INTERVIEW: 140+ D.C.
A CHAT WITH GABBERBITCH69 AND DJ LAND REFORM
The time has come to talk about raving in the nation’s capital. Only a few years after Guy Picciotto hung off of a basketball hoop and EU put their go-go classic “Da Butt” on the School Daze soundtrack, DJs like Scott Henry were tearing it up at one-off raves and nightclubs around D.C. “By some accounts, D.C. had the first full-fledged scene on the East Coast,” notes Michaelangelo Matos in his piece about the first major rave in the District, which happened in 1992.
Now it’s 2024, and the crew 140+ is keeping the D.C. rave story moving forward. 140+ throws collaborative events that happen everywhere from boats to off-hours Eritrean restaurants. Their musical policy lives up to its name: 140+ parties are high-BPM throwdowns where all styles of fast rave music mix and mingle. Recently, I spoke with Gabberbitch69 and DJ Land Reform about their crew’s history. Also: Twitter rave jokes, deep Animal Collective Tumblr fandom, and Soulja Boy juke remixes. Only on John’s Music Blog.
You threw a party on a boat recently, right?
Gabberbitch69: We did, in collaboration with someone from Baltimore. I don't know if you're familiar with JACQ JILL?
No.
Gabberbitch69: She was kind of the one who invited us to do that, which was really fun.
What sort of boat was it?
DJ Land Reform: It was just in the harbor of Baltimore. I think it was like 150 people capacity. It's funny, a lot of the time, it seems like they do weddings or events, but we brought our friend’s sound system and our DJ equipment onto it.
Was the boat rocking at all?
DJ Land Reform: It was pretty big and pretty sturdy, but there were definitely times when you would turn around and the boat would kind of lift the one side, you know?
Gabberbitch69: There was one point, I was dancing really hard to my friend’s set, who was playing drum and bass at that point. The floor was slippery and I scraped the shit out of my knee. But it was fun. Good times were had.
If you throw a party on a boat, you know, you don't want anybody to actually get injured, but a couple of minor scrapes seems kind of fine.
Gabberbitch69: I think we're the only ones who got injured from dancing too hard.
Is there a particular party you've thrown that stands out as being a highlight?
Gabberbitch69: I mean, that one because it was so novel. Well, that one was in collaboration. It's kind of a marketing mess, honestly, the way we do our parties. It’s 140+ X Friends With Benefits, which is technically our other friend. We used to do separate things more often and I think we still will in the future. If you see the flier, it's always X Friends With Benefits.
Yeah.
Gabberbitch69: This was over a year ago, but we did a two-floor all-vinyl thing last May. And that was with Flapjack.
DJ Land Reform: Yeah, Flapjack was the headliner.
Gabberbitch69: We did drum and bass and jungle up on the top floor, the side room. And then we did all hardcore on the bottom floor.
DJ Land Reform: That one was really crazy because we tried all these things to isolate the turntables. We were trying stacks of concrete, squash balls and everything. And then we realized we had to just drill into the ceiling and hang the booth. We had to go to the club like three or four times to just do that random cut.
Gabberbitch69: That was so labor intensive. We were dying of stress, you had stress dreams.
DJ Land Reform: It was really stressful.
Gabberbitch69: But in the end, I was glad it worked. This club that we use in Chinatown, the guy who used to run it at that time was always making weird changes. He decided it would be a great idea to put the subs directly under the DJ booth. So all forms of traditional isolation were just not working.
DJ Land Reform: Yeah, you just can’t DJ vinyl.
Gabberbitch69: So, okay, let's just spend a hundred plus dollars and literally build this. It was worth it. It was a good party, I think.
DJ Land Reform: They were definitely swaying a little bit, you know, the turntables.
But things were steady. The records weren't skipping.
Gabberbitch69: There was a little bit of feedback, but Flapjack, the pro he is, brought his extra crazy fancy anti isolation pads to screw onto the turntable. A lot of kids seemed to be into it, amazed, like, “Wow! Records are still real.”
DJ Land Reform: We had two floors of music and it was all vinyl.
Gabberbitch69: And then on the other hand, though, there's some people who we met later that told us at that party they had no idea it was all vinyl. But I'm like, Okay, that means the sound was good. You were having fun.
D.C. has always been kind of mysterious to me, because it clearly had this crazy scene in the ‘80s and ‘90s, but by the time I started touring and playing DIY shows, the energy was so focused on Baltimore.
DJ Land Reform: I’m only comfortable talking about dance music because I don't really go to see bands that much, but the main difference is that D.C. has always had more legitimate venues. And then Baltimore has always had more DIY warehouse type things.
Gabberbitch69: I do think that now Baltimore's punk and noise and whatever live music scene kids, like all those art school kids—there's a lot more people who show up to things in Baltimore dressed up in the whole candy raver thing or adjacent to that. They are starting to understand what DJing is. Baltimore definitely used to be, pre-COVID, very, very, very DIY, live music stuff. We would kind of never go there for any dance music. I feel like there's a good handful of parties that have popped up since COVID.
Is it affordable to live in Baltimore versus D.C.?
DJ Land Reform: Baltimore is way cheaper.
Gabberbitch69: Yeah. I feel like for our rent here, we could probably get a three bedroom apartment or two bedroom at least. Or a small row house for the cost of our rent here.
Do you have day jobs in D.C.? What do you do? Do you want to talk about it?
DJ Land Reform: Yeah, I work in Trader Joe's. I'm the wine guy.
Oh, sick.
DJ Land Reform: Thank you.
Gabberbitch69: I'll just say I have an email job. But yeah, it's just a day job for stability and to be able to do music stuff on the side and take out of town gigs here and there. If we had to rely on music or throwing parties as our income, I think it would drive us insane. We probably would have to do triple the amount of parties or whatever.
DJ Land Reform: And we would have to charge like 40 bucks.
Gabberbitch69: From our parties, we don't take home any money, really. We kind of just reimburse ourselves for any costs. I mean, there’s some locals who are able to tour on the regular, making most of their money off of DJ gigs, but they are frequently out of town. So that's a whole different lifestyle. You literally always have to be touring, which to me sounds exhausting, but good for them.
Gabberbitch69—there's a tweet of yours that went somewhat viral, where you said something to the effect of, “Intellectualizing raving is jobless behavior.” And I thought that was great because I clearly am somebody who has done that and it's not like I have always had a job in my life.
Gabberbitch69: It was just me being cheeky and I don't even know how much I was deeply thinking into it. I mean, definitely when I tweeted it, I was like, Oh, I know this might make some people mad.
Raving should probably be taken seriously intellectually, but some writing about it enters into that kind of ultra-academic territory where it loses sight of most people’s reality. What I’m trying to say is that I appreciated the Tweet, even as somebody who also takes it seriously.
Gabberbitch69 1: Word. Even people who I feel like engage with that type of critical thinking, who I follow and follow us—they thought it was funny.
How did both of you get into DJing in the first place?
Gabberbitch69: I guess I'll speak for myself, but growing up on Tumblr as an early teen and then just trying to find out where we could listen to that music out live, it ended up being a lot of DJ nights at our local electronic club that has now been shut down. We used to go to a lot of stuff at U Street Music Hall.
DJ Land Reform: They were like the only venue that had 18-plus DJ shows.
Gabberbitch69: Yeah, and we were very young and we didn't have fakes. But anyways, yeah, I think just the music we were into on Tumblr. And then we were just like, Okay, a lot of these people also DJ. We like footwork, they do DJ mixes. Then we just got into DJing and shared a controller.
DJ Land Reform: I got the DJ Hero game when I was in middle school and Daft Punk was a character. I always had an appreciation for electronic music, but I wouldn't say it was my main thing until I was 18 or 19. In high school, I was a really obsessive Animal Collective mega fan. They would DJ at U Street Music Hall, so we would go and see them. A lot of their influences, they would say like Basic Channel, DJ Rashad, Daft Punk. They would recommend a lot of electronic people—I kind of got into dance music through that.
Gabberbitch69: I was also part of that Animal Collective fandom that was also on Tumblr. It was so crazy and fanatic. They had their forum and they even had this Google spreadsheet of, like, here's all the influences Animal Collective has mentioned across interviews, categorized by year. I would peruse that sometimes and that's how I got into more techno and other random electronic music.
How did fast rave music into the picture?
Gabberbitch69: I feel like I was already into it in college and even before college. I wish I knew exactly how I got into hardcore. Maybe just through techno and stuff and going backwards through the ‘90s.
DJ Land Reform: I think you just kind of found it on your own.
Gabberbitch69: Yeah, I found early Marc Acardipane or the Frankfurt whatever the heck compilation. I was already into it but no one was doing anything remotely like that in D.C. The cool underground stuff, the sound was very Resident Advisor techno—this is like 2017, 2018, or whatever.
DJ Land Reform: Before we started throwing stuff in D.C., it was pretty much strictly house and techno and there were a few drum and bass nights, but it was always like 40 year olds, you know?
Gabberbitch69: In 2019 I had this moment where I was like, OK, I know this guy who runs this DIY space after hours at this Eritrean restaurant in Adams Morgan who was involved in the punk-ish adjacent scene in D.C. After they were done, the kitchen closed at ten, he would program mostly live music nights, but definitely some DJ stuff and some rappers. But because the cost to do it all was nothing—it was literally zero—I was like, let's just do it. And we did a few at that spot. It’s literally still there and boarded up and empty. I think it was condemned?
DJ Land Reform: There's asbestos in there or something.
Gabberbitch69: We were like, Oh we were partying with asbestos, of course, whatever.
That 2019 era, those were sort of the humble beginnings of whatever is happening currently in the American neo-rave scene.
Gabberbitch69: The first night, though, we did pack the place out really really surprisingly. Whoa, how did this go so well? I think it was because my flier looked kind of goofy and weird.
DJ Land Reform: Really colorful.
Gabberbitch69: It was really colorful and we made so many. We were promoting it so hard on Facebook back when people still used Facebook to promote events. Even in the description, we were like, you know, the whole 140+: techno, jungle, club, hardcore, gabber, whatever. A lot of those genres that were listed and that we did play that night you didn’t really hear out. I think after that we were expecting the next parties to go as well, but they were definitely humble. And then, yeah, COVID happened.
It seems like that COVID pause period, a lot of people had time to study.
Gabberbitch69: Yeah, I think they studied on TikTok. Everyone went to TikTok Academy. They learned what breakcore is or whatever.
Where do you see this all headed over the next year? Do you see the rave scene growing? Is it kind of plateauing?
DJ Land Reform: I feel like it’s still growing.
Gabberbitch69: Really? I was going to say maybe it’s plateauing. Well, dance music in D.C. in general, I guess it's growing.
DJ Land Reform: I think it's still growing because there's still, at least in D.C., there's other people starting new parties. We're kind of happy where we are in terms of the capacity and the size of our events and the success of our events, we haven't noticed a decline in ticket sales or anything. So like we're kind of chillin’ where we are. We don't have these massive world domination plans.
What is the most absurd gabber track in both of your collections that you like to play out?
DJ Land Reform: It's funny. I don't actually play out gabber, like, ever.
Gabberbitch69: You play happy hardcore.
Speaker 3: I do happy hardcore. I’m trying to think of the silliest one.
Gabberbitch69: Was the question craziest or funniest?
Silliest, most absurd, whatever.
Gabberbitch69: I feel caught off guard. A lot of my music is too scary.
I mean, even if it's scary, I guess maybe I'm referring to just a sort of ridiculousness, however that may manifest.
Gabberbitch69: Damn, we're taking this way too seriously.
DJ Land Reform: This is very serious.
Take your time.
DJ Land Reform: I guess my answer is gonna be, DJ Rashad made a remix album, and there's a juke remix of Soulja Boy "Crank That."
Gabberbitch69: That’s not gabber, though.
DJ Land Reform: It’s not gabber, but if I had to put a silly ridiculous song that’s also really good, it would be that.
And that goes off in the club?
DJ Land Reform: Yeah. I played it, like, once.
Gabberbitch69: Jabex “Rico Rico” has a fun array of samples, including Benny Benassi’s “Satisfaction,” and melds Latin and hardcore in a way that gets everyone lit.
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