Terry Mullan

Chicago DJ Terry Mullan's house music is so acidic he should be pimping Eveready batteries. Mullan was last in Miami in March, at Nocturnal for the AM Only party during WMC. His renown stems in part from his track "Sidewinder," which wound up on the Chemical Brothers Brother's Gonna Work It Out mix, and his Products of Our Environment EP, which was featured on Pete Tong's Essential Selection on BBC Radio.

And now the rest of the story. About 24 years ago Mullan was all aflutter over mastering the art of hip-hop DJing, picking up skills that helped his future endeavors in the house arena immensely, he believes. "At a certain point, most every DJ can mix records. For me, coming from a hip-hop background always gave me the ability and confidence to get in and out of records with a little more flair than other DJs," he says.

As a kid, he was raised on radio, quietly and obsessively tape-recording mix-show DJs who were playing everything from Italo disco to high-NRG to funk to house. That period of his life also saw the onset of his record-collecting fetish. "As kids, my friends and I would go on missions to find records and venture into neighborhoods we were scared to be in just to find the music we heard on the mix shows."

Mullan says he's very keen on the new crop of house producers, but as for today's ex-hip-hop DJs trying to cross over into house, well, things could be better. "I notice a grip of jocks who like to play battle style [with the turntables to the side], which usually implies scratching, but hardly anyone scratches or does tricks to take advantage of this setup."