by Don Crispy

Optimo

It doesn’t have to be “dance music” to be danced to, say the Glasgow duo

Jonnie Wilkes and Keith Mcivor aka “JD Twitch” courtesy of FEU

For DJs Jonnie Wilkes and Keith Mcivor (aka JD Twitch), eclecticism is a near religion. Bored by the same old repetitive house and techno beats he had been spinning at Glasgow’s The Sub Club for the last decade, Twitch decided—like many veteran DJs in recent years—to try something different.

“I really didn’t care whether it would work or not, or whether anyone would go,” Twitch says. “It was just something I had to do. I love DJing with all my heart, but at this point I was so bored with seamless mixing—it was all just too obvious, too predictable and too easy—that I had to do something to preserve my (in)sanity.”

Optimo was born after Twitch invited “Belfast playboy” Jonnie Wilkes on board in 1997. At first, when the pair began to mix in anything from punk and disco to remixes they’d created on their samplers, there were many doubters among the Glasgow techno trainspotters. But Optimo held fast, and by 1999 the word had got out.

While still resident in Glasgow, and intent on preserving their local culture against the depredations of corporate clubbing, Optimo are now heavyweights, with summer dates at London’s Fabric and Ibiza’s Manumission following next weekend’s set at Yellow.

In addition to highly regarded club sets, Twitch and Wilkes have also begun to spread their heterodox gospel via CD, with two new compilations out recently. Kill The DJ is a double CD release, with the first mix disc summing up a typical night at Optimo, and the second a collection of Optimo classics. Songs veer wildly from hard-hitting techno by artists like Ricardo Villalobos to tracks by skank-rockers The Cramps or kitsch a la Nancy Sinatra.

Optimo Presents Pyscheout looks back even further, with most tracks over ten years old and some dating back to the ’60s. “Previous CDs have been really intense with the mixing,” Twitch explains. “We wanted to do something that let the tracks be heard for a lot longer, where the emphasis was on the music rather than the mixing.”

A live element is also an important part of their Glasgow club nights. “I was bored at the lack of performance in clubs and wanted to get back to having something visual and exciting for the audience to watch, which is why we only book bands, as opposed to DJs.”

For clubbers who want to lose themselves in the beats, Optimo can be infuriating. But what the sets will never be is boring. “There are still people doing creative and interesting things within house music, but there is also more same old run-of-the-mill house music than ever before,” Twitch says. “I hope my personal contribution is showing that lots of music that people don’t regard as dance music can actually be [danced to], and that it is not necessary to play one style of music or one tempo all night.”

Spice! plus@Yellow, June 17. See club listings for details.

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