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Vinylogue

Cut Chemist

Four decades deep as a DJ, Cut Chemist recalls how a ‘Star Wars’ vinyl record shaped a lifetime of DJ scratching and record collecting.

Interview: Dr. Jennifer Otter Bickerdike / Photography: Delaney Bishop

DJ Cut Chemist speaks with Discogs for Vinylogue.

As Zoom’s jazzy ringtone fades, Lucas MacFadden appears on screen. He’s wearing a backward baseball hat and sunglasses indoors at 11 a.m. Despite being exhausted, Cut Chemist is animated as he describes his recent work and shares old vinyl record-hunting stories. 

Cut first made a name for himself as a founding member of iconic hip-hop groups Jurassic 5 and Ozomatli. He soon embarked on a solo career, where his turntablism led to a series of successful solo albums and collaborations with sample stars like DJ Shadow and Peanut Butter Wolf.

His fame and connections also led him down a vinyl collecting path that amassed over 15,000 records, sourced from adventures like a well-documented record-buying trip to Brazil with Babu, J Rocc, Madlib, Egon, B+, and Eric Coleman. (“I think we changed the whole infrastructure of their economy,” he joked during an episode of Crate Diggers.)

Judging by his youthful demeanor, though, It’s hard to believe that he has been in the game since the Reagan administration of the 1980s.

I love recontextualizing things — giving them a different meaning than what it was designed for.

Cut Chemist

How Cut Chemist Fell In Love With Vinyl Records

As memory goes, it’s a toss-up as to what came first: Cut starting kindergarten or discovering his passion for vinyl records and collecting.

“At age five, my parents gave me a choice,” Cut said. “I could either purchase the Star Wars movie theme song on a 45 or get the double LP gatefold. I [wanted] the big one with the pretty pictures. It marked the beginning of touching the record and the cover, of holding in my hands this beautiful artwork. It sparked my journey of loving records.”

Cut Chemist holding a rare vinyl record from his collection for Discogs.

That love only grew. Shortly after getting that first album, the collecting bug bit him hard. The James Bond soundtrack series caught his attention next. 

“It was the first time I noticed something in a series of many,” he explains. “I remember seeing a James Bond movie then going to Music Plus on Vine in Hollywood with my folks and buying the soundtrack. The next week, I would go there, and there would be another one from a different Bond movie. I’d be like, ‘Oh, wow, I gotta buy that one, too.’ I felt the need to collect these things, even though I hadn’t seen Thunderball, or whatever the film was. If there was a soundtrack, I needed it.”

Cut Chemist sharing stories about his favorite vinyl finds

Cut wasn’t even spinning his records at the time, though. For him, it was all about the hunt and the need for completion. “I was just collecting them, just to say that I had the whole collection. That sentiment continues down the line.”

“You had to really wait a while before you saw a kid that was into the same thing [as you]. When you did, you felt like soulmates. It was how a lot of friendships were forged.”

Cut Chemist

Like many others, Lucas first encountered DJing through music and films. “I feel like Breakin’ was the first movie I saw with DJing and scratching in it,” he said.

The fashion, culture and music featured in the genre-defining film excited him. “Seeing the club scene, Ice-T, and the little spiked glove — I was really enamored,” he laughs. “It was the craziest thing that I’d seen in my 12-year-old life.”

The handful of hip-hop shorts available on embryonic stations like MTV and specialty shows like Friday Night Videos also supplied inspiration for the still-young tween. 

“The music video for Herbie Hancock’s ‘Rockit’ features scratching,” he recounts. But it was a program called Night Flight where Cut first “saw a bunch of hip-hop videos in one sitting.” 

The clothes alone provided recognition for those in the know, an instant kinship based on a love of sound, values, and style mostly unfamiliar to the West Coast. Peers with similar interests were light on the ground, at least for 12-year-old Lucas. 

The Audience’s Listening
Cut Chemist
2006
Instrumental, Cut-up/DJ, Conscious
2 x Vinyl, LP
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“You had to really wait a while before you saw a kid who was into the same thing [as you]. When you did, you felt like soulmates.” Information was currency, and the foundation of lifelong alliances. “It was how a lot of friendships were forged,” he remembers.

Cut’s enthusiasm for breakdancing consumed him. No matter the location, he took any opportunity to show off moves from his favorite movie scenes.

“One time my friend and I were walking into Carl’s Jr. I had on my black Puma windbreaker with a red stripe. There was another kid there. He had a boombox and was also wearing a windbreaker. We just looked at each other and started breakdancing against each other in the street. I got served. It was all good. I can’t believe the way it happened. It was like a movie.”

After cultivating his shapes at local fast food courts, Cut started nurturing his DJ skills. With the family record player off limits from scratching, MacFadden turned to the local musician’s magazine, The Recycler, to buy his first turntable.

“It wasn’t a Technics 1200, but it was something close to it,” he explains. The equipment set him back $80. “It was on that where I learned how to scratch,” he explains.  

A stack of rare records from Cut Chemist’s collection.
Close-up of Cut Chemist examining a vintage vinyl album.
Close-up of Cut Chemist and a chicken examining a vintage vinyl album.
Cut Chemist poses with Wax Museum coffee mug in front of rare vinyl records.

Cut Chemist’s Entry Into DJing

Cut’s first appearance in front of a crowd happened at a preliminary round for a DJ competition being held at legendary venue Radio Tron, the Los Angeles venue made famous in Breakin’. The initial heat took place at a store called For Breakers Only, a boutique shop that specialized in breakdancing apparel. To guarantee a packed house, Cut held his 12th birthday party at the try-outs.

“I was just scratching,” he said. “That was enough to get me into the finals.”

Despite advancing, his friends and party guests weren’t as enthused about his performance as he was. “When I asked my friends how I did, I remember one of them was like, ‘I don’t know, you did okay.’”

Die Cut
Cut Chemist
2018
Downtempo, Indie Rock, Hip Hop, Turntablism
2 x Vinyl, LP
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Now in the finals, Cut had to get a ride from his dad to attend. “I was playing in the big leagues all of a sudden,” he recounts. “These were professionals, like Arabian Prince.” 

Against such comparatively seasoned veterans, the tween didn’t shine. “After that Radio Tron incident, the kids at school were like, ‘We went to that Radio Tron show, and you were whack.’ After that, I retired from any kind of battle situation. At age 12, I was done.” 

Cut returned home and practiced. At age 14, he began started recording with his friends (including Chali 2na of Jurassic 5) in an inclosed sun patio that his dad converted into a small make-shift recording studio. Several years later, he gave DJing another go, this time to rave reviews. To this day, scratching remains a particularly appealing part of his craft.

“I was always into drums and percussion,” he said. “[Scratching] is a rhythm created by something that wasn’t intended to be used that way. I always like to find out what the rules are, just so I can break them. When you give me something like a turntable that’s meant for this, but you use it for that. I love recontextualizing things — giving them a different meaning than what it was designed for. It’s pretty much what hip-hop is founded on — taking something and flipping it.”

Cut Chemist Continues To Flip The Script

Ingenuity in finding new ways to experience and connect through music has been a driving point throughout his career. Cut, alongside acts like DJ Shadow and, slightly later, the Avalanches, was pivotal in carrying the sampledelia torch from the mid ’90s, and passing it on to offshoots that would lead to a plethora of subgenres in the Internet age.

Jurassic 5
Jurassic 5
1998
Conscious
Vinyl, LP
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One of his newest attempts to move DJing forward has been his intimate “Candlelight for Two” sets, performed at his house. “The setup,” he describes, “is the guests facing me. I have just a candle for light.”

To create the effect of being “immersed in a sonic cocoon of sound,” MacFadden has two speakers positioned towards the listeners, two speakers to their sides, and then two speakers behind. Cut spent more than two years “culling through records” to see which LPs worked best in the carefully constructed environment, as he wanted couples who came to have the most extraordinary aural journey.

His extensive research revealed several records that were especially impressive in this stereo nirvana. Some standouts, he notes, include Mulatu Astatke’s Mulato of Ethiopia, “Dream Starts” by Elmer Gantry’s Velvet Opera — a U.K. psychedelic band — and Black Sabbath’s “Behind the Wall of Sleep.”

“The vocal effect on that is just so great,” he raves of the latter. 

Though his vast knowledge includes seemingly every obscure album pressed in the last century, Cut is also wildly familiar with the classics, rating the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s Axis: Bold as Love among his favorites, calling it “an engineering masterpiece.” 

Creating innovative ways for vinyl dialogue to evolve throughout his career has also been a priority for the Los Angeles native.

“For over five years, I’ve been running a subscription service called the A Stable Sound Club,” Cut said. “It offers exclusive digital files from my personal music archive. I guess you could say it’s a digital record pool. Every month I choose a theme, whether it be rare funk 45s from a particular region or unreleased demo tapes and one of a kind acetates. Sometimes, I’ll make exclusive mixes as well that the public won’t have access to.”

When asked what has prompted him to take this approach to the “sharing is caring” motto, Cut gets a bit serious. “I feel it’s a nice way to share my collection while building a community of like-minded supporters.”


Cut Chemist’s curated vinyl collection on display.
Cut Chemist about to spin a rare 45 rpm record on a turntable.
A stack of rare records from Cut Chemist’s collection.
Cut Chemist showcasing a rare 12-inch vinyl from his archive.

Rest assured, no poorly sounding recordings will be found amongst this lovingly curated selection. “I do the best I can to remaster each offering so that it’s the best quality file that it can be. I don’t promote it very often. It’s kind of a ‘if you know, you know’ thing.”

On top of all this, Cut Chemist is putting the finishing touches on (My 1st) Big Crate, a reference fans will recognize as a nod to the lead single from his 2006 debut studio album, The Audience’s Listening. Crate features a pastiche of the first records purchased when he first discovered the art of DJing.

MacFadden has also been busy undertaking a new collaboration with longtime friend and former Jurassic 5 and Ozomatli bandmate Chali 2Na. With the release of the still unnamed project almost visible on the horizon, Cut is excited about working with his old partner and figuring out what collaboration looks like after all these years.

“That’s part of what makes it interesting,” Cut answers. “We have remained friends for these last 35 years, so it’s a safe place to create. We had our ups and downs; of course, you’re going to butt heads and then you hash it out.” 

Pressed about his creative fervor, Cut laughs. “We’ll probably be doing music until the day we’re dead.”

Cut Chemist sharing stories about his favorite vinyl finds.

Interested in reading more editions of Vinylogue? Check out our features with The Black Keys, Colleen Murphy, Peanut Butter Wolf, and Thurston Moore.

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