In the male dominated music world, female DJs are in the minority, especially when it comes to hip-hop. And when it comes to female scratch DJs, aka turntablists, the number of female artists is even smaller. Exceptions include
DJ Shortee,
Kuttin Kandi, and the Bay Area DJ duo of
Deeandroid and
Celskiii, who have been busy perfecting their game for over a decade now.
Tonight the Filipino female DJ duo, who were invited on tour by
KRS-One a few years back, will be throwing their popular twice-monthly
Skratchpad turntablist event (every first and third Tuesday) at
The Cellar in San Francisco. The event had been on hiatus for a few years and returned just this May. I caught up with the two Vallejo natives to ask them about their party (including its "funky freestyle jam") and other aspects of the hip-hop DJ music they both so passionately love. They, like many other diehards, spell "skratch" with a K.
Amoeblog: Can you run down the history of Skratchpad -- from the first time out to the revised 2009 version?
Deeandroid: We started Skratchpad at the (old)
Sublounge in May 2003. The Resident DJs were Celskiii,
Wint-One, Amerriica and myself. We had a desire to organize and start up an open turntable event, since the Bay Area is like a DJ mecca. We loved to skratch and party and really missed the inspiration from when they had night events like the
Beat Lounge at
Deco. Celskiii and myself
were very influenced by the Beat Lounge
weekly party/DJ session that was held at Deco back in 1997, where we [were] exposed to a great selection of rare & original music from DJs that were very talented, guests and rotating DJ residents/turntablists that were making some noise in the DJ scene at that time. The showcases and DJ sets were amazing, from cats like
Apollo, Vin Roc, Derrick D, Shortkut, Spydamonkey, Snaykeyes, etc. So when
Beat Lounge stopped...years later, Cel, Winst-One and I thought it would be dope if we created our own space for the DJs in the Bay Area to network, come together, and just jam in honor of Beat Lounge and to inspire new heads and practitioners of the DJ arts.
