So High
With a Debut Artist Album & a Boutique Label, The Scumfrog Wants To Dominate The World—One Beat at a Time.

By Brian O'Connor
Photos by Rahav Segev
Published in the April 2004 issue of DJ Times Magazine
Volume 17 - Number 4

      New York City – Only music can create moments like this.
      We’re sitting in the Effin Records’ studio/office, on the fifth floor of a commercial building on Manhattan’s 29th Street. The Scumfrog (aka Jesse Houk) is sitting in a chair, parked in front of a G4, and his Tannoy and Genelec studio monitors are vibrating something fierce.
      Fewer than five people have heard this work-in-progress, a remix of Static Revenger’s “So High.” The Scumfrog’s head moves in 4/4, then a piano cuts in. Manager Steve Rosen and Effin “marketing diva” Jimmy Smith emerge from their offices, drawn by the soaring anthem of a vocal that lifts us up, and heads and feet are moving, acting on instinct. I look down to my shoes. It’s a bitter cold January day outside, but I feel like I’ve got sand between my toes.
      The remix ends. “My nipples are lactating!” says Smith. I check mine. Thankfully they’re not. But that was one hell of a remix.
It’s just one aspect of Scumfrog’s sound: Kinda rockin’, kinda bangin’, kinda big-room, but not cheesy. But mostly it brings me back to the posi-vibe of his Ibiza anthem, The Rolling Stones-sampled “We Love You.” It’s about togetherness. It’s about community. It’s about shared values—it’s about no club child being left behind. Only music can create these moments. I’ve never seen anyone bop their head to a Pollock painting, nor tap their feet while reading a Marquez novel.
      This is where The Scumfrog thrives. He can, of course, be dark. Living in New York nightclubs for the last seven years will do that, but his darkness is never boring. And he can be Euro, like his latest Crystal Waters remix, “Keep It Coming.”
On his debut artist album (debut single “Simmer”), The Scumfrog will try to incorporate these varying musical personalities, as well as his ability to play instruments, while keeping the floor packed. “That’s my thing,” he says, “I want people to have fun on the dancefloor.” DJ Times sat with The Scumfrog, who recently opened a residency at new Manhattan hotspot Crobar, and found out how he does it.

DJ Times: You’ve got a mid-town studio/office set-up, where your Effin label is based. Do you treat your art as a business?
Scumfrog: Yeah, I get in here every day at 3, do whatever PR needs to be done, do quick radio edits if a station needs them, check e-mails, and listen to whatever records come in.

DJ Times: Do you shop for records as well?
Scumfrog: It’s very deceiving getting so many records sent to you, because it makes you believe that you don’t have to buy any. Just before New Year’s, I realized that I hadn’t been in a record store in two or three months. And it takes its toll. Not that the dancefloor people would recognize it, but when you play the same set over and over again—it doesn’t matter, in a sense, because one night I’m in Chicago, the next night I’m in Tokyo—but to me, it’s weird, when you recognize that the majority of the records that you’re playing are from five labels. Then there’s the occasional producer friend who gives you stuff and, of course, I play my own new and remixed stuff.

DJ Times: How do you stay current if you’re not in the record shop for a month or two?
Scumfrog: I listen to Pete Tong’s show sometimes, but the problem with listening to his show is if you hear something you really like, you have to know the people who made the track, and then ask them for it, because it’ll never be for sale yet. The situation for record stores in New York is in such a horrible state, with everybody going out of business. My favorite spot right now is Decadance on Sixth Street, because Dennis, the guy who owns it, he’s really smart and he knows his clients. He buys a specific type of sound, rather than just buying everything. And he knows everybody on a personal basis. He knows what I like, so he’ll give me a stack of 15 records and I’ll probably buy eight. Other stores, they’ll give me 50 records and maybe I’ll buy two. What they’re doing is giving me their taste in music, as opposed to my taste in music.

DJ Times: Have you ever shopped online?
Scumfrog: A lot of people shop online, but I don’t have time to go online. I really need to have someone that gives me a selection, even though [online retailer] Planet X is really good, in terms of the different genres, my taste is all over the place. Plus, a lot of the records I play will be my own edits. Like, on E-Funk’s “Crazy” on Subliminal, I took the dub and added some stuff, took some stuff out. There were too many vocals in it. It’s really a great record to start your set with, so to immediately start my set with so many vocals wouldn’t work for me. It’s a personal taste thing. I just load it into ProTools, measure the tempo, and I might add something, or I take things out, but not too many things because then it gets boring.

DJ Times: You’ve been making waves since your first remix.
Scumfrog: That was Sono’s “Keep Control.” I drastically changed that. I loved that synth line, but the record was too dark and too long, and then I gave it to some other DJs, and they started playing it and the label called and they put it out. I gave it to Steve Lawler and Roger [Sanchez], and it started circulating quickly.

DJ Times: When you first came from Holland to New York, you plugged in relatively quickly.
Scumfrog: When I came over, I was more of a recording artist than a DJ. I was DJing since I was 16, but always at clubs where the DJ was not the attraction. In the ’80s, there was no such thing as a DJ who was an attraction. So I was never a DJ with a name. In ’95 I was working in a radio station in Holland, and Roger Sanchez was touring and he came into the studio, and I thought, “ I want to do this, too.” And I had been producing, too, but with a pop band, named Resonance. I was the singer/producer. We put records out and music videos. It was very local. It was just in Holland.

DJ Times: What did your band sound like?
Scumfrog: It was electronic, but it was on the rock tip. Then the job at the record company ended, and I had met this girl in Greece, who lived in New York, and after a couple months she had to come back to New York, and since I had an American citizenship—I was conceived in Brooklyn, and my father was American, my mother was Dutch—it was easy for me to do.

DJ Times: How did you plug into the New York scene when you first arrived?
Scumfrog: I came here in ’97, and the real plug was when I signed to Roger’s [Rsenal] label. He took me on tour and that’s when I had an outlet for my tracks. Instead of giving them to my lounge-DJ friends in the East Village, I could give it to some of the biggest DJs in the world. That’s how I got in touch with Pete Tong and all those others. That was in 2000.

DJ Times: How did touring with Roger Sanchez change the way you approached DJing?
Scumfrog: It was the first time that I was in contact with somebody that was the most professional DJ. He’s got more energy and discipline than I do. I could never do the amount of gigs that he does. He doesn’t drink, he doesn’t smoke and he doesn’t do drugs. So after his gig, the next morning, whether he’d played six hours or whatever, he’s at the gym working out and then we’re back on the plane. And I was opening for him, and I was still in bed when he came back from the gym. I don’t know where he gets the energy. But I also learned from him how to be a real professional and be an artist at the same time. When he’s out on the road, he’s his own manager, and if something is wrong, he’s got to speak up for himself. Like if you get to a hotel and it’s a piece of crap, how do you tell a promoter that is so extremely psyched to have you, “Dude, the hotel sucks. Get me something else”? He’s really good at that diplomacy.

DJ Times: And behind the decks?
Scumfrog: As great as it was for an opportunity to learn, I was doing the opening set, so I couldn’t do a banging set, and I couldn’t play a huge hit. But it was a huge learning experience to see what it’s like to be on tour like that. Now, I’m back to those same clubs and I’m the headliner. Another thing I learned from Roger was, when I wasn’t the warm-up, you get to the club and the DJ before you is playing the most hardcore banging 150 BPM with sirens, air-raid screaming, at like, midnight. The first time you see that, you think, “How is anybody gonna get on after that?” If you have the right tools in your bag, the DJ before you can play anything.

DJ Times: What do you do when you’re following someone who was banging it at 150 BPM?
Scumfrog: First, you drop the energy level, but in a way that you keep the anticipation. You take it down and convince the audience that this is part of the show, and they better stand there because something amazing is going to happen. And you can keep effects playing, some ambient stuff, or some vocoder vocals, and build and build. Volume is very important, also, as soon as you have control of the decks and the guy before you had been banging it, make sure that slowly you turn down the volume just a little bit, so you know, that when you put on your next record you turn it up. I also use a vocoder, so I can do some freaky stuff.

DJ Times: What’s an example of some freaky stuff?
Scumfrog: It was on New Year’s Eve at Folsom 1015 in San Francisco with Spundae. There’s a DJ booth and two go-go dancer platforms on either side. Dave Ralph was playing before me, and I told him that my assistant, Jimmy, was going to spin my first track. He didn’t know what I meant. I started out in one of the go-go platform stages with my [Samson] headset and this weird vocoder sound that just focused everybody’s attention from the booth to the go-go platform. So, there was ambient music playing, but tons of anticipation, and the room just filled up. The more tools you have outside of two turntables, the more you can do.

DJ Times: As far as tools go, you’re using a Roland sampling percussion pad?
Scumfrog: With the Roland SPD-S, I can load in my own sounds, so I don’t need to have an attached sampler anymore that triggers the sounds. If I make a remix, the drum sounds of the remix I’ll separately save them on a disk and load them into a computer and make a pre-set out of them. The drum machine has nine pads, but it also has pre-sets of every remix that I did, so I can extend the remix if I want to and preview it, play it in a record that I’m playing and then drop the track later. Again, anticipation.

DJ Times: You’ve DJed just about everywhere. What country surprised you most, in terms of its dancefloors?
Scumfrog: What struck me was how hard they liked it in South America. The image I had of South America was laid-back, tropical, but they liked it hard. I did a six-hour set in Buenos Aires, and it was good that I brought a lot of records, because at 7 in the morning I need to pick it up a bit. In New York, at 7 it gets dubbier, but not in South America.

DJ Times: You’ve said that cold nights can change your programming.
Scumfrog: I think that’s right. If it’s that cold, like it was on my first night at Crobar, and if you’re on 29th and 11th, the clubbers don’t go club hopping. So I’m a little freer to experiment. But the sound system at Crobar is so great that I can play a lot of records that have an amazing sub-bass, there’s only so many clubs where those types of records will really work.

DJ Times: The vibe at Crobar isn’t about the DJ, is it?
Scumfrog: We try to play music that’ll get people to say, “Wow, this music’s great, and I know this tune—even though I have no idea what it is.” That’s what we want to accomplish. And we want to play records for the sound system, records that sound extremely good.

DJ Times: Do the managers talk to you at all about rotating the floor?
Scumfrog: Naw. The breaks that I give people are very different. If I go down in energy a little bit for five or 10 minutes, it’ll be a completely different way of how I’ll go down the next time, so different people will get off the floor. And new people will go on. But usually, I’m a big ego tripper who likes to keep the people on the floor all the time. If I play out somewhere, and I only have a two-hour set, why would I want to give people a break?

DJ Times: You’re a bit of a musician. Will your upcoming artist album reflect that?
Scumfrog: It won’t be Miles Davis. I’m not a great musician. I can play a lot of instruments a little bit, and thank God for ProTools for making it sound good. So, I do play a lot of guitar and I have a lot of fun doing it. But it’s a dance record.

DJ Times: Your remixes always move forward.
Scumfrog: I like to create fun on a dancefloor without trying to do too much. A lot of folks try to change up every two bars, so I try to find a fine line between keeping it interesting and keeping it monotonous. There has to be enough happening to make people not take drugs. Make it interesting through sounds, and I try to make it different every time. Although sometimes, I’ll listen to one of my old remixes, I’ll think “Oh, that sounds like that other remix of mine.”

DJ Times: You’ve achieved a decent level of respect in a short time.
Scumfrog: When nobody knows you, everybody loves you. Now, most people have heard of me, they pay a lot of attention to what I’m doing. The Missy Elliott [“Pass the Dutch”] remix I did, which does sound like a lot of remixes I did, but it was only a free download thing on my website. But some people don’t really get that.

DJ Times: You’ve worked out a neat remixing solution. Tell us about it.
Scumfrog: I trade remixes with Roger [Sanchez] and Murk. If you set your standard loosely, I can choose any cut from their album. I chose Murk’s “Time” to remix, and I haven’t even called on them yet to do my single, “Simmer.” It’s not possible to get big-name people to remix stuff. But I can’t pay out of pocket for a big time remixer, so we trade.

DJ Times: You’ve said that the future of the remixer for hire is in doubt.
Scumfrog: Record companies aren’t making money with those remixes—unless there’s a one-in-a-million situation where the remix gets played on radio and introduces the artist to a new audience and the artist sells 30,000 more copies. The remix is a producer’s medium, a cross-promotion for clubs, and now everybody can make a remix. The cost of making a remix has gone down tremendously. Labels don’t even release them as a commercial release anymore. They send them to the pools, and the overflow they give to the stores. It’s about cutting costs.