Love to Your Ears

Certain DJs have the uncanny ability to reflect your musical
taste almost exactly while also expanding your knowledge and
appreciation of styles that you’ve yet to explore. For me, and many
others, one such DJ is JD Twitch (AKA Keith McIvor) of the group
Optimo. With partner JG Wilkes, Twitch has been running the Optimo
(Espacio) club night every Sunday in Glasgow, Scotland, since 1997;
they also maintain a label called Optimo Music. Wilkes and Twitch
don’t sleep much.

Twitch is the opposite of a specialist. His expertise extends over
several musical genres: psych rock, dub, various African styles, early
electronic music, punk, funk, soul, disco, experimental, jazz,
post-punk, Tropicália (in 2007 he collaborated with Os Mutantes
in a project called Trocabrahma), house, and techno. Eclecticism is all
well and good, but if you have crap taste, diversity is a scourge.
Gratefully, Twitch possesses exquisite aesthetics and an insatiable
curiosity that leads to frequent discoveries of hidden sonic treasures
(he possesses about 25,000 records).

Twitch’s ascension to the elite echelon of selectors didn’t result
from cool calculation, but rather almost from chance. “I neither wanted
nor intended to be a DJ,” Twitch says via email. “When I was 18 or so,
I was always getting asked to provide the music at parties and play
alongside bands, as I suppose I was renowned for having a lot of music.
Then a good friend of mine talked me into playing alongside him at this
club night (this was way before I discovered mixing records together).
Next thing I knew, I had fallen in love with playing music for people,
and it gradually became what I did for a living. I was more inspired by
giving an outlet to music I loved that people hadn’t heard before
rather than by any particular person.”

With an eclectic, freestyle DJ like Twitch, one wonders if there are
any genres he won’t touch and what elements are crucial in tracks that
form his sets. Surely there must be limits. Twitch’s criteria couldn’t
be simpler: “If I like it, I’ll play it. I look for music that moves me
or that has a certain energy I like. While I don’t like using the term
‘soul,’ I’d say everything I play has to have been made with passion
for the music.”