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http://www.straight.com/content.cfm?id=791
Music Previews
New York's Keoki opens up to electroclash scene
By martin turenne
As shameless a self-promoter as ever existed in the American rave scene, New York's Keoki doesn't seem like the sort of guy to turn down an interview request. After all, the Panama native was the first selector ever to dub himself a "superstar DJ", a handle he began using during his residency at Manhattan's infamous Limelight in the early 1990s. Happy to share details of his drug addiction for mid-decade cover stories in such magazines as Mixer and URB, Keoki began avoiding the media in 1998 after the arrest of his lover, Michael Alig. As documented in last year's feature film Party Monster, Alig is the flamboyant nightclub promoter who now sits incarcerated on Rikers Island, convicted of murdering a dope dealer. When news of the gruesome crime first surfaced, Keoki was approached by such high-profile outlets as MTV and VH1, all of whom he rebuffed.
"At that time, I was promoting my first album [Ego Trip], and my label was really pushing me to go and do these interviews," says the DJ from his Manhattan home. "They figured it would help me sell more copies of the record, but I just didn't want to go and talk about chopped body parts."
Keoki goes on to explain that he's only recently started discussing the Alig case with the press. "It's difficult to try and put into words what I feel about what happened," he says. "I have no anger towards Michael, but it's still confusing to me. Being with him was the most free I've ever felt in my life. I never could have imagined he would be capable of such an atrocious act."
Tragic though Alig's story may be, the promoter's jailing forced Keoki to reconsider his torrid pace of life. A long-time drug abuser, the DJ overhauled his lifestyle in 2000, kicking his addictions and enrolling in an acting program at New York's renowned Lee Strasberg Institute.
"Studying there has helped me in all my creative endeavours, just in terms of making me more open and vulnerable," explains Keoki, who appears at Sonar on Friday (February 13). "That was important for me because I was coming from such a hard-core, edgy life where it was hard to find feeling in anything."
A veteran purveyor of trance and progressive house, the DJ abandoned those genres in 2003, releasing an electro mix titled Keokiclash. With its outlandish adherents, electroclash seems a genre well-suited to the New Yorker, an estimation he shares wholeheartedly.
"I wish the scene was like this when I first started deejaying," he says with characteristic élan. "Three years ago, I thought 'This is over. I can't do this anymore. I can't play anymore Timo Maas or Sasha records.' But then the whole electro scene started up here in New York; I knew I had found something that I could latch on to....I see more kids dressing up and putting on lipstick than I ever did, and I love it."
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>>SUPERSTAR KEOKI<< Friday the 13th @ VIVID
