Artist's Avenue: Bryan Jurus

Bryan Jurus, Political Science, Sophomore

Bryan “JurusDiction” Jurus is making noise in the Duke City, Las Cruces, El Paso and Denver. He has over 25,000 songs in his iTunes library, and has lost some hearing in his right ear. He says he’ll keeping DJing until he starves to death or loses his hearing altogether. He also works in Student Special Services and is responsible for this year’s lineup at Fiestas.

Daily Lobo: How’s the DJ scene been treating you as of late?
Bryan Jurus: It’s been crazy. I played at One Up, Burt’s (and) Atomic — mostly electro shows. … You have DJs that are paid to play for the crowd, and then you have DJs that are artists. I am a DJ that’s paid because I am an artist. They’re paying me to come in for my taste in music, not necessarily to play for the crowd. There’s a difference there. I wouldn’t play weddings because I am paid to play my own stuff.

DL: Could you tell me more about the process of actually mixing a track?
BJ: First thing is first, you have to listen to a ton of music.

DL: How much do you listen to?
BJ: At least two hours of my day are spent finding new music (and) listening to new music. Oh, and you can’t pick a genre. There’s top 40. There’s what DJs like to call crate diggers, where you walk into a record shop and take a piece of vinyl and you’ll listen to it. Now, I live in the digital age. I do actually spin on vinyl, but I use a computer program that allows me to control my music on vinyl.

DL: Okay, then what?
BJ: The first thing I always pay attention to is key. If two songs are too far apart they are never going to sound well together. The other thing is if you take an artist like “Girl Talk” or the newer mash-up DJs, they are sticking to a formula where they drop rap music over soft, instrumental backgrounds. It’s cool, but I try not to get into a rhythm like that. I just try to say, “This is a good track, and this is different and it’s going to fit well with this.” Maybe it lacks a bass line, or it lacks that punch that the original track needed. That’s how I go in and fix tracks.

DL: So can you tell me a bit more about the Diana Ross mix you just made. You told me earlier it appeared on a list on The Hype Machine.
BJ: That particular track starts off probably about three years ago. It’s made in this style called Chicago Juke Music. And Chicago Juke was originally pioneered in Chicago. There was a couple of artists there who would hear these classic songs, like Diana Ross. There is this whole — I guess it’s early ‘60s music — that had good bass lines but lacked punch and variety. What we did, there were four of us that all worked together on it, we downloaded the original part of the track. What we do is we originally take the track and split it apart. You’re going to say, “I like this part of the song, the b-section lacks, so we are going to take that out.” I don’t pay attention to artists. I pay attention to sounds. It doesn’t really matter to me who makes the song. It’s what the song has in it.

DL: And then where do you go from there?
BJ: Even before we put in the original parts of the Diana Ross track, we go out and play out the bass lines, and lay down the entire drum track for the song. In that sense it’s an original track because that is all made from scratch. We play it. We record it, and then we use different audio programs to map it all out.

DL: So you play the original bass and drum line then?
BJ: Oh no, we play an entirely new one. That’s a completely original drum line. That’s almost a full track in itself before you decide you are going to bring in the samples you’re going to lay on top of it. That’s what makes a remix in my opinion, you have to have an original song of your own, and then you can draw samples from the song you want to change.

DL: And how did it all finish then?
BJ: You lay undertones and synths in the background to give this song a little more depth to it, a little more feeling. Then you go in and lay the original samples over that.