About
John Kelley was supposed to become a doctor. Half Asian. Half Southerner. It was study hard. Meet the expectations. Climb the family far out of the cotton-picking swamp. He was walking down a certain path. And then, just before medical school in 1991, he stepped into a rave called Infinity. Everything changed. His detailed hand at drawing, a love since he was a boy, came to the fore. His play of shadow and ink, often made to music, dramatized images with attitude. Years listening to Prince, The Police, Led Zeppelin, De La Soul, Funkadelic, Beastie Boys, Miles Davis, Pink Floyd, Tangerine Dream, all crashed under the waves as he listened to Doc Martin in downtown Los Angeles spin house and techno into majestic masterpieces; DJ Dan tearing it up in Long Beach at Aphrodite’s Temple; the UK’s Michael Cook peeling it back with CJ Bolland’s ‘Ravesignal.’ The lightsaber stabs of Joey Beltram’s ‘Energy Flash,’ the fractal head trip of Slam’s ‘Positive Education,’ the deep Italo house of ‘A Key To A Heaven For A Heavenly Trance,’ the heartbreaking nirvana of Future Sound of London’s ‘Papua New Guinea’ — all informed his diverse tastes. It was the mix of all these things that fired his imagination. A Moontribe resident DJ since its first year in 1993, John crafted a sound that was a battle cry to keep ravers moving. Harassed and imploding, L.A.’s underground in 1993 was in dark retreat. While Insomniac and others revived the city, Moontribe took the faithful once a month out into the desert. Every full moon, dancers and seekers drove miles and miles, on freeways and dirt roads to secret locations, on dry lake beds, in winding canyons, in the echoey shelter of crumbling hills. As psi-trance flowered on one side of the moon via fellow resident DJ Daniel Chavez, John sparked a progressive house and breakbeat funk style on the other. Like a Yin and Yang, they spun.
Genres
