Echo and KEPW welcome DJ Playgue

Speaker The KEPW program Underground Echo recently welcomed DJ Playgue.

Echo The night hums in low electric waves. Outside, Eugene sleeps under a quilt of street lights and fog, unaware of the magic stirring inside the Sparrow and Serpent Pub. The venue is a cathedral for the nocturnal, a sanctuary for the alternative, the darkly attuned, the seekers of something beyond the ordinary pulse of the world. 

The air smells faintly of wood polish, spilled drinks and the musk of anticipation. And at the center of it all, poised like a sorcerer on a throne of sound, is a figure whose presence is more felt than seen. 

This is Brad, known to the night as DJ Playgue. A craftsman of beats. A conjurer of rhythm. A magician whose instrument is not strings, keys or pads, but his very mouth. To describe Brad simply as a DJ is to flatten the breadth of what he does. Watching him perform is like witnessing alchemy. He manipulates vibrations, conjures layers of rhythm, and sculpts sound with his voice in ways that defy expectation. 

Each beat is a word, each cadence, a sentence, and each intricate looping a full story. He stands before his console, not just mixing music, but weaving narratives with nothing but his lungs, his tongue, and the inexhaustible ingenuity of his mind. 

He builds worlds that pulse with life. Listeners don’t just hear music. They feel it. It flows under their skin, resonates in their bones, and lingers long after the final note falls into silence. 

Brad has done this countless times, and tonight we’ll hear him in person articulate the method, the philosophy, and the poetry behind it all. He will show us how one person can turn breath into rhythm and rhythm into communal transcendence. And, perhaps by the end of this conversation we will understand, even if just a little, how to inhabit the space where magic and music intersect.

Welcome to the show, Brad.

DJ Playgue Holy crap, that was hypnotic. (Thank you.) That—not even my own mom gives me that level of praise. Don’t get me wrong, my mom is awesome. She definitely made me feel special. But wow. Thank you for that intro.

Echo You’re quite welcome. I personally have witnessed Brad’s performances and I was entranced, so this was my experience speaking. You brought this machine in here, Brad, why don’t you tell us about it?

DJ Playgue Yeah. So this thing is my loop station here. It’s a little black box that has a bunch of buttons on it. And basically what it does is takes what I put in the microphone and loops it. So–

Echo Amazing.

DJ Playgue Yeah, it’s a lot of fun. Another thing that this thing does is it has a bunch of guitar pedals built into it. For example, we have, like, vocal distortion, things like delays. So this thing has a bunch of just guitar pedals that I’m turning on and off to create the illusion that music is happening. But it’s all happening and being constructed in your brain, which is fascinating.

Echo Wild!

DJ Playgue Yeah. So I have like this effect here, which is called a panning delay, which basically is like a delay and the pan combined, it just pans it back and forth between the speakers.

And then I have this other parameter called time. Now time is just how fast it goes back and forth between the speakers. So if you come to one of my live shows, you’ll hear it going back and forth, in this case, 200 ms. So when you blink, that’s how quickly it’s going back and forth between the speaker.

And so, we can do something kind of: Weird… 

And so that’s just my voice sped up, going back and forth between the speakers very rapidly. And it sounds like a cool bassline note. Ta-da! And then we can beat to it. 

And then all I have to do is push this button right here. Which? This is my head-bob button. People’s heads start to bounce. Watch this. Yeah. Now we can make a beat. Yo, there we go. And just like that, we can make music with just the human voice. Ta-da! Magic. 

So, yeah, that right there is all from the voice. Everything, all the sounds that you’re hearing are actually coming and being made by my body, whether it be my hands hitting the microphone or my voice or my lungs or my throat, some part of my body is making the sounds that you’re hearing. And so we can use the guitar pedals just to add maybe a little bit of distortion, maybe a little delay or reverb onto our voice and we can create beautiful sounds. So check this out (shout out to Bizkit for this):

Oh, God. What has science done? Oh, jeez. Oh my gosh. Here I am on the radio for the first time. Oh my goodness. This, this music is such a mess. I don’t know if the audience at home is gonna enjoy this. Oh, gosh, I’m really nervous about this. God, you’re such a little wiener. Just throw it into the incinerator.

Yes. Yes, this is all live on the air. Holy crap. I know what we must do. Incinerate. Yes. Throw them all into the incinerator.

Oh, God. Oh, here we go again. I don’t know if the audience is ready for the last drop. I don’t know if everyone in the studio is ready for the last drop. Oh my goodness. Are you at home? Are you. Are you ready? Are you ready in the studio? Yeah. Oh, okay. Oh, gosh. Here we go. Oh, no. Wow.

Echo Folks, if you’re here, that was alchemy and magic with Brad the Wizard, also known as DJ Playgue. He plays on The Serpent and the Sparrow. Can you describe the moment you realized your voice could become an instrument itself? Was it an epiphany or was it a gradual, slow-burn discovery?

DJ Playgue It was obnoxious, is what it was. When I was in eighth grade, I started making these weird sounds with my voice. It was back in the YouTube days, early YouTube days, and like beatboxing was still in its infancy and I just saw these people making music with their mouths. And I was like, ‘What? What is this? Like, that’s crazy!’ 

And so I would be doing that in class, which is not something I would recommend. 

And my mom, even, like, I got in trouble for a few times, and my mom even, like, put a rubber band around my wrist. And it’s like, ‘Every time that you beatbox, just snap that, it’ll break the habit.’ So then I just learned how to do magic tricks with rubber bands.

Echo I was going to say, that just turned into a candy bracelet.

DJ Playgue Yeah, basically. So that didn’t help the issue. But I did learn, you know, social boundaries at some point. And I stopped beatboxing while I was in class. But it’s really convenient because, you know, some people sing in the shower. I make the background track in the shower, and it’s really nice, you know? And whoever I’m showering with, they can do the singing part. I’ll just, you know, do the dubstep in the background.

Echo That’s beautiful. How do you approach the transformation of simple vocal sounds into full musical arrangements? Can you walk us through your process?

DJ Playgue Oh, my gosh. Yeah. So what I basically do is I start with like coming up with random sounds that I can make into the microphone, and I put a backing track to that. 

So like I’ll set up some drums, some hi-hats, some snares, and just kind of experiment from there. This device here that I, that you were listening to earlier, I have input and output effects. So the input effects is the effects that are being applied live. So what you heard was live feed and then those were all track effects that I was applying. 

So I already had everything recorded. So all my hi-hats, my drums, my weird sounds, and then what I can do is I can turn on and off track effects to manipulate the sound even further. Ostensibly, I have six effects that I can layer on top of my own voice. But again, keep in mind these are just guitar pedals. Like this thing, that’s all this thing is designed for, is to manipulate guitar, but instead of guitar, I’m just plugging in my face.

Echo Make the violin noise?

DJ Playgue Oh, oh, I got you. So all this is right now? Oh, is a reverb and a EQ. EQ is just an equalizer that just brings up the highs or maybe reduces the lows. You know, whatever you need to, to hone in the frequency. And then we have the reverb and then everything else is my body. 

Now from here, what I can do is I can put in a nice bassline through my nose. 

And all I’m doing is I’m putting a filter on my sound. That’s all I’m doing. And then, but I just filter out all the high sounds. Once all the high sounds get filtered out, it creates that heavy bass. And then I can put effects on top of that. So like, for example, I can put another reverb and then even a chorus to kind of make the sound even wider. And then I can put an octave. 

And through just the voice, I can create this whole orchestra.

Keep it strange…

DJ Playgue Just like that. Shout-outs to Inkie. 

Echo Wow. When you’re creating beats with your mouth, do you think of them as a language, a texture, a motion, or everything at once?

DJ Playgue Oh, my God, these questions are so good. 

I think of them as all at once. I have five tracks. So five places that I can make loops for and fade in and out. I kind of think of each track of the five tracks as its own thing. So like for example, my track four and five might be more for texture, whereas track three might be more for impact, and then tracks one and two are more for my actual like drums.

Echo Kind of like stems of a song.

DJ Playgue Exactly. Yeah. They’re like little licks of pieces of loops that I’m working with here, and different loopers will have different strategies on how they organize it. 

Like sometimes when I need to turn on and off track effects or like push certain buttons, it helps if the button I need to push at the same time is next to each other, so I’m not reaching across my foot on the other side of this device. 

But yeah, for the most part, that’s kind of the way I’m thinking. So, yeah.

Echo He is DJ Playgue. He plays at Sparrow and the Serpent, and that is—when is your next show, Brad?

DJ Playgue I have one on the last Sunday of every month at The Sparrow and Serpent. The doors open at 2 p.m. That show starts at 3 p.m., and I have a show the first Friday of every single month, and that is an Emo Nite.  So if you’re interested in that kind of music, that’s every first Friday at 10 p m. Doors open at 9 p.m. for that. 

I also have shows up in Lebanon, in Oregon as well at Barsidious (Brewing). That one is the first Friday of every month as well. I’m very busy on Fridays and that one starts at 7 p.m. up in Barsidious, and I’m always performing locally and doing random shows here and there.

Echo Brad the Wizard / DJ Playgue is a reminder that the act of creation itself is a form of magic. Each beat, each loop, each vocal flourish is a spell cast not to control, but to illuminate, transform and connect. And in listening, watching and learning from him, we are invited into the spell, sharing in the wonder, the labor, and the joy of making something impossible, tangible and profoundly alive. 

And I’ve been here with Brad the Wizard. Thank you so much. This has been Echo on Underground Echo.

Speaker You can listen to Underground Echo every Wednesday at 6 p.m. right here on KEPW 97.3, Eugene’s Peaceworks Community Radio.