DJ Olive - Biography
New York-based musician Gregor Asch, best known as DJ Olive, has been producing genre-busting, hard to define music since the early 1990s. A key figure in the earliest times of the Williamsburg, Brooklyn art and music scene, Asch began spinning records at underground parties and has since gained a reputation as an innovative turntablist, improviser, and producer. He has performed and recorded with artists as diverse as Luc Ferrari, Medeski Martin and Wood, and Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon. His own music ranges in style from spectral ambience to warm, minimal grooves influenced by classic techno, hip-hop, dub, and Latin music.
Asch earned his BA of Fine Arts from SUNY Purchase in 1987 and moved to Brooklyn in 1990. That same year he co-founded Lalalandia Entertainment Research Corporation, a group that organized late night warehouse parties. At these events Asch began to appear as DJ Olive. Around this time Asch also formed the group We, arguably the flagship project for the newly emerging genre of music known as illbient. Asch is often credited for coining the term as a joke, but the tag makes perfect sense. Illbient’s sound is a woozy, queasy blend of ambient drift and bass heavy throb perfected by artists like DJ Spooky, Sub Dub, and Byzar. As We the trio of Asch, Ignacio Platas, and Rich Panciera, released three excellent records (1997’s As Is can rightfully be called a classic of ‘90s electronica) and organized many multimedia parties and installations throughout Brooklyn and Manhattan.
During this time Asch also became a fixture of downtown New York’s art-jazz and improvised music scene. He has worked with composers and players from the jazz world such as Dave Douglas, Elliot Sharp, William Hooker, and Uri Cane, as well as forming his own improvising group Liminal. Asch also continues to be a member of Christian Marclay’s improvising DJ Trio. He has performed on many albums, adding an element of electronic textural depth to recordings by the names above and many more. One high profile release came via Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon when she, Olive, and Ikue Mori recorded ミュージカル パ一スペスティブ for SYR’s Perspectives Musicales series in 2000.
In 2000 Asch started two record labels, Phonomena and theAgriculture, releasing his own music on the latter. Although he released music with We and other collaborators during the ‘90s, it wasn’t until 2003’s Bodega that Asch had has proper debut as DJ Olive. A record of sweaty warmth and dusty beats, Bodega captures Olive’s Brooklyn world perfectly. Samples of Latin horns, R&B vocals, and funk guitar are slathered in dub echo atop chunky drum programming, round bass, deep textural ambience, and processed field recordings. Jazz, dub, bossa, hip-hop, and ambient techno all fit into Olive’s unique soundworld on Bodega. 2003 also brought the release of the Coonymus EP, further exploring the loose beats and soulful textures of the debut full-length.
DJ Olive’s music has always focused just as much on texture as it has on rhythm. In 2004 Australian label Room40 released the first album in an ambient trilogy, a series that is arguably Asch’s best work. Buoy is a single, beatless, sixty-minute piece of flowing electronic drones, distant voices, manipulated samples, ghostly snapshots of time and place that hypnotize with impressionistic atmosphere. Olive followed this up with Sleep in 2006 and Triage in 2008. Calling these records “sleeping pills” Asch downplays the carefully created sounds that make this series some of the best ambient music ever recorded.
While on tour in Australia, Olive performed two live sets and released the results in 2006 as Heaps As, Live in Tasmania. Similar to the warm grooves and dank echospace of Bodega, this album showcases Olive’s breezy, loose style of beat making. Over dubwise tracks like “Bin Raider” and “Lila Dog” Olive stretches his Latin, hip-hop, and reggae influences into a hazy, stoned, endless groove that’s impossible to not enjoy.
For all Asch’s collaborative work with the who’s who of art music, one gets the sense that he’s simply a man in love with what he does. His records, both beat inclined and not, radiate a sincere feeling of freedom, fun, and love of sound. Asch continues to build sound installations and exhibit art, as well as perform under the DJ Olive moniker at concerts and parties around the world.