnecting subgenres that too often rub up against each other and create sparks. It’s the old Superman vs. Batman quandary played out on the dance floor and behind a pair of Technics: If jungle and house got in a fight, who would win?
D:Fuse isn’t having it. His new studio work sounds alternately like an ambient soundwash with ethereal vocals lurking in the background, and a tribal manifesto, all up-front drums and spoken word vocals. It doesn’t sound anything like what you’d expect to hear on an Ibiza beach at 6am, but then again it does. It’s the sound of something new emerging.
“These days DJ styles have splintered so much,” he says, becoming progressively more animated as he launches into a topic that’s important to him, “and it’s become such a melting pot. I think that’s what makes it so great. This whole idea of drawing lines in the sand and saying ‘This is what I do’ is absolutely bullshit.
“A lot of DJs need to look around and realize that every style of music in dance music is great, they all have something to offer, and they’re all good in their own ways. And what could be better than if everybody follows from everybody else’s ideas and writes new music incorporating each other’s styles? That’s where the next wave is going to come from.
“Take me, for example,” he concludes. “I embrace everything from house music and roots Chicago house, to Detroit techno and everything in between. It all comes from the same place, and good music is good music. That’s where I’m at now as a DJ. I play everything. My mind is wide open, and I hope that I’m out there opening other people’s minds, as well.” 
D:Fuse spins at the Venue, Thursday, April 18.
This article appears in April 12 • 2002.