Recent Press

Sneaker Freaker Ayres sits down with the down-under Nike heads
The New Yorker Critic's Notebook writes up Flashing Lights
XXL DJ Ayres Interview "Just don't call em mash-ups"
The New York Times "Houston for Dummies encapsulates the stylistic progression from the raw early rhymes of the seminal Geto Boys to the slow-mo style that later emerged, “chopped and screwed.”
Oxford American "The hottest dj in Brooklyn is a mild-mannered whiteboy from Mississippi named Ayres Haxton, Jr."
Spin "It's The Motherfucking Remix CD" in "Heavy Rotation"
MTV "One of the best-kept secrets on the New York party circuit right now is DJ crew The Rub"
Village Voice Best of 2004 - "Best party in Brooklyn to dance sweatily to smart music - The Rub"
New York Press Best of 2004 - "Best party in New York City"
BPM "The best 3 man team working"
FADER "Mashups? Try essays on musical chronology and geography, ruminations on Southern hip-hop, Bill Withers and one drop reggae."
Urb Guest reviews - DJ Ayres picks six future hip-hop classics
RE:UP "Over the years The Rub has hosted the hottest throw-down around"
Rinse "The Rub has snowballed into... well, everything!"
Spray "Derriere The Rub se cache un collectif de djs new-yorkais..."
The Wire - Hip-House 2 Review
Bedroom Rockers Photography book with large format pictures of DJs' home setups
Vice Hip-House article
Urb Guest reviews - DJ Ayres picks six future hip-hop classics
XLR8R Guest reviews - DJ Ayres & Cosmo Baker write about their favorite Hip-House singles
Vapors "ill remixes covering everything from the Ghostbusters theme song to Eric B and Rakim"
Vapors "Hello, my name is..."
Hip-Hop Connection Hip-House review in the leading UK Hip-Hop magazine
The New York Times "DJ Ayres has quietly become one of New York's best mixtape D.J.'s."
InquiringMind.ca Interview and Mix [MP3] from The Rub
Baby Loves Disco in the New York Times (link) PDF /JPEG
DJ Ayres Interview in Swedish Paper "Mashmasteren"

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Houston for Dummies review in The New York Times, Sunday January 29

While New York hip-hop tries to reclaim the national spotlight, first with showy peacemaking and more recently with attempts at fresh beefs, Houston is still enjoying its heyday. The mix “Houston for Dummies” (at djayres.com), lovingly compiled by the Southern transplants DJ Ayres and JD, encapsulates the stylistic progression from the raw early rhymes of the seminal Geto Boys to the slow-mo style that later emerged, “chopped and screwed” (a reference to “chopped” – edited – recording tape and being “screwed up” on cough syrup, the scene’s preferred inebriant). The collection renders the soul of the city, as well. DJ Ayres, part of the team behind the eclectic monthly Brooklyn party The Rub, plays historian and neighborhood cartographer while never letting those goals put a drag on the parking-lot-party arc. Hits like “Still Tippin’ ” (the Slim Thug and Chamillionaire version) are here, juxtaposed with classics like UGK's heartbeat-deep 1996 track “Diamonds and Wood.” We get one glimpse of the block when the tough Scarface links up with the laid-back Devin the Dude on 1998’s “Southside: Houston, Texas,” and another when the underground favorite Lil Keke raps about the “Southside.” This mix shows the late Fat Pat and DJ Screw at their best, celebrates well-paired teams like Paul Wall and Chamillionaire and drops in worthy rarities like Raheem’s “5th Ward” from 1992. To capture the melancholia behind the icy fronts, Ayres and JD include songs like “So Real,” by DJ DMD, of Port Arthur, and Al B and DJ Screw, which rolls on a smoggy sunset groove. Even when they aren't shouting out sectors, these tunes bleed place-love, reminding aficionados running down the latest mixtape why they messed with Texas in the first place. [edited to fix errors]
-Laura Sinagra

Urb March 2006

Who are these guys pictured?! >>

Fader, January 2006

The Fader
July 2005

The Wire Issue 251 January 2005
Hip-Hop reviews, page 74

DJ AYRES & COSMO BAKER
HIP-HOUSE 2
Promo CD
I once heard Africa Bambaataa accuse the short-lived Hip-House movement of being a crypto-corporate contaminant deployed to destroy Hip-Hop culture from the inside. Listening to DJ Ayres and Cosmo Baker's two recent House-tinged mixes, it's hard to argue - I don't think I've ever heard a Hip-House song that is about anything other than how great Hip-House is, and how you should submit to its every Acid-rinsed whim. Since their first installment, Ayres and Cosmo have added an array of more modern fast ones to the pile - Q-Tip over Seiji's "Loose Tips," Cassius and Ghostface's "Thrilla," the killer Yam-Who remix of "frontin'" and Ayres's own remix of "Warzone" all intrigue. But there's something eerily compelling about the hyper-rigidity of the straightforward House numbers. Most of the tracks Ayres and Cosmo dig up sound like little more than propaganda. Twin Hype's "For Those Who Like to Groove" is an appeal to the curious; Doug Lazy's "Din Daa Daa's Doin' It" describes a George Kranz-facilitated paradise and Tyree's "House Music is My Life" is a four-on-the-floor anthem for the conscripted.
- Hua Hsu

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Bedroom Rockers Book (Photos of DJs' Homes)
Photography by Christopher Woodcock

Bedroom Rockers book is available only at Adidas Originals stores free with purchase:
Boston, Miami, New York, Portland & DC.

Urb Issue 120 (October 2004). page 111
DJ Ayres - Guest Reviewer

photo by Beth Fladung

Dating to around 1990, the song isn't even house music as anyone would recognize it today, based largely on a simple piano loop, garnished with skittish snares and recurrent blasts of a disembodied voice yelling: "Hot!" There are echoes of soul and jazz in the track, but Joey found at the time that the love the song was getting was universal: "That was one of those records you could throw on at a hip-hop club, at a regular club. All the party DJs and the serious DJs played it, too. It was a worldwide record."

Perhaps its longshot embrace by the hip-hop world wasn't much of a longshot after all. Pal Joey had produced tracks for Boogie Down Productions ("Love's Gonna Getcha"), among others. But the relationship between hip-hop and house wasn't always so sweet, as evidenced in the short history of that most-maligned of subgenres, hip-house.

Whether or not you know it or admit it, hip-house is the real party shit. And you probably thought it was just "I'll House You." Well, there are loads of things you can blame Mike G and Afrika Baby Bam for, but they only get partial credit on this one. Take a two-hour flight to Chicago and you'll find hip-house ground zero. An offshoot of that city's famous (and famously insular) house music scene, the nascent genre minted its own set of stars in the late 80s.

Producer Tyree Cooper is often credited with helping to create the hip-house movement, thanks to his track "Turn Up The Bass," a collaboration with local MC Kool Rock Steady. The rhyme wasn't complex (it was what Pal Joey calls a "jack-your-body type of rhyme") but the idea of bringing someone in to rap over an otherwise spacious house track began to gain traction. Chicago's Fast Eddie, in particular, became widely known for his nimble flow, and he paved the way not only for "I'll House You," produced by legendary house maestro Todd Terry, but also for Washington, D.C.'s Doug Lazy, the lone hip-house artist signed to a major label (Doug Lazy Gettin' Crazy was released on Atlantic in 1990).

In 1989, Doug, who was primarily a producer, released "Let It Roll" with his own vocals because the rapper he'd asked to drop by the studio never did. It became a hit almost instantly. "I didn't really talk a lot. I was shy. But three weeks after the song came out, I was booked for a two-week promo tour in London. My first show in New York was a disaster. I was so scared. This girl at the bottom of the stage untied my shoes."

It didn't matter whether or not Lazy was long for fame, because the one-two knockout punch for hip-house came in 1990, just as the movement was getting its balance. First came Hammer, whose club-friendly pop raps set a new template for danceable hip-hop. "The label was asking me, ‘Can you do stuff like that?'" Doug recalls. "And that just wasn't me." A moot point anyway, because then came the mainstreaming of gangster rap, which closed the casket on Hammer, Lazy, Eddie, and all their uptempo peoples.

Fortunately, no good genre goes unappreciated—or unarchived. Usually we'd be buying this stuff on some Japanese or British trainspotter website. But on Hip House, the excellent mix-CD by DJ Ayres and Cosmo Baker, the local boys hold it down, mixing classics from KC Flight and Chill Rob G with little-known hip-house experiments by Craig G and Big Daddy Kane and equally hot-stepping raps from Ghostface Killah and Joe Budden.

And nostalgia for that time is beginning to creep into hip-hop itself. Canadian MC K-os rapped over the "Hot Music" instrumental on his song "Superstarr Pt. 0," which became a staple on BET and likely begat the most recent high-profile use of the Soho classic: the video version of Missy Elliott's "I'm Really Hot." During the video, after Missy spits a couple of slithery verses, the action stops, and two dance troupes battle it out over 16 bars of "Hot Music" like You Got Served filmed in a Japanese recreation of The Tunnel circa '90, before Funk Flex took over and you had to tuck your chain in.

But if you're looking for the real throwback, you might have to crack Pal Joey's vaults. At the time of its release, no MC rapped over "Hot Music" (at least, not officially), but sitting in the archives is an alternate version of "Radio Song"—the highly gauche collaboration between REM's Michael Stipe and KRS-One—performed over that indelible instrumental. "I don't think either of those people is at a point in their career where they want to see that song put out," Pal Joey says. "But I could always bootleg it… "

JON CARAMANICA
Send materials to 217 East 86th St. #226, NY, NY 10028. Go to turntablelab.com for the Ayres/Baker Hip House mix.

"Hip House" reviewed in the Village Voice, May 2004

"Rap and house is kinda different," Juice Crew non-biscuit Craig G insists in "Turn That House Into a Home." "To do this, you must be gifted." That's not totally true... but the swinging style isn't for everyone, only the sexy people. Special Ed got down, as did Big Daddy Kane

Best are the latter-day quick-spitters who get shoehorned in nicely: Rah Digga, Joe Budden, even Cincy arty-partys Five Deez.

-Jon Caramanica

Vapors magazine
Issue #24, album reviews, p. 94

On Friday night the Brooklyn nightclub Southpaw was host to a more low-key hip-hop party. The headliners were Hollertronix, a Philadelphia D.J. duo, and DJ Ayres. Together, this three-man team played a casual, exuberant set celebrating the gleefully synthetic sound of current and recent hip-hop: Lloyd Banks's densely (and chintzily) orchestrated club hit "On Fire"; Khia's Casio-powered sex rap "My Neck, My Back"; B.G.'s cheap-sounding high-rollers' anthem, "Bling Bling."

All three D.J.'s do their best work on mixtapes. Hollertronix released 2003's best party album, "Never Scared" (Turntable Lab), which makes unexpected connections between Southern hip-hop and 1980's new wave: Soft Cell, meet Trick Daddy. And DJ Ayres has quietly become one of New York's best mixtape D.J.'s. (Ordering information is at www.djayres.com.)

First there was "Hip-House," compiled with Cosmo Baker, devoted to that brief, weird moment, 15 years ago, when hip-hop and house music seemed ready to merge. And now comes "Flashback," which uses sly segues to show which new rappers are borrowing beats and rhymes from their 1980's predecessors.

Hip-Hop Connection, April 2004.

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Hip-House is available at turntablelab.com; MP3s and more info are here.

VOICE Shortlist Pick for Friday, January 9, 2004
(January 7-13 Russell Simmons cover)

Hollertronix + DJ Ayres [The Rub]

Taking the 2 Many DJs [live remix] concept and swapping out the global cosmopolitan for the Southern crunk thug, Hollertronix have perked up nightlife first in their native Philly and now here with lengthy dj sets that forego shame in favor of genuinely unstoppable musical assauls - tear-the-club-up anthems, dancehallshot-licking, blissful '80s pop, and whatever else might inspire a milkshake or three. And we'll always remember DJ Ayres fondly from the Indie 5000 days, when hip-hop parties could just be, without having to be something more too. CARAMANICA
At 9, Southpaw, 125 5th Avenue, Brooklyn, 718.230.0236

New York Press, October 15-21, 2003