Detroit, Chicago, and Outer Space

Every DJ who spins seriously on KCSB — who doesn’t just play songs, but mixes them live to create a fresh new collage of music each and every week — has a different way of making the station’s control room her or his own personal DJ booth.

Vikas Malhotra brings in a laptop, but he connects it to the trusty old studio turntables. Placing a couple of fake vinyl albums onto them, he then proceeds to cue, scratch, and spin purely digital tracks just as if they’d been recorded onto the vinyl in the first place. When I dropped by to sit in on his show, Interplanetary Musik, I immediately asked how this setup worked. “Magic,” he replied.

For the night’s first set, Malhotra spent 70 solid minutes bringing the sounds of Chicago and Detroit to Santa Barbara. He’s a PhD student in UCSB’s Religious Studies Department who got here by way of New York City and his small, small hometown of Lima, Ohio. You don’t necessarily hear about anywhere in Ohio being much of an outpost of electronic dance music, but it’s where he came to love the genres he works with on the air today. “House and techno music started in Detroit and Chicago,” he said. “Ohio was kind of between them, so DJs from both cities would go there and play parties. They were my influences.”