by RAF KATIGBAK

Angel Moraes is excited. It's three in the afternoon and the Mirror has just caught up with the Brooklyn-born DJ/producer/soundman during some rare downtime in between mixes of his latest production, a blazing Suzanne Palmer track for Peter Rauhofer's Star 69 Records. "As a person I'm very passionate," he reveals in his native Brooklyn brogue. "And I'm totally not politically correct," he adds, laughing. His no-bullshit attitude is both alarming and refreshing. "In this business, most people are just into saying what the other person wants to hear, and I'm so not interested in that. I just speak my mind and I don't give a shit what people think."

Although he may not give a shit what people may think, Moraes has made a name for himself giving people what they want: dark, dirty, sexy, percussive house via incendiary DJ sets and releases on Eightball, Hot N Spicy and Bombay Records - not to mention high profile remixes for acts like the Pet Shop Boys, Black Box and PM Dawn. Ask him what he thinks about the current state of the music biz and he's equally outspoken. "I think all this commercialism bullshit is what's hurting the business. I think people have creamed it so much that the audience is suddenly going, this fuckin' hype is not what it's cracked up to be. Where's the quality? We want fuckin' quality!"

Building better boxes

If you're looking for quality, Moraes has it in spades and, while many are quick to criticize the scene, Moraes is one of the few in a position to do something about it. One look at his new Montreal-based Sound Works project (a label, studio, event company and the face of a touring schedule) and it's obvious he's off to a good start.

But for Moraes, his crowning achievement has got to be Montreal's world-famous afterhours club Stereo. Inspired by his visits to legendary NY club Paradise Garage in the late '70s, Stereo set a new standard in after-hour clubbing. "I thought, if I'm going to put a room together, it has to be what I think is the best. Thank God a lot of people agreed with me. Everybody that did it, did it for the pure love. Nobody did it for the money. As an owner I didn't make a dime. But I would sit in the office under the coat check, and I would actually hear people come in and go, ‘Oh my god, we're at Stereo!' That's the payback."

The name Stereo was synonymous with Moraes. After all, he not only founded the club and DJed there regularly, he also designed and built most of the sound system with his bare hands. "When I went into the Garage and the Funhouse, I said to myself, fuck, I'm never going to afford a quarter of a million dollars to buy one of these sound systems, so I better learn how to do it." After immersing himself in books about physics and sound engineering, Moraes started on the long road to perfect sound, but that road was a bumpy one. "I'd be spending all this fuckin' time and money that I didn't have on wood and materials," he chuckles. "Then it would take me four months to build one box, then I would test it and it would sound like shit! I built a lot of boxes that sounded like crap. All my friends didn't understand, they thought I was fucking crazy."

When Moraes completed the Stereo system, those same doubting friends would be served thousands of crystal-clear watts of humble pie. "When we first opened Stereo, all my friends from Brooklyn came up into the booth, laughing, ‘This motherfucker, he did it. This fuckin' bastard, he really did it!'"

Green light on Red Lite

Indeed, for a vast majority of Montreal's nightlife revellers, the first few years of Stereo were, as Moraes calls it, "one for the history books." But all good things must come to an end. Last year, Moraes pulled out of Stereo. "It was very hard. As far as my career goes, it was the proudest moment to offer that place to the world, it was my baby. But it's like any love affair, there's certain things in life you're fighting against - there were a lot of mistakes made and I just couldn't live with it anymore."

But thankfully for Montreal, Moraes' chapter in clubland's history is far from over. Once again he's worked his magic, revamping Laval's Red Lite club to his own high standards, warming up the room and improving the sound to better-than-Stereo specs. This coming Saturday marks the second installment of Moraes's residency there - count on him every first Saturday of each month.

It's a project he took on for the same reason he gets up every morning. "I do it for the love. It's great that I make a decent living off of it, but I don't do it for any fucking thing else but the love."

At Red Lite on Saturday, July 5, 2am, $20

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