Needle Exchange: A DJ Questionnaire with Ryan Organ

His go-to records, his craziest gig, and the music you should never ask him to play.

IMAGE: Courtesy of Ryan Organ.
By Matthew Singer

Years DJing: I started with some friends back home in Canada about 17 years ago. We all began around the same time and came up together.

Genre: A little bit of a lot of things. I started with house and techno, found my way into drum 'n' bass and jungle, and have since mixed in hip-hop, dub, reggae and funk.

Where you can catch me regularly: I play solo randomly at a lot of lovely venues in Portland—think the Liquor Store, Moloko, the Goodfoot, Valentines, Holocene, Cruzroom, Alberta Street Pub and after-hours underground spots. I also play as part of a DJ crew called Vinylogy—four DJs, usually on four turntables, plus a live drummer—especially on patios in the summer.

Craziest gig: Before Last Thursday on Alberta became super-organized, we'd set up a little shanty canopy on the corner of 27th and Alberta with a few crates of records and a pretty substantial sound system. Once we had the entire block dancing along with us. It happened so fast. I still get chills thinking about it. We had to tame it down in the following months, so we took the party over to Cruzroom's patio for a few years after that.

My go-to records: Rodney P, "Tings in Time"; Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra, "Che Che Colé (Makossa)"; Nuyorican Soul, "Mind Fluid"; Etienne De Crecy, "Prix Choc"; Infiniti, "Game One."

Don't ever ask me to play…: Not trying to throw my Vinylogy homie DJ Antix under the bus, but he used to play a Skream remix of La Roux's "In for the Kill" at our shows that still to this day sounds worse to me than brawling neighborhood cats. Actually, I think he played it extra often just to bug me.

NEXT GIG: Ryan Organ spins at Bar Bar, 3939 N Mississippi Ave., on Tuesday, April 4.

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