Sean Holland: About twelve or thirteen years. I’ve been collecting records since I was a little kid, you know bugging my mom, when I was at Target for the 45’s.
Emm: What are your influences as a DJ?
SH: I’m into all kinds of music. I love disco. When I was growing up, my first big crisis in life was when everybody decided that disco sucked, because I thought it was so cool. When I was in junior high and high school, I was really into the Clash and Talking Heads. Those are my two classic favorite bands. I’ve always been into a lot of jazz music and world music, and of course reggae. I’ve listened to reggae my whole life; l love that stuff. And I grew up listening to a lot of country music as well.
Emm: What sort of music do you normally play?
SH: I play all kinds of music. I like to change the rhythm up, I don’t like it to be 4/4 all the time, I like a lot of hip-hop, I like a lot of reggae. As long as it’s going to work the crowd out and everybody has a good time I’ll play it. I usually say that I play dance music rather than house music or this or that, I don’t really try and classify it.
Emm: Are you on tour now?
SH: No, not really, I do travel a lot. Next week I’m in Kansas City, which will be quite cool. And the next week, and after that, I’m playing in Leeds in England and Edinburgh in Scotland the next weekend. Then I’m back in New York for the rest of the month.
Emm: What is your best DJing experience?
SH: It’s tough to say, I mean they’re all so different. I like the steady gigs. In Dallas, we had a big Thursday night. It was a big hip-hop night where we’d play everything, hip hop, reggae, and some house music at the end. And we did that every year for two years every Thursday night and there was like five-six hundred people there. That was great. With a residency you get to feel your crowd, you get to know what’s up. But I like going other places too, because you’ve got to keep your brain fresh to know what the people are going to like or if they’re not going with what you're doing right now. So, but for the most part they’re all pretty good, it’s always fun because you’re just playing music for people and it doesn’t get much better than that really.
Emm: Any funny DJ stories?
SH: I remember one time in England playing where we only had one turntable, and that was so crazy. There were two of us, so we had two DJ’s and one turntable. It was a little strange you know, because we just had to play a record and take it off, put on one real quick. I roll with the punches. You know, if you’ve got some beat up equipment you deal with it. It can’t all be perfect.
Emm: Sean, you're a DJ, you run the Coco Machete record label, and you handle distribution for several records labels. Can you give us a little more detail on what you do day to day?
SH: Well, I pay my rent by putting out records, definitely. I deal with a lot of the nuts and bolts for new upcoming labels at a music distribution company in New York called Syntax Music and Syntax Recordings. I handle all their manufacturing, all their promotion, just the nuts and bolts stuff. So the guys who own the labels can handle the artistic side of the music and identity, and the artwork and everything like that. They get to do the fun stuff; I get to do the hard stuff. It works though.
