Story by Ben Stone
Photo by Will Kanellos
It’s 11 p.m. by the waterfront in downtown Portland, Oregon and the streets are empty. The only passing cars are taxis and police cruisers patrolling the city grid, peering at sleepers in the doorways of bakeries and salons, their windshields lit by a nearly full moon. It’s mostly quiet, except for the east end of Ash Street, where the night air pulses with the sound of reggaeton, digitally-manufactured gunshots, and air horns coming out of the Rose Bar’s blue-lit doorway. On the third Thursday of every month, the night of Club Chemtrail, nobody sleeps on the stoops of Ash Street.
It’s mostly dark inside the bar, except for a silver rose projected on the wall. The music has mixed into what sounds like Ginuwine’s sex jam, “Pony,” layered onto a heavy ghetto-house beat, and the loose pack of dancers on the upper and lower floors respond by swaying side-to-side while trying to keep their drinks level. Standing around the sound system are the deejays who organize Chemtrail—SPF666, Commune, DJ NA of Nguzunguzu, and Massacooramaan—all dressed in dark colors and unfazed by the uproar of the Jamaican dancehall, London grime, Chicago house, Jersey club music, and early 2000s American R&B shaking the speakers.
“Sometimes everybody’s dancing and sometimes nobody is dancing, but they absolutely love it,” says DJ NA. Although the love he refers to is from the dancers, the statement seems to best apply to Massacooramaan himself, who is busy plugging his laptop into the sound system. Massacooramaan, a moniker adapted from an old Jamaican folktale about a hairy sea monster that plagues sailors, always deejays the last slot of the night, and it’s becoming clear why.
Massacooramaan switches out all of the romantic R&B elements and familiar American rhythms for fast, bass-distorted re-appropriations of faraway dancehall, Caribbean soca, and Amsterdam’s bubblin’ house music. Those too weary or too drunk to stay on the dance floor stagger to the exits or slump along the bar, but the remaining dancers, shirts sagging from sweat and still in their early morning rave rhythm, begin to shoot amazed and baffled looks up at Massacooramaan, whose real name is Dave Quam. But he seems to have his head in a much different place, lost in thought as he looks down at his decks.
Quam’s sound stems from basketball games he played in Chicago’s Ukrainian Village. He was attending the School of the Art Institute of Chicago at the time, playing five-on-fives with some high school kids in the park. Whenever the ball went out of bounds or they lost track of the score, the kids would ditch the game and start dancing. Like breakdancing, it was a kinetic solo dance, but breakdancing seemed like slow motion compared to how they moved—tight and frantic while still maintaining a sort of cool swagger—with no boombox or beat. They told Quam it was called footwork.
Over the next few years, Quam became a fixture at footwork battles around Chicago’s southern neighborhoods, gatherings where locals smoke and drink and watch their friends dance to an insanely fast version of ghetto house music characterized by a bare minimum of melody, ceaseless vocal samples, and intricate, disorienting layers of 808 hi-hats, snares, and rim shots. But it always bothered Quam that the only evidence of footwork on the Internet, and therefore to the world outside south Chicago, was in the few shaky, pixilated videos uploaded to anonymous YouTube accounts. So in 2007, Quam created a blog called “IT’S AFTER THE END OF THE WORLD,” on which he documented several critical years of footwork history, and in 2010, he wrote arguably the first in-depth analysis of Chicago’s footwork scene for XLR8R Magazine.
Since then, footwork rhythms and sounds have become a key part of music scenes in Germany, New York, and the UK, and many of Quam’s old  friends from footwork battles have since released full-length albums. In their 2012 review of Quam’s record of his own productions, British music review and retail site Boomkat.com wrote, “As a blogger/journalist/DJ, Quam’s coverage and knowledge of the Chicago scene has been invaluable in the virulent spread of footwork.” Quam maintains that all credit goes to the dancers.
After a while, Quam began to branch out from footwork to begin covering movements in other under-publicized music scenes, digging deep into Google results pages to find obscure soca and Amsterdam’s bubblin’ house message boards, mass-translating the text, and streaming the sounds of scenes that often did not exist outside of small metropolitan areas around the world. He would then post the music to his blog, which began attracting increasingly heavy traffic from around the world. At the time, MySpace.com had evolved into a surreally connective environment for musicians. While bouncing around the site one day, Quam discovered “voodoo bass” duo, DJ NA and Asma, known professionally as Nguzunguzu. They became good friends and introduced Quam to the rest of the small group of avant-garde producers to have released records on the Fade to Mind label. After Quam moved back from the “cutthroat” music environment of Chicago to his hometown of Portland last year, Fade to Mind released Quam’s brilliant, skeletal Dead Long Time EP of Caribbean styles and footwork productions, littered with surprising sound effects and imprinted with the flare and sonic watermarks of countless modern musical styles.
Playing to an increasingly thinning and sweaty crowd, Quam’s set has become lost in a thicket of massive sub-bass swells and breakbeats of late ’90s UK Jungle music. One of the heaviest bobbing heads is that of Zak DesFleurs, or DJ SPF666. DesFleurs and Quam have been friends ever since they started arguing at a Kingdom concert about who spun in French ghetto-tech crew Nightmare Juke Squad. To Stevens, Quam’s “vast ethno-musicological knowledge” defines Quam’s personality and work.
“[Quam is] really driven—doesn’t go out that often, works on tracks like mad,” Stevens says. “You could nerd out and try to point at footwork, bouyon, or bubblin’ influences, but it’s less SoundCloud-era micro genre splicing—dude has a very particular voice.”
And Quam’s voice can be exhausting. Not only does his music sap dancers’ strength and hearing with its fast tempo and high volume, it can be intellectually disorienting. His sets are not only a breakneck history lesson in the worldwide dance music of the last decade, but a requiem for the countless, geographically disjointed musical styles and micro-genres that have both risen because of—and been quickly drowned by—the avalanche of online musical movements. A prime example of this is Quam’s blog: Due to the shutdown of many file-sharing websites, every one of the hundreds of stunning digital glimpses that Quam posted and analyzed on it have disappeared. The artists and song titles that labeled these obscure files now draw blanks on any search engine. The music is simply gone, and one of the only places in the world to find it is on the laptop of this Portland deejay named after a mythical Jamaican sea monster—and of course, within the walls of Club Chemtrail.
Quam, DesFleurs, and the rest of the crew live and breathe for their night of the month at the club. But with an awareness of the transient nature of the Internet, they are all considering life after Chemtrail, probably in a larger city with a deeper network of musicians. “PDX has its limits,” Stevens says. “And Chemtrail is definitely just a moment in time.”
Around 2 a.m., having closed his computer and drained his can of Pabst Blue Ribbon, Quam seems present for the first time all night. He watches proudly as pairs of club-goers get each other’s numbers at the bar and exit woozily. “This is a big night—this is more people than have ever come out,” Quam says, so quietly that he’s barely audible over the fading synthesized horns that still echo around the room.

Gallery • 1 Photos

Will Kanellos

People pack the small lower floor of Portland’s Rose Bar for the monthly Club Chemtrail event and a special live-stream set by LENKEMZ (UK).