Like a Scientist

When I was putting together my lists for the end of the year, I noticed one par­tic­u­lar name that kept com­ing up again and again: Starkey. It led me to think­ing about all of his out­put for 2010 and even­tu­ally the idea of a most valu­able player in bass music formed. I can’t think of any­one more deserv­ing. Read why.

Pho­to­graph by Dan Wilton

The Most Valu­able Player: Starkey

“The hard­est work­ing man in bass” is how I would char­ac­ter­ize Starkey. Aside from his work as Starkey, Paul Geissinger also teaches music pro­duc­tion and busi­ness at the Uni­ver­sity of the Arts in Philadel­phia, which I can only imag­ine plays havoc with his relent­less tour­ing and record­ing sched­ule. Just look at his out­put for Planet Mu in 2010: He released the “Stars” sin­gle, remixed Rudi Zygadlo, and unleashed the gigan­tic Ear Drums and Black Holes album. Before the year was over, he put out an extra long EP called Space Trai­tor Vol. 1 on Civil Music, and then went straight into record­ing Vol. 2. He did free releases for Amon Tobin’s site (Uni­verse EP), FACT (“Gasp­ing For Air In This Vor­tex”), and Retronyms (Outer Spaces EP) — full dis­clo­sure: I orga­nized that last one. In the midst of this, he flew over to the UK to pro­duce a song in two hours for Mary Anne Hobbs’ Build­ing The Beat special.

When he’s not doing all of this, he also co-runs Seclusasis and Slit Jockey, par­tic­i­pates in the Who Run It? club night, does a monthly radio show for Sub.fm, and did a ter­ri­fy­ing amount of mixes for var­i­ous blogs and mag­a­zines. He remixed Inner­par­tysys­tem (the bru­tal “Amer­i­can Trash”), Rod Azlan, Bon Iver, the Con­stel­la­tions, Stagga, and did pro­duc­tion for Mav­er­ick Sabre. What the fuck? When does this guy sleep?

Any­way, I never thought I would sin­gle out one per­son, but the sheer ded­i­ca­tion and work ethic that Starkey brings to his music kind of astounded me.