(above: flier for my radio show at SUNY Fredonia around 1996-97 — I am not sure anyone listened except for one African-American student who rushed to the radio station to see who I was and seemed crestfallen)
WHY I’M CALLED “PLATELET60”
It comes from my days as a college student in the mid 90s listening to a lot of techno music, specifically jungle or as it later came to be called, drum and bass. Really quickly: a test pressing of a jungle track, on vinyl, took some nomenclature from the reggae music industry (this is the best of my knowledge) and was called a “dubplate.” Sound systems would make music early in the day and at night at the club they would test out dubplates to see what tracks really got a good reaction, to know which ones to fully put on vinyl and sell to DJs. Again, this is my bastardized incomplete knowledge of the underground record industry. If you know more than I do and want to correct me, please do so. Anyway the dubplate became a very prized and rare version of a track on wax for a DJ to possess, it meant that you were connected to jungle producers who gave you the really exclusive records. There were DJs who played nothing but dubplates to convey the message that they had the most rare shit. It was kind of an aggressive thing, perhaps.
Circa 1996 in college at SUNY Fredonia I had a radio show on 88.9 WCVF where I played ambient, “illbient,” dub, trip hop, and jungle music. I was by no means a real DJ which was something I was secretly aware of at the time. I just played CDs and cassette tapes so the mixing was pretty basic at best although I did once accomplish a mix that I was proud of: a recording of Lord Buckley reciting the “Hip Gan” off one of my Beat Generation CDs timed with DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid’s “Grapheme,” so that just as Lord Buckley says “and they started blowing” the beat drops (see YouTube videos below). It was pretty much the only real mixing I did besides small overlaps between tracks that did not beatmatch. Ambient tracks are easier to mix for this reason. In the air was this stupid thing where you had to have a DJ name. We were so wonderbread white. At times I called myself Qaddafi: my dad had been in Libya in 1969 in the Air Force when Col. Qaddafi took over and it was a vaguely terrorist “bomber” kind of name that fit the image I was trying to portray. But when I heard the thing about dubplates I thought of a play on words which would mean “small dubplates” was platelet, because I had no dubplates and was a very small potatoes DJ. Also, I was thinking about the biological term “platelets” which are what blood clots are made of (the resonance with the Jamaican term “bludclaat” which I think has to do with menstruation and tampons did not fully cross my mind). Platelets stick together. Current in rave culture was the PLUR acronym (Peace Love Unity Respect), and platelets sticking together seemed like a message of unity. I was smoking a lot of powerful dope that had come from somewhere probably Buffalo, and spending time on email listservs connecting with people in the jungle community from all over the USA. This was pre Internet. So there was a lot of fronting and acting out roles while still really being into the music and mastering knowledge of intricate discographies and record labels. We all knew that the UK was the source of the really good jungle and basically most of all the techno of those years.
I don’t know where I came up with the money to buy CDs but somehow whenever I went home to Syracuse I was buying up all the ambient and jungle I could find. I wish my memory was good enough to recall everything I was listening to, but what must be borne in mind was that I was going mostly to music stores where they had music that was only moderately underground. To get really underground music you had to go to NYC or Toronto and you were probably buying actual vinyl: halfway to being an actual DJ. I bought cassette tapes from Pure Acid Mixtapes based out of California I think, and they had mixtapes of all kinds of music that was insane. Some of the best ones I had were from R.A.W. and Curious? from LA, they were both underground from the Mexican raver community in LA and they made their own “dubplates.” Labels off the top of my head from the UK were Metalheadz, Trouble on Vinyl, No U-Turn, way too many to recall now: like I said I smoked a lot of Buddha largely out of aluminum cans so I probably did oodles of brain damage that way.
I flirted with making my own music, I borrowed a dusty drum machine from a bass player (there was a lively music scene at Fredonia, it was largely a party school for a lot of “trustafarians,” hip kids from upper middle class families who we sneered at without realizing we were right there with them and probably in a similar class with, culturally if not strictly financially). Anyway I had a reel to reel and I used the drum machine to make beats influenced by drum and bass. It was weird because I wasn’t sophisticated enough to figure out how to record while listening to what I was doing so I fashioned a sequence of headphones whereby the drum machine was hooked up to the reel to reel through headphones so that the rough transfer of signal was taking place in the headphones right in your eardrums as you listened: one set of headphones functioned as microphones, backwards. I remember making some pretty good, heavily cannabis-influenced music that way but as I was really unschooled and illiterate in sound production and recording those reels of tapes were lost and no one ever heard them. I bet if I heard them today they would sound like garbage but…like with Ernest Hemingway’s suitcase full of stories he left in a taxicab that time, that were lost forever and he had to rewrite them from memory, the lost material always has this mythic aura about it. Maybe it was fantastic.
So my college DJ name was “platelet.” I used it as an email name with my first college email address and I noticed that someone had already claimed “platelet” (probably some medical student at a SUNY university, the State University of New York is humungous and we were all linked together in those early days of email). So I tried out various numbers and platelet60 was free.
Being a techno DJ of sorts with a biologically derived name was not uncommon and appealed to me as I liked the idea of an organic concept of science. Something microbiological and to do with the human body, something in the phenomena of blood. It’s lately occurred to me that I wrote a novel called Blood Trip and this substack is called Chlorophyll & Hemoglobin. I guess it’s just science on the brain.
I’ve only been to a handful of jungle nights, once in Buffalo because Toronto was nearby, which was fucking awesome although I was super lifted and not able to concentrate, and then a few times in the Catskills where my girlfriend tried to get us into the VIP lounge but they weren’t having it. I went to liquid sky in NYC and bought vinyl there and they must have been like “look at this stupid kid, we could sell him anything, he’s a rube.” I stopped listening to jungle/drum and bass around 2000 as the music I was hearing was getting too techy and unimaginative, I thought. Also I had dropped out of college twice and was really feeling a lot of doubt and shame about my wasted potential. It was a time of changing my personality. The whole jungle thing and the college DJ thing was a bit of a youthful embarrassment although I still like some of the music and it brings back memories. I just wish I had focused on my studies and not gotten into drinking and drugs so much (pretty much just pot).
I notice on twitter a lot of people play this name game with puns and trickery. I recognize that impulse from long ago. I think by now platelet60 is just stuck with me like clotted blood. In my life as a journalist or other type of writer, I use the name and it’s weird to try to explain it to people who have no conception of the music I came from, the marijuana-induced madness, my college years, my sense of what was cool or humorous, or any of that. It would probably be better to just use my name and be professional. Maybe it’s just a concession to some silly creative side of myself that is clinging to those days in the booth at the radio station playing Macro Dub Infection vol 1 on the radio, missing classes, caught up in a social life of partying that was going nowhere. Very few people wanted to listen to that same music. I was pretty lonely and trying like hell to be avant garde and stake my whole identity on listening to music other people found difficult to dance to, hectic, alienating, and self-consciously “too cool for school.” If I had been in NYC or Toronto or London, I told myself, I would have fit right in. In some ways in that era of Phish, Blues Traveler, the Grateful Dead, other assorted jam bands, listening to extreme dub-inflected breakbeat techno was social suicide. A concentrated cultural and economic analysis of the 90s will show you that I, among many other people, was just caught up in a vast marketing music industry machinery that bought and sold identities based around music, fashion, trends, and middle class junky boredom behavior during the Clinton surplus and peace dividend in America. Generation X culture with its ever proliferating yet dead end archetypes and lifestyles and mirages of hip originality. Something about adolescence was real and then it was trampled by reality and you tried to kill the pain or discomfort or despair by buying a CD. The CD was life. The Walkman, turned up to its loudest capacity so all around could hear it, was a lifestyle but also perhaps a cry for help. It was isolation in noise.
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Lord Buckley - “The Hip Gan” - at 2:22 sync with “Grapheme” (below) at 3:22
Dj Spooky That Subliminal Kid - “Grapheme” - beat starts at 3:22, sync with “Hip Gan” at 2:22
Thank you for explaining your code name! I was wondering where the blood thing came from... you know a Blood Trip, lol.