Cut Chemist: Live Score + Films Concrète

Cut Chemist has been recording and performing for nearly 30 years. He started DJing in 1984, at age 11. He first became known as a founding member of both the rap group Jurassic 5 and the Grammy award-winning Latin funk outfit Ozomatli. Keeping his involvement with both groups in tandem with one another, he has developed a taste for music and rhythms from around the world while keeping his ethic for the hip-hop tradition. His first solo LP, The Audience’s Listening, was released in 2006. He reinvented the notion of the multi-turntable DJ with Sound of the Police, using only one turntable, a mixer, a loop pedal (for live sampling), and all original vinyl pressings. “It’s like walking a sonic tightrope and the audience gets to see me fall if something goes wrong,” Cut says. “The interesting parts are when I mess up and fix it. The audience goes crazy and appreciates what a difficult balancing act this actually is…It’s important to widen people’s musical vocabulary, and I feel it’s my job as a DJ to do so.”

Cut Chemist will bring his dynamic turntablism to the Castro stage, creating live soundtracks to films ranging from the silent era to the present including: Les nuits électriques (Eugene Deslaw, France 1928); Curses, (Jodie Mack, USA 2016); and Funk Off Movie Remix, (Tom Fitzgerald, USA 2020), a found-footage fantasia mixed live in performance.