solar penguin content

With a history of music in his family, it was only a matter of time before Louis Osborne became a performer. Louis’ epiphany happened during the early 90s when he visited the raves that took place every weekend in his native Birmingham. It didn’t take long to persuade the then 16 year old that his future lay with techno music. Inspired by his tentative acid house outings, Louis started to buy mix tapes and commenced his record collecting and DJ habit two years later when he turned 18. He honed his deck skills for a few years and then landed a job at Birmingham’s best known record store, Hard To Find, as a buyer and sales manager. “I did it for three years and it helped me get loads of experience in the industry and my hands on loads of records too,” Louis recalls. Through his job, he got to know other Birmingham DJs like Steve Lawler and Pete Gooding and when Lawler left his Café Mambo residency in Ibiza in 1998, Pete rang Louis to offer him the slot. “It was a big decision to move there: I was working for Mambo six hours a day, seven days a week for a little more than £100,” Louis says, “so I had to supplement my wages by selling mixtapes.” The Mambo residency didn’t make Louis rich, but his daytime mixture of down tempo French-oriented sophistication and nighttime jacking Chicago house, as well as his sharp deck skills, meant that he got noticed by other clubs on the island. He was offered a residency on Cream’s terrace and a year later, became a Bugged Out! Ibiza resident. Since then, Louis has played some of the world’s best clubs: from China to the Czech Republic and Dublin to Dubai, his ability to move smoothly between undeground house and techno and his ear for cutting edge electronic music mean that he is a regular fixture at world-renowned clubs like U60311 (Frankfurt), Spundae (LA), Polar TV (Berlin), Tribehouse (Dusseldorf), Centro Fly (New York), Home (Sydney), Bugged Out (Liverpool) and Pacha and Amnesia (both Ibiza). Louis has also held a residency at Birmingahm techno institution House of God (from 1996 to 2002) and has played at all the big dance festivals, including Creamfields, God’s Kitchen and Homelands. DJs are a notoriously fickle bunch, but Louis says that he hasn’t deviated too much from the dark, Wild Pitch sound that got him hooked on house in the first place in the early 90s. “When I was doing the Mambo residency, I was into Sneak, Derrick Carter and Green Velvet. I went through the whole Peace Division/ tribal techno sound in the early 2000s and it coincided with me living in LA for a year, between 2001 and 2002,” he explains. Although he was busier than ever Stateside, Louis became increasingly disillusioned with the clubs he was playing, and moved to Ireland a few years ago. His move closer to home conincided with the release of his first mix CD Tilted: Motion Audio in the US, followed by a second compilation, ‘Beats Reality’ on German label Delta, which highlighted his ongoing passion for jacking house and clubby techno, and gained him high praise on review pages. It’s no surprise that around this time, he started to gig heavily in Europe, particularly in Germany. Still as hungry as ever for new music, Louis is excited by the new wave of European electronic music. “I got bored with loopy, repetitive techno and nowadays, I play a lot of stuff from labels like Great Stuff, Bpitch, Mobilee, Poker Flat, and Get Physical as well as British producers like Switch and Jesse Rose,” he explains. Closer to home, Louis has got a new high profile residency in Birmingham’s Medicine Bar, Magik Musik, a night run by the promoters behind the legendary Atomic Jam night. “It takes place at The Custard Factory and has more of a festival vibe to it than a club night,” he explains. Louis has also embraced the digital revolution and is now using Final Scratch and Traktor 3 software. After 13 years of DJing, Louis’ passion for cutting edge house and techno remains as strong as the time he attended his first rave. The next time Louis shares this love affair with electronic music at a club in your town, make sure you don’t miss out!