Turntablism As A Business with Yogafrog

Yogafrog

DJ/Producer/CEO/Entrepreneur
Bay Area, California and Hawaii

Profile
08/27/2006

Here at The Career Cookbook we like to highlight individuals who not only have carved out unique career paths for themselves but have done so by being positive, humble, and free thinkers. This nicely describes Yogafrog, a DJ and entrepreneur, whom I met at this year’s DMC Nationals in New York City, where he was judging the scratch competition. We recently spoke about how his love for DJing has shaped his life with the formation of Thud Rumble, his company created with Qbert, and its role in spreading the DJ lifestyle worldwide. In reading the interview you will also receive exclusive insight into the Invisibl Skratch Piklz, what Yogafrog learned from the self help section in his local bookstores, and how you too can be successful by thinking outside the box.

CCB: When did you realize you wanted to work in the music industry as a DJ?

YF: That had to be when I was on the cusp of eleven and twelve. (Laughs) It was junior high school in the Bay Area. In the town of Daly City for some odd reason everyone was DJing during that time, mostly mobile DJing. There were really no competitions back then or that we knew of. The way that there were competitions were little garage battles. I went to my first garage battle when I was in seventh grade. I got totally excited about it, how DJs had so much control over all these eyeballs and the music.

CCB: At that point it became a decision or a goal of yours to actually pursue it as a career?

YF: When you’re that young you are trying everything out. Of all the things you could do that are cool you could break-dance, do graffiti, or MC. I tried all those. I was trying to b-boy and I wasn’t that good or I tried to draw but I couldn’t even draw a simple letter or characters. All my friends were DJing. I was always hanging out with older guys because somehow I found more knowledge in people that were older. Like Q (Qbert). Q is six years older than me. All my buddies were older guys who were into the cool things, way ahead of the guys who were my age. It’s not really a career choice until maybe when you’re into your twenties when you can try and make these decisions on what your career is going to be and how your parents influence what you are going to do in your life. It wasn’t until later in life. When you are young you just love it. You are doing it because everyone has a passion. You were a team, a crew. You had an endeavor to fight for.

CCB: What is it that appealed to you when you started to get paid to do it? Was it like you said because you had an audience, apart from the love for the actual craft?     

YF: Now or in its last ten years everyone considers it some kind of breakthrough musical instrument. Back then you were doing it like if you played golf or tennis. You just went through the motions, you enjoyed it, and loved the itch to scratch or mix. If you picked up a basketball you’d want to dribble it around and shoot for awhile. If you got really good, say if you were a Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant, you really start appreciating your skills a lot more because you are totally engulfed in that motion, that momentum already. I think we embraced that first and the career choice of it comes later or becomes apparent to you more fluidly as time comes by. That’s when the career path of it takes form and takes shape.

CCB: When did you start pursuing it as something that you could make a living from? Is that when you hooked up with the Invisibl Skratch Piklz?

YF: I started a bunch of crews during that time and I could see the potential. We were young kids trying to do the mobile thing, getting paid like $100 to $200 with around twenty people in our crew. All the money went to the food we ate after the gig. You never saw too much of a career possibility. You did look up to musicians. Back in the 80’s and 90’s it wasn’t really about your skills. It was more about how large your DJ setups were and your crew jackets. It was that camaraderie and enormity trying to outdo each other by skill, record collections, but also your lighting. For Q and me it wasn’t until our late twenties that we started making it a profession. I learned something from a buddy, Chad Hugo of the Neptunes, why we did all that. Why that was important, because he was a DJ too. To go through all this motion it was important for us to learn how to listen to music. You have to know what tunes people will like or beats or music, know whatever the crowd is going to enjoy. I learned that after all these years.

CCB: Where did the Invisibl Skratch Piklz name come from?

YF: That name came from DJ Disk and I think Mix Master Mike. See this is how we used to make up names and we still do. Everyone would come up with one word. I like the word galactic. Q likes the word butt hair or something. (Laughs) Everyone would come up with one word and just throw it out to see what everyone picked. This is actually how we came up with a record label name Galactic Butt Hair for Wave Twisters. Q would come up with snake paw and I would come up with strawberry. So it was strawberry snake paw. We’d just throw out names and never had any expectations. We never wanted to be too serious. We wanted the craft to be fun. So Invisibl Skratch Piklz, the name was made just like that. It was because we are still kids, we are always going to be kids, and that’s why this is fun to us. This is what we’ve always done no matter if our career blew up because of it.

CCB: Is that the same way you came up with the name Thud Rumble?

YF: I was actually near some train tracks and I don’t know what I was thinking about. Maybe I was thinking about what to call everything we’ve been doing and then this huge big rig rolled right past me and made this big explosion sound and I love sounds. I thought it was a great driving momentum for me if I called it something that would break ground all the time and kind of sound weird. It was that feeling that I got. It’s like my name Yogafrog. I don’t even know what it means yet. I tell myself I guess God will give me all of its explanations and its meanings as time goes by. I started taking yoga. We live that lifestyle, try and be free. What we do is part of that everyday meditative lifestyle. It’s that mentality of just have fun. Everything is for the love of what you want to do. Names don’t matter.             

CCB: Apart from everybody being supremely talented what made the Invisibl Skratch Piklz so special?

YF: All the individuals had something to contribute that was mighty, that was bigger than anything else, and broke more ground than everyone would think. Because everyone was fearless and still is. It was already hard to sell the fact that scratching should be a musical sound or that turntables are musical instruments. In the Bay Area everyone was just scratching anyway. It was part of what we were doing all the time, it never changed. It got more popular when Q got to go to the World Championships and showed he’s just all into this scratching. That’s the way he took something he believed in so much and he was passionate about. We all had a different part of it and we just broke ground.

CCB: What do you think it is about the Bay Area that influenced DJs? Is there just a big music scene in general?

YF: The Bay Area was like that. The culture is so rich about being different from hippies to technology. It’s free thinkers all the time. In the Bay no one was ever scared to experiment or try new things and be weird. It could be from the guys at Apple or at Lucasfilm. It’s a free thinking don’t care society. We were influenced by it. The whole Skratch Piklz mentality was to always break ground, always be different, always goof around, and try something you knew wasn’t normal.

CCB: I don’t know much about the area. Is Daly City a suburb?

YF: It’s actually the next city right below San Francisco.

CCB: Is that where you grew up?

YF: Yeah, I grew up in Daly City. Actually every Invisibl Skratch Pikl either grew up or lived in Daly City. From Mix Master Mike, Shortkut to Q we all lived there at one time in our lives. That’s how everyone kind of got together.

CCB: Why do you think there are so many Filipinos in DJing?

YF: I’d have to say it’s Qbert. It’s like seeing Tiger Woods in a predominantly white sport. It became a more multiracial environment because someone broke ground first. I think Q by being on a world stage he got to break ground and show everyone don’t be scared I’m just like you. But he was never thinking that way, we thought that was normal. Filipino champions from the rest of the world saw that and it brought us to that breakthrough in the culture. Filipinos like Babu or some of the guys in Australia. It’s really cool. I think Q was influenced by the other Filipino DJs in the Bay as well, who were DJing before him. To some of the guys Qbert was New School. He was just a newbie coming up and there was the Daly City scene, the mobile scene. Filipinos they like to party and to dance. They are a celebratory kind of crowd. 

CCB: When did you actually meet up with Qbert, was that in Daly City?

YF: He was in a crew called Livestyle; I was in a crew called Second to None. Everyone was in their own mobile crew. If there was a showcase sometimes Second to None would play and then Livestyle would play. I was more into productions and Q of course was totally into scratching. Scratching wasn’t even big at all. Even his own crew didn’t scratch as much because they had to play the cha cha songs and the dance songs. Eventually Q invited me into the crew to produce all of whatever was in our minds, to build. Of course I was still a scratch DJ but I started to focus more on producing the films, music, and events.

CCB: How old were you when you met him?

YF: Wow. I’d have to be in my teens when I met him, seventeen, sixteen. Scratching got a little more popular since Q was such a big advocate. All the techniques and tricks of course made it inevitable people are going to notice it. In those teenage years I was always following what he was doing and eventually after he did the competitions I guess we had to build something from that or else we were going to go and get a regular job. (Laughs) Even since those competition days it wasn’t a career it was more of a statement and a drive to do something about the music. 

CCB: What makes your relationship so strong as friends first and then business partners? Is it that you believe in the same things?

YF: The whole thing mostly started because we were doing martial arts together. (Laughs) We were doing this Filipino martial art called escrima, stick fighting. We were sparring partners too. There were other DJs there too like DJ Disk and the Bishop. Q and me were sparring partners, we were into jiu jitsu. We were hanging out all the time and we’d always talk about scratching and the DJ thing. It wasn’t big at all. Q was doing just the competition stuff but not traveling or world touring kind of thing and no music yet. There weren’t really like scratch music routines. I guess it just kept expanding. It actually helped too that his girlfriend and my girlfriend at the time were best friends so it was inevitable. We were doing that and hanging out with our girls. I guess we had money for a video camera and we were hanging out so much we were like let’s just video tape what happens today. So that was the birth of Turntable TV and that’s how the whole scene started. We made one video and gave it to friends and everyone started dubbing those videos and then we started manufacturing the videos. Then a distributor liked it and started spreading it out and I guess that’s how the whole scratch DJ thing got widespread. They got to see me and Q’s lifestyle, see what we were doing and trying to do everyday from normal everyday life.   

CCB: Can you talk about Skratchcon 2000 and what you accomplished with that?

YF: I wanted to build some type of fluency. Back then I just wanted all the DJs from the past, present, to the future to come together and share their insight on the art-form. I never wanted to call it a school. That meant everything that we were doing had to be regulated and this is the right way to do it. It wasn’t. I don’t want to give that impression. It was more of a gathering of everyone’s inspiration coming together and what they did and what they’re doing from the guys from the East Coast, the guys from Japan. Although it was a world art there was never anything to showcase everyone at all to the world. So the whole Skratchon was about that. During the 90’s we were always trying to explain what a turntable was. Now everyone has their i-Pod, they can DJ on their own on their computer. At that time Skratchcon was there to fulfill that lack of understanding. 

CCB: When did you decide to focus on the business side of DJing? Did this occur around 2000 and the time that the Invisibl Skratch Piklz performed together for the last time?

YF: It was way before that. I’m going to give you the best part of this interview. The Invisibl Skratch Piklz were never together. (Animated) We were really a bunch of friends who like I said were experiencing and sharing our own individual things and if everyone did get together from time to time it was spectacular because it was people’s talents coming in and that was really freestyle. All these routines were like 99% freestyle. Plans of Death was the only routine that was pretty planned out because it was to battle the Xmen in ’96. You want the exclusive insight? There was no crew that was formed together. That’s why for Q and me we always called it Thud Rumble because it was always us creating all the commerce and business back in ’96. We kept it Invisibl Skratch Piklz because we wanted to keep the crew feel alive because that’s what keeps this thing alive. If you are the 49ers or part of the Chicago Bulls you’ve got this drive about loving your team, loving your city. You know he’s from Hawaii or I’m from New York. I’m from New York and I feel proud. The crew thing was always a part of it and we thought by calling it Invisibl Skratch Piklz that would make that crew thing strong. But really it was always Thud Rumble since the early 90’s, Q and me building.

CCB: So Invisibl Skratch Piklz was really just when you came together to do shows, otherwise you were just individuals?

YF: Always. If you really look for any picture of the whole crew together there was never one. (Laughs) Even some magazine covers were manipulated because let’s say someone could not make it, everyone was doing their thing. Everyone was in their own world really. I’d say that’s why it’s so cyclical meaning it goes up and down so much. Sometimes when you are doing an individual kind of sport say golf like Tiger Woods, he’s by himself versus a hockey or soccer team where hundreds or thousands of people are together because they are totally into Portugal or Spain. That was the mentality of that, keeping that crew feeling alive. So you got the exclusive. There was no real crew. (Laughs)

CCB: Does Thud Rumble from ’96 mean something different than today?

YF: The main thing was the Invisibl Skratch Piklz crew project. Of course we had Turntable TV, Wave Twisters, and stuff like that. All these are still projects. Thud Rumble now encompasses DJing, scratch DJ lifestyle, and anything that comes along with that lifestyle past, present, and future.

CCB: So Thud Rumble back then as far as the Piklz meant putting on the shows and any records?

YF: Back then the name of the company was Invisibl Skratch Piklz. That’s why in Skratchcon at the night party I called it Thud Rumble because I switched over the whole name during that time. It had to end. The crew wasn’t really together to begin with and I didn’t want to give the impression of Invisibl Skratch Piklz forever or else people would have that expectation like The Beatles. A lot of the things we were coming out with weren’t breakthrough anymore. We did the switch at Skratchcon in 2000 and called it Thud Rumble Main Event and made that the beginning and end of an era.      

CCB: What is a typical day on the job as an entrepreneur/CEO?

YF: My fiancé she runs the whole company and has for the last five years. When Q and I moved out to Hawaii after Skratchcon we knew we wanted to get back into the lab. I love surfing and I wanted to move the company to Hawaii for awhile. My fiancé she ran the company out of San Francisco doing the business infrastructure. Now my role is to create new avenues and create what this whole movement will be. People always expect things to be the same like basketball shorts. Once they were short and now they are long. We are always trying to break ground. I always had this thing where the technology could never catch up to the art. We had these old mixers and skipping needles, all these things that just weren’t right yet. When we went to Hawaii we got to get close to Japan and go out there and build hardware like the QFO. I got to go to buddies of mine at Monster Cable and make better cables, some buddies of mine in Europe and make better needles. For the last three or four years we were in this hibernation stage of  wanting some equipment that we didn’t have to go to Guitar Center and buy, which we were already designing the 05, 06, and 07 and all those turntables. It wasn’t breakthrough enough or individual enough. Now it’s more of an individual sport. It became like golf. Q is touring on his own or Mike (Mix Master) was on his own, everyone was on their own. We wanted to make an individualistic technology. 

CCB: Have you had any mentors in your career?

I went to San Francisco State for awhile but when Q and I got really busy the only school I could do was lots of reading, studying, and learning from smart people. The best way I could do that was go to the bookstore and read up. You can learn it from maybe some cool entrepreneur who is doing something but it’s rare. The first thing I went to was Anthony Robbins. My mom got me into him. I started doing DJ things and I wasn’t making any money. She gave me this set of tapes called Personal Power by Anthony Robbins. I picked them up and said, “OK Ma I don’t have to go to college if I just listen to these tapes?” It was a thirty day program. “For thirty days I just have to listen to this dude talk?” “Yes, just listen to him and you don’t have to go to school anymore.” I was like that’s the deal of the century. So, I did it. I got a little journal, he tells you to get a little journal. I don’t know if you’ve heard of this guy?

CCB: Yeah, he’s the really big guy, right?

YF: He was in that Jack Black movie.

CCB: Shallow Hal.

YF: For me I don’t care how corny or funny or weird things are. If it’s going to help you be a greater person I’m all into it. I don’t care who I’m listening to. I’m listening to Darth Vader or whoever I have to listen to. It was Anthony Robbins. I went through those tapes and I said, “Man, I learned more listening to Anthony Robbins than in my whole life.” After that I just got immersed into that motivation section at Barnes & Noble or Borders and I bought all of them. I got everything from Zig Zigler to Tom Maxwell, leadership secrets, and Richard Marcinko; he’s a Navy Seal guy. I read every book and everything possible. I’d have to credit all those guys in that section for the success of our business because that’s who I patterned everything out of.   

CCB: Did it feel like a natural progression to start building equipment since you knew what needed to be improved and so forth?

YF: 100%. It’s still a lifestyle. We’re not trying to be mainstream or blow this stuff up. It’s been part of our lives for decades now. It’s routine. During this time we wanted to control everything. We created our own distribution. We created our own manufacturing arena to build from textiles to vinyl to whatever we wanted to do. We wanted all control. In the beginning we were always asked to sign to the big labels from Warner to Dream Works but we always saw everyone who did that was so depressed. Why should we give ourselves to someone, be depressed, just so we can be popular or get into magazines or be cool? We are in our own world anyway.

CCB: Are there any rules that you adhere to in business or is it just about having fun, being positive, and spreading the DJ lifestyle?

YF: That’s the rule. Of course there’s no kind of negative anything into it, that’s another rule. It’s got to be a positive thing for the world. You just live like that. As long as we are sharing and giving something to someone’s mind, to someone’s ideas, knowledge to make them a better person, a better artist, that’s what we strive for. We know what everyone goes through, as long as we are giving back and teaching. It’s not how many fans or students we have. It’s about how many masters and teachers we can create.

CCB: What qualities do the best DJs, business people possess?

YF: The most important thing is they work hard and they make a lot of mistakes. Those are the most successful people I’ve ever seen. Babe Ruth he had the most homeruns at one time but he also had the most strikeouts too. Those are the qualities I look for. That’s why Q and I work so well together and that’s why the company was driven so much because we knew it’s hard. And working hard if it hurts we are doing it right. If it’s a lot of hard work at least we know we are giving it our all. That’s the most important factor. Once you get to the point where you learn from a lot of your mistakes what you do is you just work smart now. You’ll work less of course and you’ll work smart at that point. 

CCB: How do you decide on who you are going to partner up with for business endeavors?

YF: The best way is what we’re into. Let’s say I get into surfing, I’ll try and fuse it somehow with what I’m doing. That’s how I choose it. I just fuse it with my everyday life. What friends I hang out with, who I meet, and what ideas come about. I’m always pursuing ideas. Anything I can see or what God brings my way I try and put that into what’s going on. Of course if you look at life that way things will just come.

CCB: For example when you are looking for cables, you mentioned Monster Cables. They were someone that you got to know and decided they were cool and partnered up. Is that how those business partnerships develop?

YF: Yeah, all the time. I rarely go out and search for it. It’s usually guys with the same frame of mind and mentality. The Monster guys, they are from the Bay Area, so they knew what we were doing already and it was just inevitable that we would hook up and try to build something and we still are. That was just a prototype thing that we were doing and we are going to keep evolving that from time to time. All our partnerships come from likeminded people.

CCB: Is Turntable TV Thud Rumble’s main teaching tool?

YF: It was and it still is. Now things are in different shape. We have 4, 5, and 6 coming out. Still haven’t released 2 and 3. It’s just an everyday progression of our lives and what we learn along the way. Everyday happy go lucky things that we do, hang out with buddies, and going out and doing things. People like to see the DJ part of it.

CCB: Those are mostly DVD’s?

YF: Mostly DVD’s. We have some broadcasting partnerships with Showtime and they aired Wave Twisters and the first Turntable TV, the Australia/Asia one. It’s our outlet of what we do everyday.

CCB: Where do you see that going? You mentioned 4, 5, and 6? Is there a Turntable TV movie?

YF: The next one is The Four Masters which was Grand Wizard Theodore, DJ Flare, Jazzy Jeff, and Q. We did this little tour on the West Coast. That’s the second episode. That focuses on teaching everyone a little bit of history again because there is a whole new generation. Every three to five years there is a whole new set because really it’s the high school kids who drive the whole world in what were into, the music, and the fashion. I’m coming out with a whole new historical part in the beginning. The third one is the DMC one, the competition circuit. The fourth one is more of our life in Hawaii and how we create stuff. So it’s a mixture of the teaching principles, how we get ideas, and other people and what they are doing.   

CCB: How did the QFO originate? Was it mainly to make DJing more portable?

YF: It’s like a guitar or any kind of instrument, like a trumpet. All those guys could go out and play their instrument everywhere, they could go to the bathroom, their car, and they could do all those things while they’re doing them. We were limited by electricity and technology. You had to always be plugged in. So it was just a totally transportable device for you to scratch with. We didn’t know what it would turn into. We just wanted to create the instrument and let all the DJs make something from that. So we’ll see in the next two to three years what people will create from this one turntable. And there’s others coming out. I started this one called the Warlord, a whole one piece with two turntables and a mixer. It’s one suitcase to take around so you can pretty much DJ anywhere. They might call it the A1, we call it the Warlord.

CCB: Have any advice for people interested in becoming entrepreneurs, fulfilling their goals?

YF: The best way to be an entrepreneur is to find a lack. That’s what entrepreneurs do. They look for a lack in the industry. They look for a lack in the world where something needs to be fulfilled. It could be for whatever industry they are a part of, whatever business they are trying to achieve. I got to find something that no one else is doing. I need to find a new way I can present my stuff differently from everyone else. It’s like Starbucks. He was like, “Oh there’s a lack in expensive coffee for everyone everyday!” You create that sensation of lack. Wow, you are right I need to get my coffee everyday. You know how marketing works. You have to show everyone that they could do better if they had this lack fulfilled. If you were the first person to do that you are pretty much set.  

CCB: Can you talk about Temple Warflex, the studio/performance space that I’ve read about?

YF: When I moved to Hawaii as a DJ I always wanted to have a really cool studio. It was really the training ground for us to create things. For Q he just really wanted to train for the last three to five years that we were gone. He’s already the best there is and I don’t know who is going to catch the guy but that’s his whole life and mentality. He’s scared that someone is going to get better at scratching. So that’s what this temple was to enhance your skill level no matter what you are doing in our company. It was actually in my house in Hawaii so it was a place for everyone to go to create and get away from the hustle and bustle of the mainland United States, chill out, and let your mind be open to anything, no influences. No way to change your way of thinking just to focus straight on the DJ world, scratching, it could be anything.

CCB: How have things changed since moving to Hawaii?

YF: The DJ scratch scene has really quieted down from the late 90’s and 2000. No one is seeing it. You have to be reminded of what the lifestyle and the DJ is really all about. It’s like yo-yos. It’s like the guy who invented the yo-yo. If he doesn’t promote it and show that it’s cool no one is going to play with the yo-yo anymore. For us it was a time for rebirth. We wanted that to happen. It was like a cleansing time. The DJ band thing to us had been done. People want to hear some good music and see someone perform amazingly. That’s where we are trying to go right now. We want to take it to where it hasn’t been taken. In 2006 I’m actually going to bring back the Skratch Piklz as a team as a tribute performance and show everyone all the new stuff we’ve been doing. The last few years I’ve been holding back a lot on the production like me and Flare have been doing Magnafrying Glass where we are fusing DVD visual scratching and music altogether in this whole 360 experience, something I’m working on for next year in San Francisco. We actually just moved back this last month or two to the Bay and set up our old studio again.    

CCB: What is the most difficult part of your job?

YF: Trying to find the next groundbreaking thing to do. A lot of DJs don’t look at the business side and they leave it to a label or some manager to take care of them. Learn the business. What good is DJing if you can’t do it for a living? 

CCB: What has been the most rewarding thing about the job so far?

YF: Controlling everything. Everyday I don’t have to do something I don’t want to because we have total control of all our music, our everyday lives, where we go next, what we do next. We aren’t signed to any labels. We have a lot of partners like Sony, Showtime, but they don’t tell us what to do. We can make our own destiny all the time. No one is going to tell you how to create, that’s worse than jail. A living jail if people don’t get that correct. Time is really important because if you don’t take care of all these things now time will catch up with you. That’s why it works so well because I focus on this more (business) and he (Qbert) focuses on that more (scratching). 

CCB: Do you feel like DJing is more accepted as a musical art-form than in the past?

YF: I really enjoy that through time everyone knows that the DJ invented Hip-Hop and it’s going to invent more than it is now. Hip-Hop created all these other DJ genres from techno to house to drum ‘n bass. It’s like a big spider web that keeps getting bigger and bigger as time goes by.

CCB: People would be surprised to learn what about your job?

YF: That all my ideas revolve around surfing. (Laughs) For me from Skratchcon to Wave Twisters to Turntable TV, I created everything while I was in the water. I love DJing but something about surfing was so spiritual. It opened up my whole brain all the time. Before we even moved to Hawaii, Q and I would go to Hawaii all the time. We plan our stuff two three years in advance. I have a project that is waiting in 2010. (Laughs) It’s a lot of preparation.

CCB: What surprised you the most?

YF: Actually that you can make a living doing DJ stuff. Q and I were all living at home when we started this whole thing. Of course your parents want you to go to school and get a job. Our moms were both entrepreneurs and we took that. What surprised us was their encouragement and support for it and we knew anything was possible. Making a living out of it and having a company that has so much influence with the DJs is really surprising and what we are really happy and thankful for.

CCB: What can we expect from Thud Rumble in the future? You mentioned more Turntable TV, QFO improvements, A1, Magnafrying Glass…

YF: We are starting work with Apple so I don’t even know what the future holds. We worked with Pioneer on that DVD scratching thing. I don’t know if you’ve seen that.

CCB: I went to a Z-Trip show and he was using one.

YF: You know like I know that every year that passes technology moves faster. Now we have these video i-Pods and these scratching DVD things, and storage capacity, where all that will fuse and mold I’m not sure yet. I want to bring it back to the team thing again. Make it into a Formula 1 kind of race. I watch a lot of NASCAR and F1 racing and I love the whole effort. It’s not just a race. You have these guys in the back with their computers calculating mileage to car speeds and the wind. Then everyone is wearing this Pirelli Ferrari uniform. I want to take it back to that team mentality but more now with structure. The team mentality of yesteryear was build a crew and be proud of it. Now I want it to be more advanced and the whole music part of it to become more of a sport, a skilled sport. It’s always going to be musical but the competition drives everyone to be better. I like to see it as a sport. I play a lot of sports. Like basketball without it being a sport it wouldn’t be as fluid and artful as it is. It’s beautiful.

*To learn more about Yogafrog and the DJ culture please visit:
thudrumble.com