Distress to impress

by MORGAN STEIKER

When Cara Giulioni, aka Mayday, took a little vacation in Costa Rica last month and happened to get booked for a party, she noticed something there that brought her back to her early Montreal days.

“Everybody was just stoked and wanted to party. It reminded me of when I first came here from Toronto. There was a lot of innocence that made Montreal appealing. You didn’t have to know everything in order to fit in. Music is supposed to be something that everybody enjoys, not something that makes people feel excluded.”

With some help from a cool older brother, Mayday didn’t take too long to understand the powers of DJing. But she admits that, at first, she didn’t really “get it.”

“When I was first going to shows and listening to mixes, I didn’t even really understand what DJs were doing. Sometimes, I even thought they were doing live stuff.”

For someone who didn’t understand, she got a grip pretty fast. It translated into a 30-minute mixtape she submitted to Tribe magazine’s New Talent search in 2002. It placed her as one of the 30 winners out of 350 applicants. As fate would have it, that same tape got her the first gig that she ever played in Montreal, just a month into moving here, and things quickly led to her hot seat at Montreal’s longest running jungle and drum & bass night, Junglist Fridays. “It was a really big deal for me on a DJ level, but also because this was the night I was going to all the time.”

To this day, some of her fondest memories stem from those nights. At its best, she describes it as a place where everyone was welcome and people came for more than just the music. “There was kind of a misfit vibe because we were a bunch of DJs who weren’t playing elsewhere, playing music that wasn’t being played anywhere else. We embraced that and rolled with it.”

When asked why she was drawn to drum & bass and jungle, she mentions the heavy use of samples and remixes, which existed in that scene long before the Serato and Ableton revolution transformed electro music.

“DJing and DJ culture has changed so much and moved so fast since I’ve started, and I haven’t even been doing it for such a long time,” she admits. In fact, it’s moved so fast that drum & bass has taken a backseat to other forms of club music, and Mayday had to almost start from scratch when Junglist Fridays ended in 2006.

“It was frustrating because people had me boxed in as a drum & bass DJ. They were like, ‘Oh, Mayday, you don’t know how to play electro and B-more.’ I had worked my way up and then, all of a sudden, people didn’t care.”

But sure enough, over the past year, Mayday has been one of the most visible DJs in the city, rocking decks all over the place, from Mary Hell’s Beat Me Up Thursdays at Saphir to Teenwolf Tuesdays at Blizzarts, as well as putting up a lot of quality material online like a new hyphy, B-more and electro mix, and original material with Ultra Valentine, a duo she forms with vocalist and producer Vadah Boy.

WITH ALEX KLEIN AND DIRTY LICIOUS
AT SAPHIR ON SATURDAY,
MARCH 7, 10 P.M., $5