Published in the December 2008 issue of DJ Times Magazine
Volume 21 - Number 12
By Jim Tremayne

New York City—Every success has a story—some are just better than others.

Eric Jao’s entry into mainstream MadonnaLand may have come via chance, but it’s not as if he was unprepared for the moment. If luck truly is the residue of design (and perhaps desire), you could say that the 33-year-old Jao (aka DJ Enferno) actually made his own break.

It happened like this: This past spring, Kevin Antunes—Madonna’s musical director—just happened to catch an Enferno gig. Fresh from discussions with Ms. Ciccone to keep an ear out for “cutting-edge” DJ talent, Antunes took a visiting friend to the Blue Martini Lounge in Orlando. After seeing Enferno’s musical mastery that evening—Enferno calls it his Live Remix Project—Antunes put in a good word about him to Madonna, who was preparing a tour to support her upcoming Hard Candy release. Eventually, he got the call. Not quite Lana Turner being discovered in a malt shop, but wildly serendipitous nonetheless.

Once he earned his spot as the DJ for Madonna’s massive “Sticky & Sweet Tour,” Enferno began to participate more in the musical process by helping to re-envision and actually remix certain numbers. One of the results was a modernized version of “Like a Prayer,” which has become the show’s goosebump moment—hands in the air, thousands singing like an arena-sized gospel choir. So far, his input has earned high praise from the Madonna camp.

“I’ve noticed that Eric has a strong sense of musical reverse-engineering,” says Antunes, who also has served as musical director for Justin Timberlake among other huge pop acts. “Under extreme deadlines and indescribable pressure, Eric and I were able to deconstruct and reconstruct some of Madonna’s older hits and give them a new twist—and still have fun doing it. I had asked Eric what he would do with ‘Like a Prayer,’ even though it wasn’t added to the set during rehearsals, and he came up with this mash-up with Meck’s ‘Feel’s Like Home.’ We took that idea, refined it for stage, and it has become that high-energy, show-stopping moment for all of Madonna’s fans.

“While I was working on the main session, Eric was time-compressing, beat-matching, and treating audio pieces for me to lay into the final session for this song, as well as several others. He has redefined the role of a DJ in a touring environment and set the bar tremendously high.”

The whole Madonna discovery story may have Enferno feeling like a lucky star, but his place on the tour is no accident. After years of mobile and club work, the Springfield, Va.-based DJ became interested in turntablism and won the 2003 DMC U.S. Championship, eventually finishing second in that year’s World Finals. He also has a deep background with piano and theater. Fact is, there’s probably no combination of talents that could’ve better prepared him to tour with the massive stage show that is Madonna’s “Sticky & Sweet Tour.” He even gets a front-and-center moment: During “Into the Groove,” he cuts it up in a moving DJ booth, while Madonna gyrates on a pole above him. He’s certainly a long way from doing high-school mobiles.

During a short break in the middle of Madonna’s week of New York area shows, we caught up with DJ Enferno in midtown Manhattan.

DJ Times: What inspired you to DJ?

Enferno: A mobile DJ. I was going to these parties with my sisters and I’d see these two DJs play at the same time. I was about 14 and I was fascinated by how they could go from one song to the next. Later, I started listening to the hip-hop mix shows in D.C. “Wow, not only are the DJs playing great songs, but they’re able to scratch, too.” That was inspiring.

DJ Times: You were already a music fan?

Enferno: Yeah. I used to make mix tapes, kind of like remixes with a boombox, when I was 13 with a blank cassette. You could hit start and it would start on the beat. There was no pop, no discernable difference. So I thought, “Well, let me take parts of songs, just the sections that I like, and put them together.” This is before I ever had turntables.

DJ Times: Tell me about your mobile days.

Enferno: They were mostly high-school dances. The idea came to me when I was 15. I was in Maryland with my parents. They went to lunch and I went to Chuck Levin’s Washington Music Center, which was nearby, to look at keyboards. I saw this guy giving DJ-mix lessons. I was intrigued, so I asked, “Hey, how much for DJ lessons? I wanna learn this!” And he said, “Oh, these aren’t DJ lessons—I’m just doing this for a friend of mine.” I began to pick his brain about how much it would cost to get started. That’s when the seed was planted. I thought, “I could do this!”

DJ Times: You never saw yourself as a DJ?

Enferno: Well, I’d go to parties in my high school and the DJs never blew me away. They’d get up there with their CD players and push play. And I’d never been to a club before because I was too young, but I had an idea of what I wanted to do. So in six months, I negotiated with my parents a plan to buy DJ equipment and to pay them back.

DJ Times: What did you buy?

Enferno: Two Technics with a Numark 19-inch mixer with a sampler button—I forget the model. I had lights—four par cans on trusses. I got an Electro-Voice PA with a Crown amp and a lighting controller that would do chase patterns.

DJ Times: How did your DJ career progress?

Enferno: When I got to college [at the University of Virginia], I started doing more gigs. I made mix tapes on cassette and passed them out—that helped me out a lot. I built up a pretty decent business by my senior year. After college, I moved back to D.C. and I started working at clubs.

DJ Times: How did you move toward scratch DJing and battles?

Enferno: I fell in love with turntablism when my best friend showed me a compilation of videos of the 1997 DJ battles—’97 DMC U.S. Finals, ’97 ITF Categories, ’97 ITF Regionals. I thought, “What is that?” The moves didn’t seem to match the sounds. I’d watch it all day. I learned how to scratch that way and I progressed into beat juggling. I’d rewind and stop the video and learn people’s routines. I’d figure out DJs’ patterns and build around that. That’s where I got the idea to not just play the music, but also perform.

DJ Times: Did the competitive aspects of that scene appeal to you?

Enferno: It was never so much the competition as it was the performance. There is something about getting up there, nervous as I was, and not messing up. It’s months and months of practice for a six-minute routine.

DJ Times: Like figure skating.

Enferno: But you might not even get that far—you may not get past the prelims. At first, I sucked pretty bad, but I was learning. Back then, it wasn’t about winning. It was like, “Can I do this? Can I get it right?” Little by little, I’d get it right. Pretty soon, I’d begin to win DJ battles locally.

DJ Times: Tell me about winning the 2003 DMC U.S. title.

Enferno: I wasn’t trying to win that, but I worked really hard on the routine over the year. I wanted to get up there and do it without messing up. I thought, “My friends are coming—it’s got to be great.” In the finals, I drew the first spot and I nailed it. It was a surreal day because as the day went on and more contestants went on, people came up to me saying, “You know what? You might have a shot of winning it.”

DJ Times: What did winning mean for you?

Enferno: It was a dream come true because I remember how I felt that day. Afterward, I couldn’t fall asleep because I could not believe that I had the DMC jacket. I couldn’t fathom the thought of it.

DJ Times: What do you tell up-and-coming battle jocks?

Enferno: It really would help if you knew how to mix first because it really starts there. You need the tricks and you need the technical skills to win battles. But if you have the foundation with the mixing and, better yet, if you have experience playing in front of people, that helps. You’ll know what an audience wants to hear.

DJ Times: What do you think about the idea of DJ battles with digital gear?

Enferno: It doesn’t seem like something that’s a true DJ battle. I’m all for using technology, but in a competitive sense…

DJ Times: Like acoustic guitars vs. electric guitars?

Enferno: That’s a good analogy, too, but when you see someone using digital technology—in a battle, for example, which is very technical—when you start pushing more buttons and doing movements that people can’t see from a distance, it becomes less obvious what it is that you’re doing. People start questioning. With two pieces of vinyl, you know where you stand.

DJ Times: Explain your Live Remix Project.

Enferno: It’s a combination of a few disciplines. The first part is from music theory—I can read sheet music and I took jazz lessons in piano. I learned scales and the theory behind it. Another discipline is turntablism—the idea that you could take turntables and a mixer and manipulate sound with your hands. It was interesting to take those ideas and come up with a new type of performance. Technology can make that happen with effects processors like the Pioneer units. I can do things in real time.

DJ Times: What’s in that rig?

Enferno: The left side is the turntable side—Technics 1200s, Rane TTM-57 with Serato, Pioneer EFX-500, Korg Kaoss Pad 3. So those are hooked up to the effects sends and are daisy chained. The output of that entire rig goes into the sound card of another laptop. On the right side, I have a laptop with Ableton Live. The output of the Echo Indigo card goes into a Behringer audio mixer. Connected to the laptop are two MIDI controllers, an M-Audio Axiom 25 and an M-Audio Trigger Finger. I have Reason 3.0 with piano and synth patches, Reaktor 5 for synths, and Glitch freeware.

DJ Times: What type of material or performance were you going for?

Enferno: Just songs that I really like. I’d re-work them onstage. In an Ableton Live session, I’ll have four drum loops available to me at all times. I got turned onto Ableton because there were turntablists who were using it like guitar players would use a loop pedal. They were using it to scratch with, so that’s why the laptop.

DJ Times: How did this Madonna tour happen for you?

Enferno: I was playing at a cigar lounge in Orlando called Blue Martini and I was doing a Live Remix Project gig. Kevin Antunes, Madonna’s music director, was there. It was just chance. He doesn’t hang out there, but his wife had friends in from out of town and they wanted to go out. I did my set, no idea he was there. I was at the airport flying back to D.C. the next day and my phone rings while I’m going through security. I let it go to voice mail. I tried to listen, but it was too loud. I see I have a text message, too, and it’s Kevin Antunes, who said he saw my show and to give him a call. I called him and he said, “Hey, I saw that you were using MIDI controllers in your set and could kind of get the gist of what you’re doing…” and so on. Then he told me that he worked for Madonna and they were looking for a DJ and that he’d like to keep me “in the conversation.”

DJ Times: And then?

Enferno: After a couple weeks, he told me to send one of my videos on YouTube to Madonna and I had one that explained exactly what I was doing with my Live Remix Project. He took it to her with a nice email hyping me up. Pretty soon, I got a call for an audition.

DJ Times: What was that like?

Enferno: When I found out about getting the gig, something happened to my blood pressure or something, because I started shaking. I was in the basement, having this conversation with Kevin and I got really cold. I had to go upstairs and put on a sweatshirt and get underneath the covers, I was so affected by it. I had a physical reaction to the whole thing.

DJ Times: And now Madonna puts you front and center in the show.

Enferno: Yeah, I have my moment. It’s flattering. As the tour went on, it wasn’t just the cool turntable tricks that she wanted me to be involved in. She wanted me to get involved in remixing some of the songs for the show. I mean, that’s not exactly what I do…

DJ Times: She wants a DJ’s ears.

Enferno: That’s exactly what it was. It’s me, Kevin and her—we’ll work on a track with some direction and she’ll get it and maybe say, “I can’t believe I didn’t think of that.” There were a lot of moments like that. Then it’ll progress and we’ll have a nice finished product at the end. She knows what she doesn’t like, but it’s actually very easy to take direction from her because she’s very easy to work with.

DJ Times: Was it at all intimidating?

Enferno: It was intimidating at first because she’s someone I’ve been aware of all my life. I was a little star-struck, but that went away. Kevin told me it would be like that, but he said, “Let it all out, but when you get to the gig, be cool and focus.”

DJ Times: The MSG concert I saw was like a Broadway show on steroids. They don’t let the audience get bored for five seconds. For a massive thing like this, there’s obviously a lot of prep work and a lot of direction.

Enferno: Funny thing is, I wasn’t a stranger to taking direction in the past. I’ve had music teachers and I was involved in musical theater. If I look back on what I’ve done since I’m a kid, it’s crazy. If I hadn’t learned piano, I wouldn’t be able to speak the same musical language that Kevin speaks when we’re working. I took karate as a kid and made black belt. That kind of discipline works into what I’m doing now. And with acting in theater, there are a lot of similarities—you have a director.

DJ Times: When you “have your moment” during “Into the Groove,” how tough is it cutting and scratching while Madonna is dancing on your DJ booth, which is also moving?

Enferno: How can I do the scratches and have the record not skip? [Laughs] That was my dilemma. I thought about it and I know that with Serato, in Relative Mode, it tracks the forward-and-backward movement, but it doesn’t track the needle jumping around. The downfall of that is if it does jump around too much, you’re going to get “sticker drift,” where the needle isn’t going to line up every time.

DJ Times: So what did you do?

Enferno: From my scratch battles, I knew about “skipless” scratch records. These are records that people use in their routines. QBert has made a lot of them and I think he pioneered that technique of pressing records that literally had skipless samples. Imagine having one long sample. In my case, the sample is 15 minutes long. It’s timed so that the sample’s at this part of the axis or that part of the axis or the other part. Rather than cutting the pie into thirds, the same sample repeats itself at each one of these parts. It doesn’t matter if the DJ booth shakes, it’s always going to land on the same spot, relative to that sticker. The truth of it is, the needle does jump and skip, but the sound is exactly the same. They made the riser really solid, too. She’s jumping around, but the music doesn’t perceptively skip.

DJ Times: Speaking of remixing Madonna’s material for the show, what did you want to bring to it?

Enferno: It’s a sense of being current. These are classic tracks that you can’t really make better, other than to make a different presentation and make it sound like something that people would listen to at clubs. For example, for “Like a Prayer,” I thought it would go really well with Felix’s “Don’t You Want My Love.” They were in the same key and I started working around that. Then I realized that Meck had come out with a version from that, “Feels Like Home.” Wait a minute! “Like a Prayer” has similar lyrics, same key…

DJ Times: For the Madison Square Garden show, that new version of “Like a Prayer” seemed to be the moment when the audience was going bananas the most. It was loud, like a Rangers game. It was wild.

Enferno: Imagine doing that in front of 75,000 people. When they put their hands up in the air as far as you can see, they don’t even look like people anymore. It looks like fields of wheat. [Laughs] It’s mindblowing. I still get goosebumps thinking about that.

DJ Times: Even on this tour, you’re still playing club gigs.

Enferno: Lots of fun. I play lots of musical genres. The line has been blurred musically. The idea of open format has become accepted and I get a lot more enjoyment out of doing gigs with an open format and moving up and down the BPM scale, but doing it where everyone can get into it. I mean, I’ll find a song like “Jammin’” by Bob Marley, which is a slow song, and drop it at the right time, people lose it.

DJ Times: You seem to play everything.

Enferno: See, open format and mash-up get confused. It’s not always about playing a pre-recorded mash-up. In a two-hour set, I can count the mash-ups I play on two hands. If I hear a DJ play nothing but mash-ups, I lose interest. You have to connect the songs by beat, but also by key. Some songs are incompatible, unless you find a section of the song, maybe a break, where you mix and there are no notes clashing.

DJ Times: What makes a good DJ?

Enferno: In a club environment, a DJ’s job is to provide a soundtrack to the evening. A good DJ can pull emotions from the crowd, depending on what he plays. You don’t have to be an open-format DJ—you can be any style. It’s also about controlling the crowd without them knowing they’re being controlled. It’s a dance: You give, they take, then they give back to you. A good DJ will know how far they can go, depending on the crowd. Every party is different.

DJ Times: For any DJ who wants to move up the ladder, what’s your advice?

Enferno: You have to be balanced in every respect. As a DJ, you have to program and have the technical skills to perform. But you also should learn how to network and identify the people you need to know to get the gigs you want. If you don’t, you’re still spinning in your basement.