In its 10 years, the San Francisco-based Wicked Sound System has become one of the most respected forces in West Coast house music. The four DJs at the core of the group – Garth, Jenö, Markie and Thomas (since relocated to New York) – earned their way into the hearts of early Bay Area ravers with their legendary Full Moon parties, monthly Wicked events and Come-Unity weeklies.

But this powerful collective didn’t begin to penetrate further reaches of the country until 1995. At that point they had saved up the money to buy the sound system they needed, bought a 1947 Greyhound bus and took their vibe on the road. Once the rest of the country heard Wicked’s richly diverse house sounds, word traveled fast and the DJ quartet was no longer the Bay Area’s best-kept secret.

By this point, the crew was definitely thinking about branching out to original production. Pooling their funds together, the four bought a studio. Timeshare, however, was not very conducive to productivity, so they divided up the equipment. The first release on Wicked Records was Garth and E.T.I.’s “20 Minutes Of Disco Glory” in 1996. The track took six months to complete, but it has been the most successful of their releases and seems to have numerous lives as it turns up on compilation CDs and soundtracks to this day.

Through these endeavors, however, it soon became apparent that Garth was the only member of the collective that was ready to start releasing material on a regular basis. Since his compositions were not representing the entire group, it seemed more appropriate to establish his own label. Named with the Wicked tour bus in mind, Grayhound Recordings was born in 1998.

When Garth began to build his own studio, he started only with monitors and effects he inherited from the Wicked studio. Since then, he’s steadily added on, with a Soundcraft 248 mixing console being his newest purchase – he’d used a Mackie 24-channel desk for the last three years. Other items include a Mackie 84 speaker, a Power Mac 7100 with Logic Audio, an E-Mu E64 sampler, a Nord Lead, two DB2s, a Roland Space Echo with an old analog tape delay, a Roland 303, a drum station with all the old sounds from the 808 and the 909, classic keys console for strings, and a Joe Meek lead box VC6 for the mic pre-amp into which he plugs everything for on-the-spot processing.

The first few releases on Grayhound were tracks that Garth had done under various monikers and the productions were varied in style. Garth worked as Crosstown Traffic with a dub disco bent and as Rocket with Eric James of E.T.I. with a more tech-y leaning. Today, Crosstown Traffic is no longer, while Rocket has become Garth’s main production project. Growing up in London, England, and being exposed to reggae sound systems, plus dub, punk and funk have greatly influenced the tracks Garth puts together.

“I prefer working with somebody else just because it’s more fun,” says Garth. “You’re down in the studio and it’s instant feedback. It’s interesting to see what the two minds can come up with. I can come up with an idea and if it’s crap, we just cut it dead, the two of us. Instead of spending hours honing in on that one thing and maybe trying to work at it, you just cut it out and you move on.

“Whenever we do a track with Rocket, there’s definitely signature sounds, but we try to push the envelope a little bit. It’s heavy, funky, a little bit punky, if at all possible, in the house realm. We always use the house tempo. To me, that’s the sexy tempo. If you can get people dancing to your music, it’s a bit more effective. If you want a good looking crowd that are coming out to have fun, not just like trainspot, you’ve got to make sexy music.”

Garth’s latest mix CD, Vol. 3 – San Francisco Sessions (OM Records), is another example of his spinning ingenuity. Taking into consideration that mix CDs are listened to at home and in the car, Garth starts gently and slowly taking the listener through various stages and tempos. Utilizing his broad musical range, there are dub influences (Juan Trip’s “Shadows”) as well as jazzy flavors (Bibi’s “Summer”) in the mix. The middle of the CD gets quite pumping and then comes down again. It’s a formula that has proven to be successful at Wicked parties, the places where Garth made his name.

“What’s interesting about Wicked is that we mix it all up together so that it all flows and you don’t even question it,” Garth says. “You don’t think, ‘They sounded weird together. That was an interesting mix of music,’ which is perfect for house anyway. House, to me, is just a tempo. It’s a frame of reference for all the influences that get sampled in the music.”

– Lily Moayeri