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EuroVancouver
Profiles: Professional
Watch
Solo
Act
East
Beats: the prominence of DJ
Roment in Vancouver’s Eastern
European club scene
By
Malcolm Morgan, Canadian
Section Editor
When it
comes to djing, what does it
take to be the best in the
biz?
Lone
ranger
Roman Radomsky,
known professionally as DJ
Roment, sits juggling his cell
phone and a pack of smokes
with an ultra-cool manner that
could only belong to a leader
in Vancouver’s club circuit.
The 22-year-old
Ukrainian native’s voice
during the interview, relaxed
back in the throat, to the
point of being at times only
vaguely audible, reinforces
the sense of his own security
in his industry power
position.
On top of this,
he buys me a coffee,
not the other way around. The
dude knows when he’s in
control. And he should:
Radomsky is the premier beat
master for the throng of young
Russians, Ukrainians and other
Eastern European nationals
filling the venues of Artiom
Balykin’s Baltika
Russian Club, the single
remaining Russian
youth-focussed club party
series in town.
Balykin has been Radomsky’s
steady employer for the year
or so that the Baltika
party scene has been alive.
This was a wise hiring
decision, as Rodomsky is an
obvious crowd favorite – to
the extent that when guest DJs
are booked to appear at
Balykin’s party, for example,
a Russian pair from Seattle
who often alternates with
Radomsky during the course of
a night, club regulars
approach Radomsky with praise
for his work and critiques of
theirs.
When you’ve got it, you’ve got
it – and you let the music
speak for you, while you drawl
matter-of-factly with minimal
vigour. But just where did DJ
Roment get it?
Sound
training
Leaving his birthplace of
Kiev, Ukraine due to the 1991
Chernobyl nuclear disaster,
the half-Jewish Radomsky took
up residence in Haifa, Israel
for eight years, only arriving
in Vancouver in 1999.
Radomsky’s DJ self-training
began at that point, when a
friend gave him the primitive
equivalent of the
turntable-amplifier-speaker
set he uses now: a, Radomsky
admits, junkyard-worthy pair
of CD walkmans, which Radomsky
used simultaneously with an
earpiece from each walkman in
each of his ears, the walkmans
plugged into speakers. With
this makeshift DJ starter kit,
Radomsky was able to teach
himself to mix and blend the
sound of two songs playing at
once, one into each ear. It
was a humble arrangement, but
it facilitated what Radomsky
describes as his basic passion
for the core material of his
work: “I started with just
listening to music, you know,”
he says, “I loved music.”
This love soon found Radomsky
“going on and on, and
listening to music, and
training [his] ear.” He
emphasizes the necessary step
of accustoming oneself to
listening to music, so as to
play it back in a unique and
compelling way, repeating,
“you have to train your ear.”
Self-training on the cheap
meant no formal lessons in
djing for the emerging
Roment.
Radomsky never entered the
doors of such facilities like
The Rhythm Institute, a DJ
training program at
Vancouver’s Boomtown Records,
or the courses in djing
currently available at
Toronto’s Royal Conservatory
of Music, one of them taught
by a professional DJ who works
with Canadian musician Nelly
Furtado.
He is proof that desire
matters more than privilege,
giving himself his start on a
bare-bones equipment set,
confident that it would lead
to bigger and better things.
Owning
the Russian party scene
For Radomsky, djing feeds into
both his personal and
professional ambitions; it’s a
professional devotion
motivated by a very personal
affinity for the craft. “It’s
a fun job,” he says,
rephrasing slightly to say,
“It’s not a job for me – you
can go to your job, and say
you work at a gas station, and
you aren’t really attached to
it, and hate to go to work,
but with this you love it.”
He concludes the discussion
of personal tie to his job
directly and simply, as usual:
“This is a hobby…you’re happy
to go there.”
Indeed he was happy to do it
when he was starting out
playing hip hop and rap
favorites at the house parties
of his high school friends,
when he was a participating DJ
at summer Stanley Park raves,
to the point when he took over
for the DJ at the now-closed
Russian club that was formerly
Balykin’s competition, djing
for them at Alexis Restaurant
in Vancouver.
He’s more than happy
to now be Balykin’s resident
DJ, his position as of 2004,
working at all of the upscale
downtown clubs that host
Baltika events, making
$150.00 per gig, and finding
it “easy” because the downtown
clubs have their own in-house
sound equipment. When
Radomsky is invited for djing
at an alternate venue, he has
to assess the size of the
room, and the type of
equipment already available,
then usually rent extra
speakers and/or amplifiers to
accommodate a larger space.
He drives this equipment to
the venue in his own car,
sometimes using a friend as a
second driver if there is
extra equipment. The pay-off
for this added inconvenience
is that he will charge perhaps
$250 per night – hourly pay of
$20-30, plus extra to cover
his equipment rental costs.
And, like a true professional,
before any gig, he practices
in his equipment-filled room
at home, each time
reaccustoming his ear to the
playlist that he prepares for
the night. During the course
of the night, he is open to
readjusting his playlist
order, saying “I see how the
crowd goes, and see what
works,” and what works
sometimes entails him putting
in a few improvised tracks.
To keep his material current,
he gets constant access to the
newest music, finding Russian
techno the most interesting,
because “it moves on and on,”
continually producing unique
sounds and tracks.
The
global sound system
There is a clear recognition
in Western society, and in
global pop culture generally,
that club music, particularly
performing and/or
writing it as a DJ, is a
hot choice. It’s basically
the equivalent of what
starting a rock band in your
buddy’s garage would have been
20 to 30, or even 40, years
ago. The pop culture music
makers who become the centres
of attention, eliciting the
attention of groupies
and, if good and well-known
enough, obscenely high
salaries for even a night’s
work behind the turntable, as
popular music magazines such
as Spin have
identified, are now headphone
jockeys, manipulators of
electronic sound, complete
with the same dry ice and
light show that the now
prehistoric guitar jockeys
used decades ago.
Perhaps we can view it as a
nod to the influence of the
computer age – that those we
look to as our Jimi Hendrixes,
or, to risk hyperbole, even
our Beethovens, are winding
music through a sound system,
nodding and bopping to a
heartbeat bass thump, while
turning dials on a table.
Even the dinosaur guitar
wielders seem to realize that
if they want their image and
work to stay alive, they’d
better join forces; for
instance, U2, the world’s last
larger-than-life rock band,
employed dance music producers
on their 1997 Pop
album, introducing techno and
jungle beats to their rock
sound, and more than one DJ
has released a dance remix of
one of their songs.
Radomsky, of course, is aware
of the kind of status djing
confers, admitting that there
is a degree of female
attention in addition to
compliments on his work. More
important to him, however, is
that he tries to use his
European origins as part of
how he markets himself; not
only does he play the newest
Russian techno together with
other European dance and
trance music, but he sometimes
wears the jersey of his home
soccer team, Dynamo Kiev, at
his venues.
And he wants to forward his
image of a successful European
in a highly contemporary and
wildly popular music trend as
far as he can. “I’m popular
in the Russian community,” he
says, “but I want to be
popular all over the world.”
Given the hypothetical that he
might someday DJ in L.A., New
York, London, Paris, or other
international cultural
centres, Radomsky says that,
wherever he went, he would
insist on being known as a
Russian-speaking DJ from
Vancouver.
But he holds his Vancouver
position at as much value as
he does these ambitions,
saying of his satisfaction
with Balykin’s club over other
Vancouver clubs he could go
to, again, simply and
directly, “I’ll be staying
there.” He also holds the
Vancouver atmosphere superior
to that of neighbour cities
like Seattle: “I went to dj in
Seattle, and it was a pretty
small club,” describing the
older, more laid-back Seattle
crowd. Of Vancouver, he says
“here there’s more energy,
it’s more wild, people are
going crazy.”
Radomsky seems to be in
absolutely the right city at
the right period in music
history, and he knows it,
commenting on how central djs
are to the club scene: “Yeah,
because, right now, if there’s
no dj in the club, and you
just play the music, there’s
not the same energy.” Energy
is certainly an understated
way of describing the
reactions his work generates,
having myself seen him in
action.
At the end of the interview,
he strides away ultra-casually
to prepare for his upcoming
weekend gig at Baltika.
I picture him there in his
Dynamo Kiev jersey, headphones
with one earpiece on, one
resting on the side of his
head (both a practical stance
for sound mixing and a DJ
style point), and with his
characteristic two-finger
victory-like salute behind the
turntable. Keep it
ultra-cool, Roman, and keep
the beats coming.
Roman
Radomsky invites comments and
inquiries, at:
sdjroment@hotmail.com
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