Cloob.fm Profile

Name: Oliver Wai
Alias: Oliver
Style: Progressive House, Trance

The Beginnings

It all started when I was 6 years old when my mother signed me up for piano lessons. I was the first and only kid in my kindergarten class who had to practice a musical instrument after school and I hated it…

Twelve years later, and after twelve years of lessons I was introduced to the underground electronica scene as a freshman at UC Berkeley in the mid-1990s. Suddenly all the years of musical training made sense. Being exposed to the (back then) small underground community of electronic music aficionados open my eyes to the world of techno music. Trance, house, drum & base, trip-hop, I loved it all.

Life moves forward and people’s path intersect and diverge at various moments in time. Mine was no different. I transferred out of Berkeley after 2.5 years in 1998 when my career objectives changed. In a sense that also signaled the end of the underground music scene for me as well. Santa Clara University was a good place for me career wise, but it was relatively lacking when it came to the electronic scene. However during this time, I befriended a group of foreign students from island nation of Singapore who introduced me to the next major musical influence.

Gate Crashing through South East Asia

I didn’t know much about Singapore, other than it being this funny little island in Southeast Asia where the youth (mostly ethnic Chinese) spoke better English than Mandarin. It was with this group of friends when I was exposed to the European DJ scene.

Singapore was a place heavily influenced by the club sound of the UK. I found out that there really was a “Ministry of Sound” in England and that they organized Gatecrasher events. What was unique to me about this type of electronica is the depth and the complexity of the melody. Whereas the US-electronic dance that I had originally followed was of the heavier bass and melody (like Moonshine Records artists), the new European Trance was a complex blend of melodic vocals of uplifting musical themes. I loved the musical sounds of Paul Van Dyk, Tiesto, Armin van Buuren, and Ferry Corsten and their works heavily influenced my musical tastes.

Around the World and Back

After I graduated and went into the working world, I spent much of my free time traveling the world and sampling the local electronic scene. What better way to understand and enjoy the music than to go directly to the source?

My travels took me to the Happy Hardcore clubs of Tokyo, to the Ibiza influenced House scene of Barcelona. It took me from the Trance clubs in London to the dance halls in Singapore. I visited the gothic (literally) underground clubs of Prague to the empty desert wasteland of Nevada for Burning Man. Partied in the Jazz influenced Parisian scene to the hard beats of Munich, Germany. These years of travel greatly gave me an appreciation of the music flavors of the various parts of the world and greatly influenced my musical styling.

My Foray into DJ-ing

I’ve dabbled on and off with DJ-ing over the years but I never really got into spinning until recently. The main reason was that few of the US labels carried the vinyl tracks and the ones that did were expensive imports. I built a small collection but the costs were prohibitive when you had to pay $15-20 a record when all you needed was 1 of the 7 tracks. Needless to say that after awhile, my Technic SL1200MKII and DJM-500 sat in a box collecting dust.

It was not until recently when I met BYeung that I started to DJ. That and the ability now to buy tracks directly online made life so much easier. BYeung and JAMbertO ran a weekly Tuesday night live broadcast party at their house in Palo Alto and much of what I learned about DJ-ing was from impromptu lessons by BYeung and/or JAMbertO over drinks after the live shows. Whereas I learned the technical aspects of DJ-ing there, my background in classical piano helped immensely on the artistic side of things. Composition, tone, key, these were concepts that I had already known for years. Funny how life comes full circle sometimes…

My Music

My musical tastes are reflective of the influences that have shaped me. I spin a wide variety of genres of electronic music however my main focus is in Progressive House and Trance with a twist of Electro and/or Drum & Bass depending on the mood. I’ve been known to put together a Deep House set once in awhile when I’m feeling the mood for sexy vocals with a slower beat. My main influences these days are Armin Van Buuren, Glenn Morrison, and Retrobyte as I tend to play a lot of their stuff in my sets.

As for my sets, I have a distinctive structure that I build into each one of them. I tend to structure my 1-hr podcast on cloob.fm in a 3 part structure based on the Sonata-form from my classical piano days. You’ll know what I mean when you listen to my latest podcasts at cloob.fm.

If you’ve gotten this far and are stilling reading this bio, thanks for attention and now you know the rest of my story. Hope you enjoyed it and see you on the other side!

- O