PorterHouse Volume 2 is quite an energetic and adventurous mix of house, trance, breaks, and everything else. Maybe Steve Porter has created his own genre – Porterhouse – since there isn't a single label to describe the music he makes (the CD contains 14 of his own remixes and productions) and plays.
DJ Ron Slomowicz: Your new project, Porter House 2, is a two CD set with
forty-five tracks on there. How did you get so many tracks worked in
there?
Steve Porter: That's how I DJ live. I've already got all of the
tracks preprogrammed and pre-edited to that format, so I just
basically represented how I play live on the CD for the most part.
RS: Do you normally preplan your sets when you play live?
Steve Porter: I prepare extensively for every set that I have.
Before every show, I spend the night before preparing all the new
tracks that I have to play so I'll spend quite a bit of time preparing
before I'm ready for the set.
RS: There's a lot of variety on here - some breaks, some house,
and some trance. How do you choose the tracks from each genre and
edit them down? What is your modus operandi?
Steve Porter: It really stems from the fact that I used to work in a
record store and I used to sell dance music from all the genres. We
had a breakbeat section, a trance section, and I became very familiar
with those sections and I developed a taste for each of the genres as
I was working at the store. I tried to take the taste I developed
for the genres and develop that into my current DJ style.
RS: Most DJs on the party scene play one genre for an hour –
like the best of the genre. Do people think of you differently?
Steve Porter: Yes. I guess that's why I re-categorize my sound as
Porterhouse because I kind of jump around at my own digression.
RS: Everyone else spins one-hour sets of one distinct style and
you come on and have different stuff mixed together.
Steve Porter: That's just the way I approach it. I like to have a
little bit of a surprise value to my sets and be able to jump from one
genre to the next. That's the representations of my roots and it's an
affection for a variety of dance music. For me, it's about taking a
rollercoaster-type journey throughout a set and by the end of it all
the people have heard all these different sounds. That's what I try to
do.
RS: Forty-five tracks on a CD, that must make licensing hell.
Steve Porter: It was, but it wasn't, considering that a lot of
people that were licensed on the album were extremely cooperative and
were excited to be a part of the album. It wasn't like we had to pay
these astronomical fees to license every track, because people were
excited to work with the album. We had a lot of cooperation on that
end, but also when I can contribute my own work to the album, that is
also very instrumental to keeping the costs down as well because
obviously I'm not charging any fees for my tracks and what-not.
RS: I noticed it's coming out of Australia, did that help with
licensing also?
Steve Porter: Well, actually it didn't really necessarily help with
licensing, but the label that we put it out on, EQ, was just amazing
to work with. As soon as we sent tracks over that we wanted to use,
it was just a matter of a few days when they came back and let us know
if we could use the track or not. EQ did a terrific job in licensing
the tracks.
