It’s an Indian Summer of legends in the Bay Area—Detroit house pioneer Theo Parrish and foundational Amsterdam techno wiz Speedy J played epic sets here last weekend, proving the heads still have it. Now, courtesy of Fatsouls Records and Imagine Luv’s terrific regular High Level party (Fri/10, 8pm-2am, The Foundry, SF), we get a genius from NYC whose dance music resume kicks off the 1970s—yet who still remains at the top of the booking list both on his own and as part of legendary trio Body & Soul.
François K, aka François Kevorkian, has revolutionized dance floors several times: Editing Martin Circus’ hugely influential 1979 “Disco Circus,” gorgeously mixing Dinosaur L.’s left-field 1982 classic “Go Bang!,” and remixing Yazoo’s 1982 “Situation” (which incidentally launched 12″ dance mix culture) are just three examples of how he’s still slaying dance floors more than a half-century later. As a resident DJ at Studio 54 and Paradise Garage he was there for it all, and has since championed a blend of soul, house, techno, and dub that weaves a magical spell from the past and the future.
Kevorkian is joined for the party by another revered house DJ, Brooklyn’s Spinna, and Fatsouls’ own DJ Said, who we adore. (Said himself spilled the beans to me about this booking when we ran into each other outside the restroom of the brilliant Kraftwerk show at Greek Theatre earlier this year.) It’s going to be a High Level party, indeed—the last one, featuring Danny Krivit, also from Body & Soul, was terrific, spilling into the backroom to give ecstatic dancers extra space.
I was delighted when François, who rarely gives interviews, agreed to hop on the phone with me for a terrific, hourlong conversation that covered his deep history here, how he feels about the current DJ scene, and what he’s been up to lately with his fascinating “Live Stems Dubs” series.
No stranger to San Francisco, Kevorkian’s production experience here stretching back to the 1980s and The Automatt, a legendary recording studio in SoMa. “I spent a lot of time working there — before becoming that, it was the famous Wally Heider Studios. It was one of the greatest studios ever in the area where the Moscone Center is now, before that was built. The Automatt was opened by Dave Rubinson for acts like Santana and Herbie Hancock, and run by a woman who had worked for Bill Graham [Michelle Zarin, who passed away this year; notably, all of the recording studios’ management team were women].
“I was rubbing shoulders with all kinds of people,” Kevorkian said. “Sandy Perlman who produced Blue Oyster Cult had hired me to mix this album for him, Narada Michael Walden was across the hall. I spent enough time there that I immersed myself in the surroundings. I was only 15 when Haight Ashbury was happening, so I missed all of that, but I was very interested in San Francisco’s musical history.
“For the project with Sandy Pearlman, I had a rental apartment in the city and I clearly remember the Grateful Dead coming to town, with all of these buses and hippie vans parked around the area. It signified what I always thought was specific to California: People were willing to throw their lives aside and follow this band around, it was the only band with this kind of following. There was a whole community.
“I bring this up because this is one of the ways things have changed in dance music,” he continued. “When I first came out to play for [seminal SF rave crew] Wicked in the mid 1990s—I was lucky enough to play for them a few times—it reminded me exactly of this sense of community. Sure there could be what we call ‘headliners’ now, but they had built up such an enormous community. People were there for the experience these residents had created. It was totally OK to just go to a club or party and hear the residents.
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“That used to be the same in clubs. You came to see the residents, there was a loyalty. It wasn’t just the big headliner from out of town, and then some names in smaller type at the bottom of the flyer. There was a community that had built itself around the residents. It was a distinct vibe everyone had created together, and it was special,” he said.
In a huge way, Kevorkian himself has dedicated his career to being a local resident DJ in New York, with the brilliant Body & Soul party with Joe Claussell and Danny Krivit, running every Sunday afternoon 1996-2002 (something many of us threw our West Coast lives aside to attend as many times as we could afford), and then Kevorkian’s own party, Deep Space, which ran on Monday nights 2003-2020 and focused on his more dubby and techno side.
“I was locally focused, dedicated to creating an experience. It wasn’t a grind for me at all, like it may be for some DJs. At the same time, I was still appearing internationally. But I grew increasingly disappointed at what the industry had become. I was being booked into venues and festival lineups that had very little to do with what I was aspiring to play. It felt more like a conveyor belt system. I was coming on to play 90 minutes and that’s it. You can’t do anything in 90 minutes, there’s no time to develop a narrative or story.
“I get it, clubs have their bottom line, and maybe attention spans of certain crowds are shorter. But I can’t cry for a DJ who feels challenged to play for two hours. Meanwhile I’m 71 and laying down seven or eight hour sets. Many of the big names on these bills felt like window dressing, with more concern for social media than the art of DJing. I needed to reposition myself. I just could not go on doing that sort of thing, it didn’t feel genuine. So I started being more selective and turning down certain gigs.
“Then the pandemic came, and I noticed a curious thing. We had started an online community called World of Echoes. The namesake Facebook group grew enormously, and it started to feel like that community feeling again. I started streaming at the start of lockdown, and came to realize that I loved it so much more than performing at some of the gigs I had previously been playing. In the last five years we’ve streamed something like 350 shows. People from all over the planet were coming on the streams to connect, they were there for the music and for each other. It was a terrible thing going on in the world, and we were coming together in the face of it, performing a public service.
“That’s now entered the real world too—I played at Gilles Peterson’s We Out Here Festival, and there was a mini World of Echoes in-person meet-up. This has been happening at other gigs as well. This longtime community we formed online is now coming together in-person at certain events around the world.” Body and Soul appearances are also focal points of community: A recent London edition drew 4000 people, many of whom had traveled to come see us, and one I attended in Barcelona this past May filled a glamorous old theater to the rafters.
Ever the innovator, Kevorkian has kept himself occupied the last few years exploring live remixing through his “Live Stems Dubs” series on YouTube. Working behind a huge mixing console-like board of equipment, he reworks classics from the likes of Steely Dan and Maurizio into through-the-looking-glass creations that become their own improvised sonic entities.
“I was disillusioned with what I was hearing from music contemporary music, so often very linear. I concluded one of my sets recently with a track from an album called 666 by Aphrodite’s Child from 1971. I took the mic because the question had to be asked, ‘How come, with all our technology now, so little I hear nowadays sounds as fresh and creatively brilliant as what they did to this track from 55 years ago with such limited means?’ We need to shine and keep pushing boundaries.
“With the help of AI tools, I can isolate stems and create multitrack performance sets that can be manipulated in an improvised manner which reminds me of the way we used to make remixes: It was all done live, in the moment. Dinosaur L., ‘Situation’ by Yazoo… Those were made manually, without the help of mix automation computers. I’m not doing anything groundbreaking in terms of this —Adrian Sherwood and Mad Professor have been doing live edits for decades—but I’m using these new technologies to give myself opportunities to create something that can be ‘in the moment’ and of course always different! That is so exciting to me.
“Most of what I’m actually doing with this equipment may be going over 95 percent of peoples’ heads, but the point is I’m feeling free to realize a lot of what I’ve been wanting to do creatively with this technology and found a niche that very few others seem to be willing to take risks exploring in front of people. And it’s pretty fucking mindblowing.”
HIGH LEVEL WITH FRANÇOIS K, DJ SPINNA, AND DJ SAID Fri/10, 8pm-2am, The Foundry, SF. More info here.
