Keep your hands down—that’s the first rule of DJing according to Felix Da Housecat.

“If people on the floor see you panic while you’re DJing, they’ll eat you alive,” warns Da Housecat (aka 29-year-old Felix Stallings). “I see other DJs and how silly they look when they panic, putting their hands up, waving their hands around and making a scene. I say, ‘Just get over it.’”Ergo…keep your hands down.

In addition to “keep your hands down,” there are other, more abstract axioms that can be perfectly adapted to meet the challenges of DJing in an unfamiliar booth.

“I was spinning in South America, in Brazil recently, and while I was DJing, the club started dropping these balloons and confetti from above me, and I knew this stuff was going to hit the turntables,” says Felix. “It did, and it just slid the needle off the record. I just looked out at the crowd and started smiling, and the crowd cheered. I put the needle back on the record and started from the beginning, and they just went crazy. You can’t panic; you’ve got to cool out.”

Ergo…cool out.

Of course, there are times when Felix wants to freak out. But Housecats don’t play that way. “There have definitely been times when I’ve wanted to freak out,” says Felix. “I’ve had to consciously control even the expressions on my face, like, if a needle is popping, I’ll point my finger at the record and just shoot it. That usually lets the crowd know that it’s the equipment, not me.

“Just last week, I was playing ‘Video Clash’ by Lil’ Louis,” says Felix. “And thank God the record is long, because something happened with the other turntable—the right speaker went out on the other deck. So ‘Video Clash’ is about to run out, everybody’s jumping up and down, and I just cut it, to silence, and I went back to the beginning of the record, and then it almost ran out again, and I knew I couldn’t do the repeat again, so I told them to plug it back up and I mixed the other record in and I came back with the left while it was broke.”

Felix Da Housecat can certainly be forgiven for any DJ-related snafus. After all, he’s a producer first, a DJ second. And despite his Chicago house music, post-DJ Pierre, Marshall Jefferson, Frankie Knuckles pedigree, Felix doesn’t even own turntables. “I started off as a producer and I was talked into DJing,” he says. “I learned as I was booked. When I first started, I was doing fade and cue, and when people started booing me and talking [bad] about me, I was like, ‘OK, let’s try to work this.’ I kept doing it until I got it locked.”

On a recent night, to get a read on his crowd, Felix dropped out the vocals during the chorus of The Clash’s “Rock the Casbah.” Says Felix: “I’ll drop out the vocals to see if people are singing out the chorus, to see if they’re alive, but I’ll also do it to see if they’re feeling what I’m feeling, to get them to be part of the party. Or to see if they’re educated and if they know the song, because, believe it or not, some of these younger generation kids never knew about these songs.”

And, of course, Felix will drop “Silver Screen Shower Scene,” the wonderfully Euro-trash electro tune with Miss Kittin on vocals from his award-winning, retro-electro album, Kitten and Thee Glitz (Cube/Emperor Norton).

“If they’re going to pay me to play records for a few hours, I’ll do it,” he says. “But the super check, that’s with the producing. The Glitz album, that was not done for the money, but when it took off in America, I was shocked. I thought, ‘What is this world coming to?’”

– Brian O’Connor