Samaira Wilson speaks with Jesús Hilario-Reyes about the nitty-gritty of DJ technology, maintaining dexterity across disciplines, the conditions of their work, and how their double life came to be.
At peak dawn hours, you can find Jesús Hilario-Reyes, under the pseudonym MORENXXX, in a DJ booth playing their latest n’ greatest set for a dancefloor full of ragers. During daylight, you can catch them in the studio, dripped in Kevlar-threaded welding garb, sparks flying as they work with steel. Hilario-Reyes, a self-determined anti-disciplinarian, draws on a spectrum of skills at will, whether it be sculpture, sound, performance, or expanded cinema. Their core motivation stems from their affinity for nightlife, metalbending, and sound engineering, which they use to investigate communal embodiment and how objecthood shapes cultural-ecological realities. Together, we spoke about the sublayers of the club, the ideologies they hold close, instruments of natural disaster, the motifs of their practice, the freakability of techno, and the research that informs their latest work in the Fade group exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem (open until September 6th).
Samaira Wilson: What came first, DJing or art?
Jesús Hilario-Reyes: Art, for sure. I’ve grown up drawing and painting, and I knew I wanted to be an artist early on. I went to undergrad at SAIC in Chicago, where I primarily worked in performance and sculpture. I went in intending to paint. But that quickly died down. I don’t know. I think I was on the painting is dead tip. My cousin took me to my first rave when I was 12. So, that experience really informed my fascination with nightlife. In undergrad, I went out a lot. There was a rumor about me that was like, “Jesús is either in the club or in the studio.” Which I initially found annoying, because I’m like, let me have fun. I was a dancer before I was a DJ, and that, to me, should be a requirement. This relationship to the club vs. studio has been long-standing and has evolved to be such a fierce entanglement – in which they’ve become a symbiotic practice. A former professor of mine called it a ‘push card,’ something that fuels and inspires the other and provides reason for what we make and why.
SW: How’d you know you were good at it?
JHR: I don’t think I was that great in the beginning – at least to my current standards. There are very rare occasions where you come right out of the bat swinging, knowing exactly what it is you offer. I began DJing in a different era; it was when deconstructed club was the method in which people played. Sets were usually an hour long, so you had to come in and gag it really quickly. I’ve evolved to treat my sets as a long-form poem; there are ways in which you can make time feel so slow, or so fast. In studying DJs I look up to, I acquired many skills I use today. I have this spiral fx trick I picked up from watching Honey Dijon play at Smartbar. I’ve come to add to the technique and tweak it, and it has become a sort of signature of mine. With anything, devotion and discipline produce technical excellence, and I’ve really seen how my skills have honed to the point where they’re at now. DJ technology is really capacious; you can really stretch music into landscapes. But I think what makes someone good is that you kind of have to be a little bit psychic, and I’ve said this before in another interview – but you have to be able to tap into the energetic field that allows you to interpret the thousands of decisions you make behind the deck into something worthwhile – into something brutal and spirited.
SW: Yeah, and its temperature checking a little bit.
JHR: For sure. I will always be a student; I make it a priority to witness other DJs, and not just show up to my own gigs. So, I’m out a lot, which I think is a part of the gig. That feels rewarding because I treat it as research – and that makes me feel productive; it’s a wellspring I can tap into, but also feed into. I’m not just taking but equally contributing to the wellspring.
SW: Are you looking for ideas for meaning or medium?
JHR: Both. Aside from being in the studio or the club, I’m reading a lot. I read lots of theory, critical essays, and poetry. This helps me build a cartography of thought in which I can align myself with – along with other artists and writers. I think that’s the best way to go about it, instead of acting as if I came up with this out of nowhere. We’re all existing within a rhizome; we’re all making at once and drawing from different or the same sources. So, it’s bound to be resonant.
When I get epiphanies or revelations on a dance floor, it’s more about affect, how do I make this feeling or visual tangible? Most of the work I’ve been doing relates specifically to nightlife – or the ‘night’ in general. It comes from my investment in lightness and darkness. Light is the carceral element that defines where one ends and begins – because you can literally see where you start and end, this is the defining and also limiting quality of light. Whereas darkness is about the expansion of the self, because you can’t distinguish yourself from the environment. That play is key in clubs and warehouses in which raves are organized, because it’s such a built environment. There are lighting systems; there’s fog. That play between embodiment and disembodiment becomes a necessary tool for blurring. There are drugs, of course, but there are different types of socialites at play that promote that slippage between the individual and the communal embodiment. That, to me, relates to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, where he discusses the exact phenomenon of darkness. This expansion is equally as terrifying as it is liberating. Also, in Roger Callois’ essay Mimicry and Legendary Psychistania, he proposes that mimicry and camouflage are not only survival tactics but also a form of erotic joy between an organism and its environment. So, when I’m going out, I can see this phenomenon wake something up within people.
SW: Wow, you just broke down the night club experience layer by layer. Using Nowadays, the club you DJ at as an example, it’s smoky, and I love that they don’t let you pull out your phone on the dancefloor. It forces presence and a sort of collective privacy. Sometimes when it’s packed, you’re pressed against people like you’re one big body. I read somewhere you said it’s blurring the line between the individual and the group. After hearing you talk about it, you are pretty much studying human behavior. It’s interesting because people don’t always know what they’re doing or why they’re seduced by everything happening.
JHR: Yeah. I don’t always want to intellectualize it, but that’s just my response to everything, to be honest. I think the entire experience is manufactured. The club is considering how much fog to buy and how much to invest in its lighting resources. How much money goes into the sound system? They have to ‘pump’ the utopian idea so people feel a sense of belonging and safety in this space. And that’s not to say that these aren’t real emotions that people have, because they are – I’ve felt transcended by many sets. And these experiences are what bring people there and keep them there.
I’m obsessed with all the language and terminology for lighting and sound equipment. The hurricane motif has been a constant throughout my practice for a long time. I’m from Puerto Rico, and one of the main reasons my family moved to the States was because of hurricanes. In this obsession, I’m thinking about what makes people move. In one context, the siren promotes large-scale movement, urging people to move away from danger or seek safety, but within the context of the club, where you see it sampled in music, it becomes a really climactic tool that can create moments of rupture and escalation. So, there’s a metabolizing of language. I use the word “metabolize” because one devours the other; the siren exists because of the industrial revolution; its implementation in public space was due to war and a potential attack, and was then legalized for repurposing as tornado and hurricane sirens. The siren becomes one of the first experiences of ‘electronicmusic’ for the masses. The siren is then sampled into production equipment and so on. You see the hurricane show up in the fog machine, Chauvert DJ Hurricane 1200, 1600, 2000, etc. Hurricane bubble haze…. You also see it within the fans – Cyclone 3000. Even in ballroom culture, ‘here comes the hurricane bitch! Katrina, Katrina, Katrina!’
SW: Yesss! The signal results in an action; it’s a structure. When a siren rings, you’re expected to leave. Same for the dance floor, you’re expected to dance. We’re being told what to do.
JHR: For sure, for sure. That just reminded me of something – I was talking with my good sis and brilliant mind, Yesenia Rojas, who has this innate and beautiful criticality up her sleeve – it’s a bit freaky but is something I really admire her for. When I was showing her what I was making for The Studio Museum’s Fade show. She said, “Alarms of any kind litigate the existence of the violence. Seeing a prisoner escape horn is a reminder that prisons and the prisoner exist; hurricane sirens make hurricanes physical even when they’re not around.” Which further complicates and articulates the type of matrimony you bring up. But it is something I was grappling with in the making of that work, this paradox in which tools of distress are consequently bound to their subjects. They actualize the victim; they actually capture modality; they actualize the fugitive. I don’t necessarily think that that’s what the work is doing, but it is something I should be wary of when referring to these technologies. Or articulating their image. But honestly, that entanglement to me makes the work more ‘real’ for lack of better words. It’s a grounding device. The Mangrove is something that we haven’t talked about, but it’s one that informs my formal decisions, the sort of entanglements that I’m…
SW: Mangrove?
JHR: A mangrove is a type of tree that exists on the edge where the land meets water. It has a really intense root system. That environment has been historically used by many maroon communities in the Caribbean and the American South. It’s been a site of disappearance; mangroves offer a barrier or threshold into which one can disappear. I’m thinking of the Mangrove as a saving grace, in both the historical and poetic senses. A massive network of trees that hold land together, that are not individually distinguished, that blur into one another, that are ungovernable, that grow hair and warts, that grow in spite of their littering, that provide protection from storm surges. It’s all there for me.
I’ve begun to speak of my sculptures as ‘a blend,’ which is a DJ term. A blend is when two or more tracks layered on top of one another produce a third or fourth song. It’s the marriage of all these songs to produce something new. That informs my use of found objects – songs are kind of like found objects, at least the way in which a DJ uses them. My professors in grad school saw a video of me DJing and brought it up during a studio visit. They were like, “So what do you do when a mix or blend isn’t working?” I explained to them that, typically, I’ll take the lows out on one track and then increase its filter to maybe one-eighth higher in pitch, so it loses a lot more of its low end. Then I activate the spiral effect, which stacks the sound and creates this rising moment. You can also make it sound like it’s downward. But I use a 3/4th count. This develops the upward spiral motion or ‘rise’ in the song. And then at the drop of the other song. I’ll take it off, and it cascades onto everything. The structure and form in a sonic capacity look like interference patterns, how they’re layering onto each other, creating phosphenes. The metalwork is inspired by my last trip to Puerto Rico. There’s this one lady on the block who I grew up with in Calle Diez de Andino in Santurce. She has one exterior layer of ornamental metal fencing, then another layer of plastic lattice fencing, and a white picket fence behind it.
SW: Whoa. Crazy.
JHR: She had a vision or was deeply paranoid that someone was watching her! But the stacking of the patterns created something like a phosphene, a visual eye trick. You know those spirals that hypnotize you? The layering made it feel like there was movement happening.
SW: Sick. I was reading a lot about how optical depth is the same as auditory depth. You can really hear above, below, behind, under, and all these things. It literally works the exact same as sight, you know? So, when you were talking about where to move the sound around or what to change about it–that’s crazy because we, as the subjects of your music, can hear those decisions.
JHR: Even in that context, the gesture of using this spiral effect – making it loop upward is similar to how one would make a siren. In my use of disharmonies – that maybe weren’t working, in the blend. That’s how I get out of it, turning one track into a long siren or long noise.
SW: How often do you DJ?
JHR: I DJ every other week. I usually play late, though. This weekend it’ll be 2 a.m. to 5 a.m.
SW: I’m crying. Okay, okay.
JHR: Usually, 6 a.m.
SW: OMG. What do you play? What can people always expect from you? What’s your signature vibe?
JHR: My sets are very much narrative-driven. I think a lot about the journey. I typically play for about 3 hours. So, it allows me to have a really well-thought-out journey. Techno is at the heart of it all, but I’m open format – truly. I don’t place any limitations on myself. But I can always guarantee drums; I love a drum break. You’ll get a vocal, maybe, because I like to be dramatic. Also, you’ll get really bassy moments with me, and more recently some electro – but the electro I really fuck with has something ethereal or cinematic about it.
[starts playing a mix]
SW: Mm, yeah. This feels like I’m on an outer space mission. Oh, this one’s giving spaceship, for sure.
JHR: I tried to have this sort of futuristic and ancient vibe at the same time. The drum holds the ancestral, even if it’s dispossessed, cause there’s a lot of white people who make this music.
SW: Yesss.
JHR: The drum and the siren.
SW: I read somewhere it’s a grotesque and beautiful juxtaposition that you’re working with. What seduces you to those things and how do you balance them?
JHR: I think a lot of the time that distinction is based on the person and depends on the context because the siren is not in and of itself something that’s grotesque. To me, it’s a similar relation, but I don’t know. I don’t know if my work itself teeters between grotesque and beautiful. Maybe it does.
For the dance floor at Nowadays, I put vinyl on the floor…
SW: Yes, for Slip Index?
JHR: Yeah, that was for the effect of communal embodiment and an imagining of it in and of itself. Even with the work in FADE at The Studio Museum, the sound is shaped by…okay, it’s fresh on my mind. Basically, we used a recording of an Osprey call, a bird found along coastlines. They build their nests from mangrove roots. They typically nest on stadium lights, and honestly, anywhere – they’re a pretty abominable bird. They also have a specific call they use before storms. We extended the recording to be interpreted as a landscape, which is something you see a lot in dub music. Then we processed it through an LFO, which is just a series of openings and closures.
Then we used geophones to record the seismic activity for a party. Seismic activity is based on these highs and lows, and the highs are highlights, and the lows are shadows. The term is fab; it’s called seismic shadows. Seismic shadows help us interpret the shape of the Earth’s core. We obviously can’t see it, and we know that shear waves can’t move through solids, while primary waves can move through space but refract, allowing us to infer what we can’t see. That’s also how we interpret the image of a black hole: it has a very small fraction of light around it. Which to me is a stunning gesture – imaging something you can’t see.
So, we used a club’s seismic activity to shape the sound of the osprey siren. Think of the club’s seismic activity as this big object that is casting a shadow on the osprey call, and when that thing is moving. It’s revealing certain aspects of the siren.
SW: How much are you trying to make legible? When do you think about that in your process?
JHR: Um, I don’t, and that’s a good thing. I do think about the number of gestures in a work and that working to make the work less legible. Because sound is so immediate, the viewer receives it without negotiation. Sound moves through us; we can cover our ears, but that hardly does anything. So, regardless of what the sculpture is, sound becomes the undeniable force. In the end, what viewers experience is the visual, which is a series of openings – of the horns – clamped onto a large structure that could be misinterpreted as a crucifix, or they can read it as a lighting system of some sort – or a system nonetheless. There are the wire entanglements, and then they’ll experience the sound. Which, in the end, is a transcendental score that is soothing rather than eliciting an urgency or anxiety. We made the sound that way because there was no use in articulating the siren further; we approached it as a medication or a therapy for the siren. I’m okay with that. Even in its silence, I believe objects sound even in silence – that one can interpret what it can be.
SW: It’s the information.
JHR: Exactly, you can’t miss it. One is the object’s performance, and the other is the sound. How does this sound harmonize with the object in and of itself? I think this has been a way for me to stay true to the concept while also making them feel like they work together.
SW: We talked about the research that’s guiding you, so what are you leaning into most these days? Sound, video, performance, or sculpture?
JHR: Sculpture, but not for long. I’m kind of tired, yeah, welding is a bitch. The bending of it all, the cleaning of all the metal. This shit is not that cute. I’m just really trying to think more about performance because I just got a fellowship, and they have a lot of performance resources there. I’m not tied to any medium. That’s why I identify as anti-disciplinary: I try to be opportunistic about what the idea is and what’s the best way to make that happen. If it’s a sculpture, then yes. If it’s performance, then I’ll go that way. If it’s video, then that way as well.
SW: I just thought of a compass for some reason. They’re all there, but you pick which way to orient yourself.
JHR: Yeah, it allows me to have some type of transferable skill whenever I wake something back up.
SW: Totally. Do you have a favorite medium to work in?
JHR: I think my favorite is working with steel. Steel is a beautiful material. Some people prefer aluminum, but it feels too cold. It does patina, but the patina is not as visible. The rust that develops on steel is something I really enjoy and look forward to. It offers the material to feel time-based.
SW: Do you have a favorite song right now?
JHR: My favorite song right now is L’ancienne by Djrum; it’s in his album Under Tangled Silence.
SW: Why do you love it?
JHR: I enjoy the way it balances this really beautiful piano with this somewhat harsh and alien synthesizer. It makes me think about techno – kind of – as a sort of technology that can be freaked. Also, the drum moments in the track are so tea, haha. Many techno producers speak of imbuing technology with spirit, and of the spirit coming from human intervention – the expression of the self within the machine. But that’s also coming from Detroit and its history with the automotive industry. These people were in bed with the machine.
SW: The rust belt, too.
JHR: Yeah. It’s super machinic, but it’s also extremely spirited. There’s also another song I really like right now. I like to use tracks like this to close sets because of the vocals. This one says “Are you happy with who you are? Are you happy with the people around you? There comes a point in your life where you ask yourself a series of questions.”
SW: Oh my god. You want to make them existential on their way out?
JHR: Yeah. Hahaaa, but the beat is good, so it feels warm? You’re leaving an experience that reminds you to consider your position and those around you. I would be so grateful for that.
SW: What’s something people find mundane that you find magical?
JHR: I find the fog machine to be magical. To me it’s a type of darkness – that is liberating. It’s a scary freedom. It’s a filling of space between you and your environment. The fog machine is a kind of darkness – because it’s filling. It makes places feel limitless. I like the idea that humans make magic. There’s a vast difference between a night without fog and a night with fog. Without fog, people are less likely to be on the dance floor. With fog, you get more liberated because you have a bit of cover. Even though you’re not covered, it helps make you less insecure about moving.
