As Polywog herself will tell you, it takes a fearless person to attempt what she’s managed to accomplish over the past few decades in dance music. Coming out of the early ’90s San Francisco rave scene, Polywog knew she would need to stand out from other DJs, so she got to work on developing a style that incorporated elements of breakbeat, electro, house, ambient and classic rock.

“I realized that I didn’t want to be an imitator,” she says of her DJ beginnings. “There are people out there who can beat-match house music flawlessly, and they always get all the new records. And I thought, ‘Well, why do I want to chase that when other people are doing it really well? I just want to bring my own statement into it.’ And I also realized just through talking with lots of different people as well that I don’t think that one style speaks to every person in the room, unless you’ve got a room full of people that definitely wanna hear jungle or they wanna hear house music. But even then, if you do a cross-section or a poll, the influences that people appreciate is pretty vast. So my kind of mission is to be this genre-blender, a kind of a bridge between the past and the now, looking towards the future.”

Since then, she’s managed to build a career out of her own eccentricity, logging in time on 1997’s Lollapalooza and Jane’s Addiction tours and starring as one of the party DJs in the 2000 rave film Groove. (The film includes “Frogs in the Fog,” a tune Polywog co-produced with cohorts Platypus and Shranny – known collectively as P.P.S.) Polywog has also directed her fame back towards the up-and-coming female jocks in the Bay Area with her role in reviving the female DJ collective Sister, out of the ashes of the pioneering club night Your Sister’s House.

“The women know you don’t have to stay in a tight relationship with the collective,” she says. “It’s mainly to give talented women a place to play and then help to promote them. But Sister has really grown leaps and bounds beyond what Your Sister’s House did. We’ve got the website [www.sistersf.com] that’s really doing well and [there are] so many new female DJs, and they’re all really talented. I guess I should have credit for starting it back, but at the same time, the collective, they did most of the work. And one way or the other, it would have happened. It was just a good timing thing and it’s been going strong for three years now.”

Currently, Polywog is learning the ins and outs of producing. She jams with her band Polywog and the Tadpoles – which includes several Sister members – at her weekly club night Polywog’s Playhouse and hopes to record them later this year. As for DJing, she raves about the new Stanton turntable and its backward playback capabilities. But she still hasn’t found a mixer that suits her. “I have not yet found a mixer that I find is the most awesome mixer,” she says. “I work with Vestax. On the Jane’s tour, they gave me a Rane to start with, and Vestax said, ‘Hey, try out this mixer.’ And I’m getting a buzz on it. I’m getting buzzes on my Vestax PM-17A mixer here at home, and I don’t know what the deal is, but I still like it, because it has effects in and out and I can separately effect the mic line and the three channels on there. I’ll work with any mixer they’ve got. I prefer something with really good handling. But as long as it works!”

As flamboyant as she may be in style and selection, Polywog believes “the main thing is to be comfortable, because if someone wants to put on a big silver wig, and they’re not comfortable, then that will reflect as well [in their performance]. To be noticed, it does take a sense of fearlessness and also a willingness to fall on your face. It’s mainly just being persistent. And the bottom line, for a DJ to be successful, they’ve got to have a real passion for music – or an extreme passion for money! But I don’t think that’s the main thing. The main thing is a real passion for music, and that will drive everything.”

– Justin Hampton