Tres Johnson DJs the Think Iowa 2012 opening party at Wooly’s in Des Moines.
Big Kansas City attendees may or may not notice the tall man with the colorful glasses behind the DJ booth. His sound is nonintrusive, blending with the conference, changing with the energy. It’s not his first rodeo. Tres Johnson has DJ’d every conference in the Big Series since the first Big Omaha in 2009.
“I got booked the night before at the old Loom party in Benson,” Johnson said, recalling his introduction to the Silicon Prairie News event. “Brent Crampton [resident DJ and part owner of House of Loom] was like, ‘Hey, since you’re doing this, there’s this conference thing tomorrow, will you split the day with me?’ I left the Loom party at 3 in the morning, came home, slept for two hours, and then went to Big Omaha.” Halfway through the first speaker’s presentation, Johnson realized it was exactly where he needed to be. “When Crampton showed up at like lunchtime, I told him no worries, go home, take a nap, I got this.”
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Johnson remembers some of the first speakers vividly: Gary Vaynerchuk, Micah Baldwin, Jeffrey Kalmikoff. “I remember being drawn to everything they were saying,” he said. “Those three just really got to me. All of that made me be okay with where I was at. I can be wherever I need to be as long as I’m working on my passions.”
That first Big Omaha got him thinking about himself as having skills and assets to market. “As an artist, I think we get so wrapped up in our art, our craft, and you don’t think of yourself as a business,” Johnson said. “How as an artist or a DJ am I a business?”
Johnson actually began DJing in Los Angeles because he couldn’t afford to work at his first passion, painting. DJing was cheaper and still allowed for creativity. It helped that his chosen method for listening to music anyway was mixing the sounds of whatever he purchased. Johnson estimated that his current collection totals around 1,500 dance records and possibly 500 jazz, reggae, hip hop, ambient and trip hop albums.
Although he’s been living in Omaha since 2001 (thanks to family, partner Amber Jacobsen, and pug Miles Davis), his DJing takes him to various cities, such as Albuquerque, San Francisco and Denver. When he’s not out of state, he’s either DJing a Yoga Rocks the Park event in Omaha, painting or working on a set for his weekly online show at lowercasesounds.com. He just signed his thirty-sixth DJ for the site’s play roster.
To play a conference like Big Kansas City, Johnson might start off the day after the opening party with a lot of ambient sound. “People are tired and hungover.” By lunchtime, he might introduce some horns to build the energy as people wake up. Usually toward the end of a conference, he’ll throw in some vocals with positive messages. “I play deep house,” Johnson said, describing his sound. “If people are having a conversation and it’s low, it’s very much in the background. If you turn it up, then it gets people moving.”
Johnson said his usual method is to keep preplanning to a minimum, but he’s already found some specific sounds to complement the unique venue of Big Kansas City. “Since we’re in an airplane hangar,” he said, “I’ve downloaded sounds of astronauts and pilots, because I think it’ll make sense. I found a perfect launch ignition for the very beginning. And then I’ll just go into a beat.”
Johnson will play the opening party and the closing party as well as the entire conference, and he’s excited about making the whole event sound cohesive. “It’s not about any one thing—the people, the speakers, the music—if any one thing in all of those elements tries to stand out, it takes away from the whole experience,” he said. “I just need to feel part of it.”
Credits: Top photo by Anna Jones | Art of Photography and Phillip Harder / Thinc Iowa. Middle photo by Malone & Co. / Big Omaha.
