When the name Beat Suite appeared on this year’s Breakfest line-up, there were a few people scratching their heads wondering who the hell it was, but it didn’t take too long to figure out that Beat Suite is a night held every Friday at the Velvet Lounge in Perth, hosted by DJs Micah and Sharif Galal. Micah explained over a beer in the Velvet Lounge the ethos behind the night, which is basically loungy, funky music comprised of house, breaks, funk, hip hop and everything in between. “I’m trying to create somewhere to hang out to either chill at the end of the week or get fired up and to go out after,” Micah said.
Beat Suite started five months ago when Sharif moved to Perth from Sydney. “He rang me about two or three months before he moved and said ‘let’s start up a night together’ so we sussed out this venue and when he moved here we got it off the ground,” Micah said. But how does one actually get a phone call from the host of Triple J’s The Groove Train I asked? ”Late last year I was one of the DJ mix winners in the Noise on the ABC Competition,” said Micah. “I sent in a CD and got this call from Nicole Foot saying ‘your mix CD was really good we are going to put it on The Club’. I was really stoked – Triple J airplay – you’ve got to be happy with that! Later when I got home there was this message, call Sharif Galal. I thought it must be the same message and they were both trying to find me, so I rang him and he said, ‘I need another mix CD that is longer and we are going to put it on Mix Up this weekend’. I had 24 hours to get it organised. Luckily I’d done another one so I had one ready to go. Later Sharif said he was coming to Perth in January and we should catch up and have a drink.”
It seems Micah and Sharif have not only formed a friendship but Sharif has inadvertently helped Micah come to terms with his own rising status as a DJ. “Sharif is quite a character, I love him to death, but he’s definitely a character. The way he deals with a national audience is something I admired about him when I met him. All these people come up to him, tugging him and trying to get his attention. He makes his way through a crowd and talks to everybody, putting everyone at ease and makes them all happy without giving up anything about himself. I had this issue that I wanted everyone to like me and the more high profile you get, the more people try to knock you down. I’m not an extremely confident person, so I just watched him do that and I was like, wow you handled that so well. Everyone left thinking ‘cool, he’s really wicked’ but he didn’t necessarily give people what they wanted from him, yet he left them feeling content.”
Although Micah and Sharif are the resident DJs at Beat Suite, they also invite guest DJs to come along too. “I’ve got a pool of DJs who fit the night really well and who are competent people – Ben Mac, Skelly, Basschild (Scotty) FMT, Dart, Philly, Fdel, Wish – a lot of Ambar DJs because they are my friends and they’re people who I know can play – like Dart – he doesn’t play drum & bass down here, he plays Cookin’ Records and sort of jazzy, broken beat stuff. Ben Mac will come down and play a bit of house. I still get guests who haven’t played here before but I do have a core pool of DJs.”
Micah is the only local DJ on the Breakfest line-up so I asked what he and Sharif had planned to kick off events. “It’s a Beat Suite set because it’s what we play down here; mid-tempo stuff. There’s people doing hip hop and people doing breaks and house but we’re sort of fusing it in a loungy way that no one else is really doing – at least not that I’m aware of anyway. It’s a nice opportunity for me and Sharif to get up there and have a spin. I’ve always wanted to play at Belvoir.”
Apart from Beat Suite, Micah personally has big plans for the future, which he tentatively revealed. “I’ve achieved the first goal I set for myself about four years ago when I left university and starting working. I decided I wanted to become a main part of the community and a DJ that people would enjoy seeing and who they’d also respect as a person. It’s fantastic I’m able to play Friday and Saturday nights and host a radio show [Rhythm Trippin’ on RTRFM] once a month.”
Micah showed us what he’s really capable of earlier this month when he opened for Soul Of Man at Ambar and received a huge response from the crowd. “I was on an extra high that night because the night before, I’d got best breaks DJ second time in a row at the Perth Dance Music Awards and I was like wow, I feel like I have really solidified it now. So I went ok I’ve done that, where do I want to go. I would really like to say that I’m a musician and that I make a living out of music. I’d love to take my profile national and maybe international eventually, I don’t know; and the way I’m going to have to do that is by making my own music – so that’s what I’m doing.”
And so the journey begins with Micah working with breaks producer, performer and remixer Lo-Key Fu. “We did a set at the Morgue together last week, him on his 808 and me mixing and we just nailed it. We’re playing down South together on New Years Eve and we’re playing at the Big Day Out and hopefully some other festival gigs, which will be a prelude to producing together.” To get things rolling Micah is remixing Style of the Rising Filter, a track off Lo-Key Fu’s recent album Itchy Techno Finger. “Fu knows how to make a dance tune really well. He knows how to make the rises and the falls and the tweaky bits and he has a good sense of dealing with vocals, and I’ve got a really good sense of what the dancefloor needs; together we’re going to hopefully do something that will work really well. That’s where I’d like to go anyway but we’ll see what the future holds.”
You can catch Beat Suite on:
24th December: Beat Suite XMas Eve Special, Velvet Lounge, Perth
26th December: Breakfest 2004, Perth
