"Gravitating towards the weird shit": The story of Danny Daze

Westchester isn’t the Miami of Art Deco, beach bodies and glamorous superclubs with fountains in the loos and bottle service. It’s a cheerful, well maintained if slightly rough around the edges place with white bungalows, well kept lawns, dusty roads and random lawn furniture. Westchester is a tight-knit Cuban-American neighbourhood, and at the weekends salsa and merengue music blares from every second yard as the residents congregate for cook-outs and a gossip. Daniel Gomez, aka Danny Daze, lives and works to the rear of a house he bought and rents out to a family whose pick-up truck advertises a pool cleaning business. His mum lives around the corner. She’s been in this neighbourhood since fleeing Castro’s Cuba at the age of five. At the end of the street is a greenish stream where Danny caught fish when he was a boy, and where there used to be a little outhouse where he and the other kids would breakdance. He favours baggy chinos that he rolls up high above the ankle. Compact, dark-haired and average height, he walks with the loose-limbed grace of a former dancer. Danny’s gran lives across the street.

Danny Daze’s house/bunker is what we’d call in the UK a ‘granny flat’: one room with a kitchenette and a bathroom and a low double bed with a tangle of crumpled designer clothes recently dragged from his suitcase. Of course, not many granny flats also feature a gleaming studio set-up including a 27” Mac, a Moog Voyager XL, Enzoniq Fizmo, midi modified Pro One, a Prophet 12 an Omega 8 and a Studio Electronics ATC 1-X. This is Danny’s home for half the year (he also has a flat in Berlin).

And Danny is in demand across the world right now. He’s not only a hugely impressive ‘DJ’s DJ’ whose sets at clubs from Warung to Panoramabar ring with character and eclecticism, he’s a producer of rare skill whose electro and techno tracks are full of leftfield ideas but anchored by a dancefloor friendly, bass heavy aesthetic that gets floors moving – a combination that reflects his character and this unique city. And this month he’s stepped out to finally reveal himself as the force behind Omnidisc Records, a label that Mixmag’s Electro Editor describes as “Consistently dark, consistently fresh and always aimed at the dancefloor: one of the most exciting labels in electro and techno right now.”

Over the next couple of days Danny will be our guide through the city, showing us the places and people that influenced his story and his music, a story that’s as far away from the glitz of the Miami Beach megaclubs as Westchester on this Tuesday afternoon. But first he has to drop off some laundry at his mum’s house.

You may know Danny Daze from his massive 2011 summer hit ‘Your Everything’ on Hot Creations, a perfect slice of warm, neo-deep ’ouse dance-pop released when the label was at its pyramidal pomp. And that could be a problem. A former pop producer and remixer who was pretty unfamiliar with the new ‘deep house’ sound, Danny reckons that “subconsciously I went and made an underground pop record, I made a record that fell into a label that was known for that, which is totally cool. It’s why I’m here talking to you today.” But while the huge success of the tune made Danny’s name internationally, its disconnect with his DJ sets and the rest of the music he produces and loves trapped him a in a strange pincer movement of expectation from promoters who thought they were booking a ‘deep house DJ’.

“I’d go to one of the parties where I was booked [as a ‘deep house DJ’] and I would play techno,” he explains, frustration still evident. Word spread that ‘Your Everything’ didn’t reflect Danny’s DJing style. “There were a couple of very big parties where I got pulled off the line-up. I also wasn’t getting booked to do what I really wanted to do – although at the same time, my name was still buzzy. It was a really weird time.” Thankfully, by now most people have got the message. Danny Daze plays and makes bass-heavy electro and techno: highly danceable, but fifty shades darker than anything than the summery sound of 2011–2013. Almost as dark, in fact, as our first destination.

Churchills Pub is not exactly what you’d expect in an area called ‘Little Haiti’. Stretching around a street corner like the kind of low-slung windowless aggro box you’d find in those parts of Glasgow where supporting the wrong football team is asking for a kicking, it boasts a giant painting over the door of the man himself at his most pugnacious, and emits a smell of grime, cigarettes and sodden beercloths that triggers a Proustian spasm of pre-smoking ban nostalgia in at least one of our party. The dingy interior features a long central bar with two pool tables on the shallow side and a big, dark pit of an old-skool live music venue on the deeper. The toilets are a riot of yellowed paint, graffiti and stickers for punk bands with terrible names. It’s awesome. We can well believe it when Danny explains that this is one of a handful of epicenters for alternative music in the city. It’s here that we’ll be meeting some of the city’s dance music royalty.

Danny’s early experiments with production were concerned with bass in its purest form. The kind that shakes booties and loosens fillings. The kind that Danny used to make aged 14 on Fruity Loops software for car bass parties, a Miami tradition that involves kitting out your vehicle with as much sub-woofer as it can carry and blasting out specially produced tracks that push the limits of the human ribcage. And if there’s one thing that still characterises Omnidisc, Danny Daze’s productions, and this city itself, it’s the love affair with bass.

The Miami bass sound was invented by one of the legends that Danny has invited along to Churchills today, Dave Noller. A large, affable character in his forties, Dave is better known as Dinamix II. His 1986 track ‘Give The DJ A Break’ synthesized the electro and hip hop of the likes of Planet Rock and Man Parrish with early hip hop, and was the first tune to play the 808 bass sound as a melody in its own right. “Maybe it’s the heat down here,” says Dave, “but people seem to gravitate towards that breakbeat and that heavy bass.” The peak years of Miami bass were ’86–’94, but the sound is still hugely influential – not least on Danny’s productions like the monstrously rolling ‘POP’, premiered last month on Mixmag.net.

Also here today is one of Miami’s most unique artists, Otto von Schirach. A fruitarian evangelist who’s currently working on a follow-up to 2012’s ‘Supermeng’ LP for Monkeytown, the exuberant, long-haired mystic met Danny back when he was playing obscure hip hop and r’n’b for Full Moon parties at a funpark (“arcade games and go karts”) called Malibu Castle. Danny was 15. “I think we changed his brain a little. He was more an observer than a raver, always interested in my gear. We started hanging about seven years ago, and I started realizing; this kid’s music is fucking epic,” Otto says.

The next to join us for a pint in Churchills is a man with the build of a welterweight boxer, a ready grin and the delicate hands of a surgeon. Born in Nicaragua and raised in Westchester, DJ Craze has been a friend and inspiration to Danny since they hung out at raves at the Hot Wheels rollerskating rink back around ’99/’00 and Danny was just starting to DJ and make music. A four-time world DMC champion, Craze is one of the greatest turntablists of all time. He and Danny have long had a shared sensibility. “We always gravitate towards the weird shit,” he explains. That weird shit, that experimental, offbeat indie sound that makes Danny’s productions so fresh, is represented here by the founder of the label that did more to shape Danny than any other. Schematic Records was founded by Romulo Del Castillo in 1996 as a post-rave home listening label, and quickly became known as ‘America’s Warp’. Romulo describes Danny as one of the few people who keeps the energy of the Miami scene alive – but it goes both ways. Schematic’s intelligent, emotional releases were a huge influence on Danny’s development as an artist; in fact, back when he was busted with 2,000 ecstasy pills and ended up under house arrest, they were one of the few things that kept him sane.

Wait, what? Tucking into a tasty (but artery-thickening) Cuban meal of pulled pork, plantains and black rice at local hangout Palacio De Los Jugos, Danny explains: “At this point [around 2002] I was very desperate for money: I had a car accident and I couldn’t work. My mother couldn’t help and my dad doesn’t help out at all [Danny’s parents split when he was young]. I would have robbed a bank. A girl I knew hit me up online. She asked, ‘Do you know where we can get a punch of pills?” Danny’s first and last foray into criminality didn’t quite go to plan. In fact, what followed could have been a cut scene from 90s rave movie Go: after sourcing the pills and meeting what turned out to be an under-cover detective in a Hooters car park (during a Harley Davidson convention, no less), the minute Danny put his hand in his pocket there were a dozen guns in his face. Cue time in a youth prison, the end of a potential pro tennis career, and a further nine months of house arrest. “They used to give me an hour a week to go get a haircut or go get food. I barely remember anything from that time. I kind of just blocked it out, but it was very monotonous,” he says. He stayed sane by chatting online on electro forums and on Instant Messenger, buying and selling vinyl online and getting deeper and deeper into artists like Iceland’s Ruxpin and Lackluster and the more leftfield side of the music released on hometown labels M3rck and Schematic: “I guess it was very emotional music, and that’s what I gravitated to,” he says.

But when Danny finished house arrest in 2005 he was $75,000 in debt to his lawyers, and he concentrated on the serious business of making money. At first he worked killing cockroaches during the day and DJing at weekends and evenings. He didn’t turn down many gigs. “I’ve done three hundred-something weddings. I’ve played for deaf people. I’ve played for fourth-graders, for nine- and ten-year-olds at a Homecoming party where I had to play everything from Jennifer Lopez to Vengaboys – and I got good at it. Anything to make money.” His crowd-pleasing, mash-up style juxtaposed everything from electro to disco to rock and was full of his own dancefloor edits of everything from Jefferson Airplane to Violent Femmes. Soon he was getting gigs at clubs, including a weekly eight-hour residency at a place called Funktion and Monday nights at a fetish party called Back Door Bambi. Meanwhile, his edits were getting picked up by DJ AM, and in 2006 he teamed up with Joe Maz and his brother Gigamesh to create DiscoTech. They were swiftly in demand for edits from some of the biggest chart acts in the US, and touring from Vegas to LA to Detroit. “It was fun at the time,” he recalls, “but soon everyone was doing that style. In 2009 I just thought, ‘Eugh, that’s enough.” The journey towards the kind of music he really wanted to make started when his 2009 track ‘Ghettofab’, under his own name, was included on mixes by DJ Hell and Loco Dice. He took a year off from gigging, and ‘Your Everything’ was the result.

As we walk through Little Havana, where tourist-friendly live music bars stand cheek-by-jowl with parks full of old Cuban men playing dominoes, tiles clacking away at a BPM that’s more like gabber than electro, Danny turns his thoughts towards the future. For now that means concentrating on Omnidisc, with planned releases from Legowelt, Sebastien Bouchet, Dean Grenier, DJ Tennis and David Vunk, and its two off-shoots, the disco-influenced Polyester and the bass-driven, tech house inflected 80 Hertz. It means building on a couple of years that have finally seen him get the message across about what kind of artist he is – and seen that message resonate from Brazil to Berlin, from his recent Radio 1 Essential Mix to his upcoming parties at Miami Music Week. It’s about Danny and some of the incredible talent in his hometown putting this city back where it belongs: at the centre of the dance music world.

Danny Daze ‘Miami EP’ is out on February 22 via Omnidisc