JORGE WATTS | Behind The Decks

Written By Shane Price

The OG house and Techno legend, coming from the little home town of Adelaide, Jorge Watts has absolutely dominated every genre he puts his hand on; playing alongside the world's biggest DJs and dropping sets all over the globe for the last decade.

Behind The Decks had the pleasure of sitting down and having a quick chat about all things Jorge Watts. We also have a 90 minute live mixed DnB set ready to rock everyone’s socks off!

Come with me as we step Behind The Decks with Jorge Watts

You started off your career on vinyl to now throwing down on CDJs. When playing to the crowds or at home what do you prefer to play on?

I played a gig at Sugar Nightclub Saturday night, which I played a fair bit of vinyl as they still have 1200’, I still love playing vinyl any chance I get but I don’t miss carrying it at all.

You’ve played all around the world, including doing 6 months stints in Chicago, yet you still call Adelaide home. What keeps you coming back to Adelaide?

I love Adelaide’s lifestyle. I think if you travel overseas you appreciate how good we have it here in SA. For the last 10 -15 years, I’ve had a lot of producers to work with, but I can definitely see myself living in Holland or even Belgium soon.

How does it feel reading such things as “Jorge has made an enormously loud “bang” at the forefront of Australian House and Techno music.” (Quoted from Traxsource)

It certainly makes me humble and warm and fuzzy at the same time. It’s nice to be spoken about like that when we have a great gene pool of talented producers here in Australia.

You’ve played with the likes of Carl Cox, Adam Bayer, and Richie Hawtin, and the list goes on, have you ever been starstruck?

No not really, those guys are all really cool people and so down to earth especially Carl, we love talking cars every time we see each other. But there was one time I was playing with Richie and I had played and he looks over at me and says "Can you play a few records? I’m busting to go to the toilet". I had to decline the invitation as I got stuck into the rider straight after my set and I was a bit too trollied than star struck!

You have a lot of versatility, you seem to play any genre you get your hands on, minimal techno, techno, house and for our FF mix you’ve produced a live DNB set. What’s your favourite to play and why?

Well at the moment DnB is killing it for me, sonically Andy C, Bou, Kmotionz, Kanine, Critical Impact just to name a few, those guys are smashing out the park. I’m totally in the zone with this stuff because the genre is really pushing the limits, there’s simply no rules for what goes on in the genre and that’s where I love to be, techno used to be in that realm for me but after decades of living and breathing it, sometimes it’s good for a change.

Can you point out a favourite moment in your career so far?

Chicago was next level, a great time for me DJ’ing around the US and the massive amount of production that I was doing with my homie KC, we made a lot of great records in such a short time. I made a lot of great friends working at Supreme Records in Chicago and that influenced a lot of the house music I wrote for the next ten years. I think having music on big name releases like Carl Cox live DVD’s and Derrick Carter compilations on Defected are definitely spikes in my career too.

Freak Division which is yourself and Dan Treloar, has some amazing tracks on some of the world’s biggest labels. What can we expect from this new release and you guys in the future?

Well Dan and I have been really busy pushing “Freak Division” as the one entity artist and label out there over the last 12 months and with that we have been trying to get the best sounding production that we can, lots of hours in the studio and I think you can really hear that in our latest works. Doing everything in house as well from obviously the music to our artwork to our mastering is a major factor for us as well. We are always striving for the best sound we can produce and the last few releases we really found that we’ve hit another level of production.

The last question we ask everyone is, what’s the craziest thing you’ve seen from behind the decks?

There has been a fair few incidents over the years from bra’s being thrown around to Josh Winx sampling Carl Cox MCing about corn on the cob at Future Music Festival, but probably seeing a guy run around the dancefloor with a toilet on his head was a sight, would have sounded sh*t in there though.