Congrats to Slyce for coming back to DMC after ten years and taking the win! It was a sick battle. A lot of different styles and some close competition. Christie Z Pabon did a great job organizing the battle, and you can see her breakdown of the judges’ scoring over at TurntablistNetwork.

We’re in the lab, busy working on some of the interviews we did with some of the competitors, but in the meantime, here’s some of the photos from the night. Got home at damn near 4 a.m. This drunk lady with hairy armpits arguing with the dude at the bodega about her cheese fries didn’t help me get home any faster, either. Additional facebook pics are at our facebook page DBM Labs Facebook Page

I think Kentaro was the first Asian DJ (read that, DJ from Asia) to win a DMC World championship. The video above is of his victorious set. It was crazy for a couple of reasons…

First off, there’s the music and the way he played it. Kentaro ditched the hip-hop records for house and dancehall, which really spoke to the DJ’s ability to create new music out of all types of records, not just rap.

Second, the guy didn’t scratch. Maybe I need to watch it again, but if memory serves, the guy doesn’t scratch once. Pretty incredible. No conventional cut routine or anything. Just juggling and making music. It’s something your mom could watch without making the “it sounds like noise” remark. And c’mon - you know that’s worth something.

It’s sets like Kentaro’s that really allow you to look at DJing, turntablism in particular, as something more than simply using skratches to emulate musical instruments. It’s not the most technically advanced routine ever, but you can’t deny that he did something that no one had really done before.

Oh…and at the 1:30 mark…note the power-off juggles a la P-Trix.

Talk about pushing things forward - A-Trak won the DMC World Championships when he was 15 (and when he looked like he was 11.) Maybe it’s actually discouraging to figure that a Candian barely out of his tweens could crush 98% of the DJs in the entire world, but man…it’s inspiring what a few years of dedication and practice can do.

Even though it’s his only solo DMC title, A-Trak hardly fell off after his’97 World victory, in case you didn’t know. He went on to win pretty much every single major DJ competition by the time he was 20, co-founded the Allies, and now turns tables for Kanye West. A DMC success story if there ever was one.

Interesting side-note about this routine: see that piece of white paper sitting on top of the mixer cables? A-Trak wrote his skratch patterns down so he’d remember which ones to do and in what order. Not like skratch notation, but like: “chirp, flare, transform, flare, etc.”

Crazy.

This is one of my favorite DMC sets of all time. Actually…next to Craze’s ‘98 USA set…I think it is my favorite DMC set of all time. Teeko, a member of San Francisco’s 41Funk crew, is one of the sickest DJs I’ve ever seen.

This set was from the 2003 USA DMC finals, and it came at a time when a lot of DJs had started building their sets around more commercial music. (More on this in another post.) Teeko took that idea of relying upon mainstream radio hits to get crowd reaction and completely threw it out the window.

The result is the one of the jazziest, funkiest routines ever. If we’re talking about elevating the turntable to the level of a musical instrument, like showing what you can really accomplish with two turns and a mixer, this is one of the best examples.

In addition to the musical elements of Teeko’s piece (let’s not even call this a ‘routine,’) an element of digging made it interesting. He didn’t rely on any break records. None of the sounds were pre-arranged or formatted to intentionally make it easier for him to do what he did. He composed this out of original material, and in an age where we’ve come to rely on laptops to get us through a gig, it’s refreshing to know that people are still willing and able to create something so innovative while staying so true to the heart of the art.

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P-Trix was such a monster this year, and he literally came out of nowhere. Before the ‘99 DMC, I’d never heard of him, but he straight destroyed it with his ultra-complex beat juggle techniques. I can’t think of any juggles that were even almost this intricate pre-1999.

In addition to his De La Soul juggles (with “Itsoweezee” & “The Bizness,” aka the two juggles he does in this routine) being incredibly technical, especially for this era, his skratch sets were extraordinarily well composed. He displayed exceptional coordination, too, with the drumming styles that he incorporated into his routines, and his power-off juggle technique is something that other people built upon in years to come.

But here’s the real measure of how great this set is: What turntablist doesn’t have two copies of these De La 12″s that they copped just so they could practice P-Trix patterns? These records are like the new “Rock the Bells” and “It Takes Two.” I almost feel like he laid the foundation for an entirely new school of juggling.

There aren’t many DJs who can lay claim to a timeless routine, but P-Trix can. This is the epitome of classic turntablism.

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