“Your style sounds like moldy cheese,” I tell Carlos Souffront. He laughs. “I like that.” He might mean it. Given that he’s from Detroit, I suspect he has the practiced ease of “Midwestern nice.”
I first knew of Souffront as a DJ. I had heard him play at a word-of-mouth party in Bushwick. The crowd danced shoulder to shoulder, drinking mushroom tea. Water (I hoped) leaked from exposed pipes and dripped into our cups. Souffront played what I recognized as Detroit techno, but funkier and melty. “Wow,” I mouthed to a friend. He whisper-shouted into my ear, “He’s a cheesemonger too.”
In the twenty years since I left my home state, Missouri, I often find myself surrounded by Midwesterners. We somehow converge without accents or other tells. The Midwestern identity is too subtle and mutable to be consciously detectable, yet we know that we are a particular breed. But a DJ from Michigan who also specializes in cheese—the most Midwestern of American delicacies—was just too on the nose.
When I saw Souffront in Brooklyn again, it was at a No Way Back iteration—the party he helped establish in Detroit that now travels globally. It was easy to spot him across the room. He wore a cranberry-red sweater and a thick, charming scarf; he would have blended anonymously into a J.Crew catalog, but here stood out as a friendly lighthouse in a sea of black nylon.
I introduced myself as the person he’d spoken to on the phone. We’d already had one interview about growing up on a diet of Midwestern cheese and music, and how that cultured him as a career tastemaker. He greeted me warmly, launching us into an easy chatter which I tried to focus on. In growing distress, I felt my stomach contents threatening to join the conversation. I raised an index finger. He regarded me patiently. As the wave receded, I apologized for my queasiness during my molly come-up.
He disappeared and returned with a cup of water filled to the brim, then while I sipped, graciously filled my silence with apologies for our scheduling mishaps. When I thanked him and offered to let him get back to the night, he said, “Let’s talk again. Let’s do the damn thing.”
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Brittany Dennison: What was it like growing up in Detroit, a famously musically rich city?
Carlos Souffront: I was born in 1977 in southeast Michigan, in the Metro Detroit area. I’m the youngest of three. My parents are from the Dominican Republic, and they moved to Detroit in 1968 to raise a family. They chose Detroit because of the auto industry. They felt it was an up-and-coming area. It wasn’t known as a hotspot for Dominican communities, which back then were more Chicago and New York. But my dad was the consul to the Dominican Republic, so he helped people get visas to travel here. We met a lot of other Dominicans in Michigan that way.
We saw tons of concerts together as a family. The Jacksons, David Bowie, Hall and Oates. My dad would take us to the symphony. So yeah, my family really loved music.
BD: Your family had a big musical influence on you, it seems.
CS: Definitely. My dad was also a huge music lover, mostly classical and opera, so records were an early fetish. He taught me how to hold them properly so I wouldn’t scratch them, how to play them. I was my dad’s DJ. He would tell me to look for the record with a certain color label, a little picture, such-and-such on it. I would run and grab it and play it for him.
I was obsessed with Prince and Donna Summer because of my older cousin, who came to stay with us and go to school in the U.S. for a few years. She introduced me to disco.
And my older sister was a massive influence too. She brought home the first house music records I ever heard, in 1988, and that totally flipped my wig and started me on that part of my musical journey.
BD: When did you first start going to parties in Detroit?
CS: As soon as I got my driver’s permit. I was like, I’m going to find where this house music is being played. I would drive up and down Woodward Avenue with my windows open, listening for bass. And it worked. I actually found several parties that way. And once you started going, they would hand you flyers for the next ones.
BD: What were those parties like?
CS: Exhilarating. It felt like this was what I’d been looking for. Everyone there felt like a misfit from the dominant culture they were trying to escape. And of course now, most of the community is the people we were trying to escape from. Back then, it really was the best. It’s hard to overestimate. It’s the reason I still have a crush on this shit thirty-plus years later.
BD: You were so young then. Were the others mostly your age, or older people who were accepting of younger people in the scene?
CS: I was on the younger side, but it wasn’t ageist, sexist, or prejudiced around sexual orientation. It was underground, so if you made it in, you were part of it. Everyone who came had made sure they got the flyer at the prior party, kept it, called the number, wrote down the directions, looked at a map, and braved disused buildings, dangerous parts of town, all sorts of shit. They really chose to be there.
BD: Do you enjoy dancing? Do you remember your first experiences of dancing to that kind of music with other people?
CS: Oh my God, it’s my favorite thing in the world. I love to dance, but I have to be compelled. I won’t just dance to anything. But dancing is a huge part of it for me.
I was actually talking about this with Derek [Plaslaiko]. We were talking about our friend Karen Gage and how much we both love how she dances. There are people I’ve known so long that if I saw them in silhouette, I could tell who they were just by how they danced.
And back then, people weren’t all facing the DJ. The DJ was usually out of sight. People danced with their friends, and that is a very crucial thing that’s gone away.
BD: You miss it?
CS: Oh, absolutely. I make a point to not do it and hopefully model good behavior.
BD: When I saw you play at Partyline, you were hidden behind a large divider shaped like the party’s logo [a rotary phone] so the dancers didn’t have a clear line of sight to you.
CS: Yeah, that was fun. I remember that party well. That morning was actually my dad’s memorial. He had died that Monday, and because he was in New York [Partyline takes place in New York], it worked out perfectly. I’ve been learning how much I process emotions through listening to and playing music. That night was really cathartic and really nice. I mean, it wouldn’t be the first time I cried while playing, but I didn’t that night. I felt pretty joyous.
BD: Oh wow, I had no idea. The privacy then must have been particularly welcome. Does it make you feel self-conscious to be watched?
CS: I hate being watched. I never look at the audience. I know they’re watching, but I don’t want to see it. It’s incredibly personal. I’m baring my soul.
These days, you have to find the punks among the ravers. People with the right principles, the right attitude. Dan, who throws Partyline, is one of those people. As soon as he explained the idea, I got it and loved it.
BD: I love dance music, and I go to parties, but I have never DJed, and I have no idea how it actually works. So there’s no real reason for me to be watching, I guess.
CS: And you’re not gaining insights by watching the DJ either. So yeah, what exactly is the point?
BD: Let’s go back to the beginning. What was your first experience of DJing?
CS: There was a small independent chain called Harmony House in southeast Michigan when I was growing up. A guy named Adriel Thornton worked at the one in my local mall. He was throwing some of the early raves in Detroit. He turned me onto stuff and gave me flyers to parties. Once I started going to the parties and getting more involved, we started doing events together. That was my first residency, doing a weekly night with him.
BD: You went to the University of Michigan. What was your experience of music in Ann Arbor?
CS: I had a weekly radio show and became the music director for the radio station. I also got a job as a buyer at an independent record store called Schoolkids’ Records that was legendary for decades. It was where you went to find imports and rare stuff. By the time I got there, it was at the end of its life. Independent record stores were going out of business in the nineties. But I became the electronic music buyer, and the owner really liked me. I told him that if you want to sell techno records, you have to let people hear them first. He let me play records for customers. I sold a lot of records and made a lot of friends that way.
BD: How did you get into cheese, professionally?
CS: My concentration in college was English, and I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I needed a job. My main expenses were food and music. That’s why I worked at a record store. When that went out of business, I figured, well, I did music for a while, let me try working in food since that’s my other major expense.
By that time, I was a fixture at Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor. It’s a Jewish deli that also has an incredible cheese counter. I’d go in there every day for coffee or bread or a piece of cheese. So when I applied, they already knew my name. I started working there and learning more about cheese. And the more I learned, the more I realized how much more there was to learn. I also loved that cheese people reminded me of music people. They’re passionate and not in it for the money. Just interesting people with very diverse hobbies.
BD: Do you tell other DJs that you work in cheese, and do you tell your coworkers in cheese that you DJ? Or do you keep them separate?
CS: I don’t really have to, because everyone else does it for me. Everyone I work with eventually hears about the DJing, and everyone in dance music eventually hears about the cheese. And I’m not the one telling them.
I’d rather keep them separate because it’s really personal, and also it’s not for public consumption. Some of the music is downright bizarre and scary. People make assumptions about who I am based on what I play, and I don’t feel they’re doing it with the appropriate context. I’ve long dismissed the notion that my taste is going to be acceptable to a broad swath of people. The stuff I like has a niche appeal.
BD: You said in another interview: “Cheese is produced through the nurturing of culture, albeit microbiological. It’s somewhat comforting to realize the odd career I’ve hobbled together for myself turns out to have a certain logic.” Could you explain that logic?
CS: It’s just this idea that basically what I am is a connoisseur. I take in as much as I can, and I make decisions about what I think is the best. Then I share that with people and see if they want it, whether it’s music or cheese.
Cheese is just preserved milk with certain cultures reinforced to make it taste the way it does. Similarly, you could say that music has the same structure that’s put down as a recording. The flavor of it is a function of the culture that it comes from. So I guess that’s what I mean, that I do the same thing. Picking out what I think is the best and sharing it.
BD: Do you encounter the same kind of snobbery in the music and cheese professional worlds?
CS: I just don’t fuck with music snobs. I don’t do music for a living, so I don’t need to curry favor with people. I can sniff out a social climber mentality from a mile away, and I want no part of that. I don’t follow dance music gossip. I’m barely on Instagram, and I’m not on Twitter at all, which is where a lot of that stuff goes down. For me, it’s about finding people who are genuinely passionate about music. They don’t have to be passionate about the same music as me. How boring would that be?
There’s definitely snobbery in cheese, but the cheese world is cool because it feels like a global village. It’s less competitive. Every year I’m one of several dozen judges for the American Cheese Society’s competition. We taste and evaluate 1,500 to 2,000 American cheeses. There are always a few judges from Europe and Australia. They’re fascinated by the quality of American cheese right now. Unfortunately, right now, in Europe, there’s a real struggle to preserve old ways of cheesemaking. And there are certainly some struggles happening here as well with the Food and Drug Administration. It’s a weird time. Most Europeans just think Americans are stupid, and they’re not wrong. Especially now, I mean, we can’t disprove that we’re stupid.
BD: Speaking of regionalism, you play a lot of acid house. Do you play in that genre because it’s Midwestern, or do you play acid house because you are Midwestern?
CS: I think I play acid house because I’m Midwestern. You can never live down the music that first stirs your soul. For me, that was hearing acid house in 1988. But I don’t consider myself a strictly acid house DJ. It’s maybe 10 percent of my collection.
Most of the music that I play isn’t made by people from the Midwest. It’s made by people much further away.
BD: I get the sense that producers everywhere make music influenced by the Midwest, and then it comes full circle when Midwestern DJs play it.
CS: It’s certainly possible, yeah. I used to feel like there was a cultural consistency and musical style of a place. But dance music doesn’t sound like it’s from a place anymore. When I started, I could listen to a record and almost always be able to tell you where the producer is from. That’s harder now.
There was an older idea that artists have to go to a big city to be noticed. Globalization promised that people could stay put and have their great art reach the world. What’s happened instead is that people still go to that bigger city, and wind up making art that reflects their impression of what the bigger city wants, instead of making a product born of their homegrown culture.
So now, in effect, ninety-five percent of techno sounds like it’s from Berlin. The music doesn’t really reflect a place so much as a party experience. And it’s regrettable because I think it’s kind of cool for music to have a taste of place.
BD: Do you play differently when you’re in the Midwest versus when you’re playing elsewhere? You’ve shaped the sound of the No Way Back parties in Detroit from the beginning. Do you play a certain style there?
CS: I do tend to nod to a city when I’m playing there. If I play in Chicago, I’m playing Chicago records that I love. When I’m playing in Minneapolis, there has to be a nod to Prince. But more than that, I play to the event and to the other people I’m playing with.
For No Way Back, it’s always been gritty underground techno with a tough sensibility. There’s a wildness to it, where some tracks get abstract almost to the point of rhythmic noise. It’s a radical expression, a sort of fundamental expression, of underground dance music.
BD: How did you meet everyone in the No Way Back and Interdimensional Transmissions crew?
CS: Detroit’s a small town. In the nineties, if you were into this kind of music, you eventually met all the other passionate freaks. All the people involved in No Way Back are those passionate freaks. We’ve all just been friends forever.
By the time the idea for the first No Way Back came around, we were in the doldrums of minimal techno. It was getting flat and boring. Derek’s idea was to bring things back to basics.
BD: You moved to San Francisco. What brought you there, and did that change your sense of identity?
CS: I moved to San Francisco in 2011 to be a full-time f****t. The Midwestern scene is particularly straight. In fact, the whole world is! For the longest time when I moved to San Francisco, I felt like I needed everybody to know where I was from. But it’s not that important. People don’t really care where you’re from here. But I’ve always felt very much Midwestern, and I’ve always gravitated toward other Midwestern people.
BD: So how often do you go to parties in San Francisco where you’re not DJing?
CS: Certainly less now. I go through phases. The parties that I like in San Francisco happen maybe four or five times a year. A lot of them fall on bank holiday weekends, when I’m DJing elsewhere. So the opportunity is rarer than it was, but I definitely go out as often as I can.
I love supporting my friends’ parties. I love hearing my friends DJ. I’m pretty hardcore about it. If it’s a party that I really like, I’ll be the first one there and the last one to leave. I just love to see the fresh ideas at the beginning and to see where it goes.
BD: What do you think makes a great party?
CS: I know it’s going to sound weird, but as long as you have the right intent and the right energy, you could almost play anything and bring a convivial spirit to the thing. My saying that is probably a sign I’m growing up. What matters to me is hearing a DJ articulate a style they’re passionate about. I’ll happily listen to music I don’t personally love if the party is good. I’ve been to great parties where the music wasn’t what I would play, but the DJ had the right attitude and the right intent, and it worked. I’m starting to feel like that is actually more important than the music.
BD: I feel that. I’ve been to a lot of parties where the music is great, but the vibe is just off. A party isn’t just about the DJ and the sound system.
CS: Yeah, the people, the environment, everything’s part of it. I’m not an audiophile. I went to scrappy, underground parties as a teenager where the sound wasn’t good, but it didn’t matter. A great party happens when the people who are participating have a lot of intent. They mean to be there, and they mean to be there over anywhere else in the world. It’s not casual. It actually means a lot. Maybe too much.
BD: Do you find that certain cities or regions are more receptive to good parties?
CS: It can happen anywhere there are people with the energy to throw parties who have the charisma to get people there and the wherewithal to keep them coming back. It used to be driven by local music culture, where the people throwing and attending the parties were also making the music being played. That still exists, but more so now, we’re living in a globalized culture where everything is from everywhere.
I’ve been incredibly inspired by people throwing parties in cities where I’ve lived. I can’t say one is better than the other, although there’s the gay factor in San Francisco that’s hard to get anywhere else.
I’m hopeful that the kids are all right everywhere and that parties will continue. The underground is massive, as they say.
BD: I have a lot of hope for the younger generation. The world is tough right now, and I’m very impressed by their adaptability and resourcefulness. What do you think the challenges will be for future generations of DJs?
CS: The hardest thing will be carving out a musical identity. When I go to parties with young DJs, it can feel scattered. Every DJ has a totally different style, and they’re not sequenced in a way that considers the arc of the night. So you get these pockets where one DJ and their friends have a moment, then it shifts to another DJ and their friends. They’re going to be challenged with getting a real sound together that’s going to make an impression outside of their own microcosm.
BD: And what’s in the future for you?
CS: I don’t really care about the audience anymore. I care about peers coming together. At this point, the peer group is big enough to include both the artists and the audience. All I want to do is facilitate those convergences.
The last big party I did was during the total eclipse in the path of totality in Texas. I collaborated with a couple of people there and invited all my friends who make music. It wasn’t a money gig. Everyone got themselves there. Everyone earned the same small honorarium. I got us Airbnbs so we could stay together, eat together, and hang out for three days. There were about fifty-five artists. I didn’t even care if anyone else came. Obviously it didn’t make money, but that wasn’t the point. Bringing people together was the point. It was a dream come true.
Everything I do now is a version of that idea. Bringing musicians and lovers of music together. The audience is just a nice bonus.