Tulsa’s known nationwide for its live music scene. Every night of the week, bands of all stripes take the stage and create a sonic undercurrent (a little tonk, a little rap, a little metal, and a whole lot else) that’s its own kind of 21st century Tulsa signature sound. But there’s another music scene here that’s just as vibrant. It’s led by people who—without drumsticks, guitars, or microphones—can get you moving like no one else.
Meet your local house and techno DJs. From Soundpony to St. Vitus, dance music is seeing a renaissance around here lately, as DJs return to their decks post-pandemic and continue building on a deep history of dance club masters who’ve kept this city sweating for decades. As more and more DJ nights flood into our listings, we thought we’d introduce you to a few of these wizards and find out more about what they do, how they do it and why they’re, frankly, essential to the vibe of the city.
Far be it from us to define what makes a great DJ. You know it when you feel it. How the energy of a room builds and shifts without you realizing how it’s happening. How just when you think you can’t dance anymore, you’re still out there for just one … more … song. How when it’s working, it’s seamless—seemingly effortless.
Just like anything that looks easy, DJing is a craft mastered by countless hours of practice and experience, driven by a passion for the music. Tulsa DJs like Sweet Baby Jaysus, Darku J, Moody, Kylie, Dr. View, Afistaface, Doc Free, Ject, Xylo Sesame, Robbo, and many more have spoiled us rotten through their years of work in all sorts of venues, with all sorts of musical flavors, for all sorts of crowds. (Honestly, we do not deserve them.)
For Darku, who DJs under the name HeartWerk (“moody house music from someone who cares”), it’s a craft he’s been practicing since he was a teenager. “I bought some turntables and just broke a bunch of record needles, messing around,” he said. “YouTube wasn't even around. I would go to Soundpony, underage, and literally just stand in the window and watch DJ Moody, and five hours would go by and I didn't even realize it. I was 21 before I knew where the toilets were in Soundpony. I would just stay right there watching him. That's all I cared about. If I could find any videos on the internet of people playing, they were usually terrible quality, but I would just really study what it was that they were doing and then try and mimic it at home.”
Darku’s been paying his bills by DJing since he was 16. He’s worked nonstop in Tulsa, as well as in cities like New York and Austin, and also produces music (his own and others’—don’t miss his remix of this track by Branjae). DJ Foxy’s been at it nearly as long, coming to the decks from gaming, playing in marching band drumlines and studying music technology. (His day job is in communications.) House and techno music may be the heartbeat of a dance club, he said, but disco is its soul and foundation. “If you want to understand house, techno, any of the dance music, learn disco. It’s the blueprint,” he said.
Darku and Foxy have seen plenty of changes to the local scene over the years. Tulsa may not be as well known for dance music as it is for other genres, but according to Darku, that hasn’t always been the case. “A lot of people don't realize Tulsa actually had a thriving electronic music scene up until about the early 2000s,” he said. “That's when police crackdowns on raves and things like that started really going into effect.” The federal RAVE Act of 2003 was widely seen as targeting dance clubs in particular, and had a chilling effect on the scene.
Recent years have seen regular one-night events appear in multi-use venues (such as Soundpony’s ongoing Pony Disco Club, much loved by Darku and crew), where techno is often on a rotation with other styles of music throughout the week. “It’s jazz, hip hop, bluegrass, a bunch of stuff that doesn't really lead into any kind of continuity,” Darku explained.
The advent of St. Vitus in 2020–the first Oklahoma club in recent memory exclusively dedicated to house/techno/dance music, brought new opportunities for DJs. “I think Vitus opening—having a professional sound system, a super professional environment instead of a DIY kind of space, and going four nights a week with a DJ doing four-hour sets as opposed to 30 minutes or an hour—I think that made a lot of people around here start to realize this isn't just like a little fad or some kind of niche commodity on the side,” Darku said. “House music, dance music, techno music, disco music is a thing. We have places that actually facilitate what we do now. People know that they can go to Vitus and they're gonna hear house and they're gonna hear techno. They know what to expect when they go there.”
This commitment to giving DJs ample time, space and resources to work goes hand in hand with a deep respect for the work itself. Foxy held up a tiny flash drive: “There are about 9,000 songs on that,” he said. The DJ is responsible not just for purchasing that music but also understanding how to work the sound system, how to read the room, how to choose the right track for the right moment, how to create seamless transitions (whether on digital or vinyl) and on and on. “Selecting tracks would be like choreography,” Foxy explained. “What makes you do one thing as opposed to another? You build a story and then the climax and all that stuff. Each track has a specific quality and then there's multiple qualities to a track. You can line them up next to the ones that are closest and it’s like a big puzzle. And then you have an overall effect that can change over the course of the night.”
“I would say techno got a bad rap before,” Foxy said. DJ Sydney Lee—new to the local scene and rising fast—is excited to see that perception changing. “A lot of people think of DJs as these party people who, like, wreck furniture and say derogatory things on a microphone,” she said. “Most DJs are just good, normal people who just wanna play good music with their friends and their community. I do feel like DJs can sometimes get a bad rap. I've also heard people who are more willing to hire live bands versus a DJ because they think for sure the DJ will bring out this crowd that’s like—not only is the DJ reckless, but the crowd is too. But if you get people like Foxy and Darku, the people that they're bringing are committed to music and just want to dance and have a good time. ”
Sydney credits those two for mentoring her as she broke into the DJ scene. It’s a lot more work than people might realize. “I'll work Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Monday, usually, for around four hours each time. So that's 16 hours a week right there, and people think that I just work 16 hours a week, but it's like, I have to put hours into finding new music, downloading the music, organizing it. I'm my own promoter. I'm my own networker. I was bringing two giant speakers with me, a giant sub and my controller that's way too big. That setup alone is an extra hour before and an hour after. And people truthfully don't realize you can't just decide to be a DJ and just plug in whatever music. There's so much more to it, if you want to do it long term.” Not to mention the hurdles that come with being a woman in a traditionally male-dominated field. “Darku and Foxy are not gatekeeper-y at all, which at least in my experience is a pretty big problem in the industry,” she said.
Regular meet-ups at St. Vitus allow veterans to extend their mentorship and goodwill to others in the scene who might just be getting started. Newcomers can learn how to use the club’s world-class DJ equipment with experienced professionals’ guidance. “We can answer any questions you have,” Darku said. “By bringing together people who are consistently gigging with people who have never played a gig, you can get them on the same level of just talking about things like, ‘What do I need to do to book my first show?’”
Along with greater acceptance of DJing as a legitimate form of musical craft, Tulsa is seeing more and more innovation in the scene as a whole. Recent collaborative art and fashion shows featuring DJs bring to mind New York in the 1970s and ‘80s, where fashion and music collided on the dance floor. (Aaron Whisner of the street art collective Clean Hands did some of the graphic design and the bathroom murals at St. Vitus.) “It's almost like every year it resets with the new kids that come in,” Sydney said.
At the end of the day, a DJ’s job is to hold space for people to find themselves on a dance floor—and in times like these, that’s as important a job as any. “You see people coming in to Vitus who feel completely open to be on the outside who they feel on the inside,” Sydney continued. “And that's just coming out more and more and more. It seems like Vitus is one of the most safe places where people feel like they can be that. In this scene it's all accepted. I get reminded every single day of the crazy amount of talent that we have here. Tulsa is a really special place. It has so much potential to just keep getting better and better and more creative—to really show what the people are about. I think every year we're hopefully getting closer to that.”
