“So, get this!” Craze, also known as Arist Delgado to his mom, tells us, wide-eyed. Well, we suspect he’s wide-eyed. His eyes are safely concealed behind a pair of Ray Bans throughout the interview – the ones with the camera set into the frame. He keeps clicking away through the early evening, swiveling his head like a tripod, documenting everything while taking it all in.
There’s a lot to take in: the sun setting beyond District 4’s apartment blocks, the already-iconic HỢP 合 DJ booth pulsing gently before tonight’s big event, and Peronis making the rounds to ease the jet lag from his Maldives flight, sharing anecdotes about the first time he played here about ten years ago, and other luminaries who’ve landed in the city, like drum & bass don Goldie. “So get this!” he repeats for emphasis, “Goldie gave my daughter her DJ name, can you believe that?” They were in Miami when she’d confided in the drum & bass legend about wanting to replace her current name. “‘Orchid,’ Goldie decided it immediately, right there and then!” Craze exclaims.
DJ Craze: The Groundbreaking Turntablist
The B2B sets he’s co-hosted with his daughter, now 25 and still performing as DJ Orchid, help frame the timeline of his remarkable career – she was born just days before he defended his title in 1999. Until 2020, he stood alone as the only solo DJ to claim the DMC World DJ Championships trophy three consecutive times, delivering groundbreaking turntablist performances under immense pressure.
The Goldie anecdote is a precursor to a resume reads like a who’s who of music industry achievements: Kanye West’s DJ for the 2008 Glow In The Dark Tour, Yelawolf’s DJ for the 2011 ‘Hard White Tour,’ and co-founder of Slow Roast Records alongside DJ Kill The Noise. The label, distributed by Fool’s Gold (A-Trak and Nick Catchdubs’ imprint), adds another layer to his connections – Craze was once part of the Allies crew with A-Trak and Infamous.
Mesmerizing Displays Of Beat Juggling And Scratching
Recently, he released ‘Tablism.’ It serves as both tribute and masterclass to the artform. ‘Turntablism. The art of manipulating sound in the spirit of a musical instrument using turntables, an audio mixer and vinyl,’ his voice declares at the track’s opening. “And if you’re not doing it to be the best you can be…what are we doing here,” he continues, before launching into a mesmerizing display of beat juggling and scratching.
“I just do it to f&ck with people now, you know, just to say ‘hey, I’m still around,'” he laughs, though his posture quickly stiffens at the mention of his achievements. “Man, I wanna beat everyone though when it comes to turntablism,” he nods, momentarily dropping the kind of warm smile from someone from Florida.
DJ Craze’s Pure Obsession And Fierce Competitiveness
Only pure obsession and fierce competitiveness could explain his 1998 to 2000 dominance, at age 22. This period marked turntablism’s golden age, with the term itself only popularized around 1995 by DJ Babu of the Beat Junkies and Dilated Peoples, after Luis Quintanilla of the Invisibl Skratch Piklz coined it. The term distinguished between traditional mixing DJs and those who transformed the equipment into instruments for creating entirely new sounds.
Turntablism embraces showmanship – think Harlem Globetrotters with turntables. DJs reach under legs and behind backs to manipulate the fader, and footage from 1999 shows Craze pioneering the back scratch, contorting himself backward against the turntable.
Behind his smile and Ray Bans lurks a vulnerability. He’s since opened up about the perfect storm of pressures: his daughter’s birth, anxiety attacks that hospitalized him, and the weight of defending his title after the Allies’ loss to the Skratch Perverts the previous night. His wrists bear tattoos that he glances at during moments of anxiety. They’ve been helping, he says.
That’s How You Cook Beats!
He has others too, and, like his DMC titles – part of a haul of 12 individual titles across his career – they came during a short two or three year period. “I’d turned 30,” he remembers, looking at the back of his hands where he got his first tattoos. He’d had enough time to take in his achievements by then, and he got them to signify how magic his hands were – a nightly blur of scratching and fading. Then he kept on going. There’s the logo for Slow Roast Records, so called: “because that’s how you cook beats!” He puts his arms together to show that there’s ‘Miami’ written down one forearm and ‘Bass’ down the other – the genre of music from his adopted hometown on the East Coast driven by the 808 that influenced underground electronic music far beyond its birthplace.
It still figures in his sets, along with an eclectic mix of hip-hop, drum n bass, and breaks depending on his mood or whatever beats he’s been cooking that he’s been desperate to share with an audience. He just came from The Maldives, where he got to take a four-night break at the spontaneous invitation of the hotel, who discovered he was in the region: “And I’m by the pool…still making beats,” he shrugs – a gesture that he’s become synonymous with. There’s a tattoo, probably his favorite, of the shrug emoticon nonchalant raising its shoulders to the heavens spread down his left arm. “Because after everything I was just like f&ck it,” he says happily, doing an exaggerated shrug for good measure.
The GOAT Signing Off
The shrug says it all – a gesture that’s become as much his signature as those lightning-fast hands that redefined what was possible with two turntables and a mixer. From DMC champion to Kanye’s tour DJ, from anxious defender of titles to zen master of the craft, Craze has lived many lives behind the decks. Now, as the setting sun’s rays catch his Ray Bans and the HỢP 合 booth pulses with promise, he’s neither running from nor chasing his legacy – just making beats by the pool, teaching his daughter the trade, and letting his tattoos tell their story. Like his famous back scratch, he’s come full circle, finding peace in the perpetual motion of vinyl.
Would he get any more tattoos, we wonder finally. “I keep threatening my daughter that I’m going to get the goat emoji under my left eye,” he breaks out laughing again. “I mean, I am the GOAT,” he shrugs one last time, at ease with his place in the pantheon of turntablism greats.
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