Style Child

DJ Ty Tek sits in the back room of Casa Del Soul, the modest yet packed retailer that hawks albums, clubwear and other gear to aspiring Denver spinners. The scene is part vinyl hot spot, part mini-Warhol Factory for the turntable set: A booming house track plays noisily in the background of the small space next to Club Vinyl on Broadway as fellow DJ "Little" Mike Chapman moves in and out of the room, and the store's information minister, Nathan Uhlier, hunches over a nearby computer. With cropped dark hair, an olive complexion and a vaguely Slavic appearance courtesy of a pair of large, luminous eyes, Ty Tek stands out as a cool and collected figure among the Casa clutter, qualities that characterize his role within the local DJ realm.

"Right now, in this day and age, it's really hard for kids to get noticed as DJs because there are so many of them," Tek says. "I got in at the tail end of that last wave of DJs in Denver. I'm not saying people don't have a chance right now, but there's this whole crowd trying to get in. It's harder to get noticed when there's all that competition."

Tek is a part of a second wave of Denver DJs, a sophomore crew heavily influenced by the dance-music revolution that gestated in Detroit and Chicago and then came of age in London, Manchester and Liverpool. Fueled by Rock City techno, Windy City boom and the beat-laden acid house of the U.K., the global wave began to move through clubs in just about every major metropolis more than a decade ago. Denver joined in sometime around 1991, just a couple of years after the neo-disco brands made their presence felt in the rave fields of England and the ominous black-box clubs of New York and Los Angeles.

Locally, first-string DJs like Hipp-E, Craig C, Jonas Temple and Vitamin D and promotion outfits like Together and Step On jumped on top of this future-forward soundscape; later, Skunk and Miss Audrey explored the measurements of the new genre's potential as a scene. Ty Tek, Little Mike, Jeremy and Nutmeg, among others, formed a rear guard, essentially filling up the Mile High City's DJ rosters to a saturation point that has left little room for a third wave.

But, hey, that's why they build new clubs.

Tek doesn't have much reason to worry about getting squeezed out, however. He maintains juicy residencies at both Vinyl and Enigma (formerly Rezodanc), does video work for local outfit Rocket Pictures and holds a coveted coolster job at Casa Del Soul. And his background is as interesting as his tech-house mixing skills. He was born Tyrone Maximillian Tekavec in 1979, the child of immigrants from Slovenia, a Western-leaning Catholic state that emerged from the Yugoslav nations' early-'90s collapse in better shape than neighboring countries such as Croatia and Bosnia. He and his grandparents migrated to the States when he was a boy.

"Pueblo is where my grandparents moved," Ty says, "and then my dad was married down there. I have four sisters and two brothers. I lived there for eighteen years."

Rather than draw influence from politics or the Eastern European folk traditions of his homeland, Tek developed musical interests that fell within the somber electronica so popular with small-town kids looking for a lifestyle usually found in larger cities. Skinny Puppy, TKK and Coil were among his adolescent faves, tastes inspired by an uncle who worked as a sound engineer and had his own band in the '80s. "It was a local industrial band, and he had a lot of influence on me. I was really young when I started playing around with keyboards, like eight or nine years old.

"When I started getting older, like high-school age, I bought my first set of turntables. I was the only guy in Pueblo who had them at the time. I didn't know where to buy records, so I had to order them. I taught myself. I got one of my first gigs at Pueblo's Evolution nightclub at the age of sixteen. I was one of the first DJs there, so I was able to learn as I played."

Around the time his mixing skills began to flourish, Tek got raver's fever and started checking out Denver's after-hours parties, a scene still in formation at the time. "I got my mix tapes together and started giving them out to promoters up here," he says. "They probably weren't the best tapes, but I was determined to do it."

An early rave promotional unit, Odyssey Productions, became a primary target for Tek's analog juvenilia. When he came of age, he made the official leap to the big city.