House music—a mix of electronic dance, disco, funk, soul, jazz, psychedelic rock—may not be the first thing we think to turn to when searching for truth. But DJ Eric Rosen has taken house music, his turntable, and Torah along for his eleven-year journey of self-discovery.
Born to a musical family, Eric was raised on Israeli folk music, beating drums with his brother and playing guitar with his dad. As Eric became more passionate about guitar, he gravitated towards metal. Soon he adopted the long-haired rocker look and started hanging out backstage at Pantera concerts, sometimes even moshing up a crowd. But at 15, finding himself with a house mix made by a friend, he discovered the musical genre that would serve as his inspiration. It was a style that he, at first, hated. But it changed his life.
Eric realized that metal was “angry music,” something he didn’t want to be associated with anymore. House was its antithesis. He traded in the moshing and got himself a job at a record store where he experimented with turntables. It was around this time that, thanks to a Birthright trip, he discovered Israel.
With the inspiration he received from Israel, his true music emerged. “Torah showed me what we are here to do, and what the seriously heavy implications of music really are. The Jewish people have a mission to unify the world, and when this became something that I learned about, the music became a reflection of this.”
Today, and eleven years of mixes later, Eric is producing a soundtrack that represents his Jewish development, from metalhead, to Buddhist, to wandering Jew. He DJs all over the LA area, in some of the city’s most popular venues. And he constantly finds himself running into Jews on the dance floor.
“We are drawn to the tribal rhythms of today the same way we have always been,” he says. “It is a translation of the Jewish journey into music. We are constantly seeking unity through music in a way that can best be felt on a sweaty dance floor where background, occupation, religious affiliation matters not, because the music is what unifies us.”
That’s why Eric is so glad that the Jewlicious Festival—a Jewish music festival held annually in Long Beach, California— found him. At Jewlicious, he now not only DJs, but is also the Festival’s director of marketing and branding, having helped make it the sold-out success that it is today.
Eric’s next project is working on a fusion of classic niggunim (songs without lyrics) and traditional Jewish melodies mixed with house and hip-hop music.
“There are definite parallels between niggunim and some house tracks. The melodies of instruments, the clapping of rhythm and beats allows us to interpret music in our own way, the way niggunim opens up the soul to hear music on a level that lyrics can never reach.”
With all his sounds, Eric finds his inspiration for a new mix by learning a piece of Torah or reading a spiritual text and bringing that into the music.
“Always bring God into the picture,” Eric says. “The reality is Him anyway, even the music and the turntables, and the records and the guitars. Even your hands, feet, creativity, and the air you breathe to sustain life during the creative process.”
And when the material is down and the mix is burned, the secret then is to create a chavruta—a one-on-one experience with the crowd.
“You have to read the crowd and play tracks that fit the vibe of the moment,” Eric says, “and that will take everyone to the next level, wherever and whatever that might be. The Jewish journey is about finding the middle ground for oneself. In finding one’s one truth amongst a multitude of truths where institutional agendas bend and pull at all of us to see ‘their way.’”
To hear DJ Eric’s tracks, visit his site http://waxdj.com/djs/17/ and also http://www.jewliciousfestival.com
Monica Rozenfeld is a freelance writer living in NYC. You can catch more of her interviews with Jewish musicians, activists and entrepreneurs on her blog The Jew Spot at www.TheJewSpot.org.
http://www.presentense.org/magazine/issue-6/arts/portrait-artist-gods-his-dj
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