“It’s fun to have the kind of perspective that I’ve gained in seeing how the scene has developed from my beginning years until now,” Vince told me, as we watched the Sound System Cultures LLC team at work from behind the stage. “The culture has always been there. For me, it began a little bit differently, as I grew up raving in San Francisco, so the parties were a little bit different. The DJing was all vinyl, and it was dominated by this warehouse vibe all over. To see how much this culture has grown, and how passionate the people within it are, it just absolutely blows my mind. I’ve always really considered myself a hobbyist. I love making music, and I love DJing, but I never expected any sort of ‘touring-travel-around-playing shows’ dynamic to evolve out of that. I’m really just riding the wave that everyone else is riding.”

He’s speaking frankly on the paradigm shift that happened within electronic music here in the states almost eight years ago, wherein a few especially wild producers began to exert great influence on the gradual direction of our slice of audio culture. “It became apparent to me at the Tipper [Denver] Fillmore show. There were just thousands of people there. Meanwhile the first time I saw him was in a community center with some twenty-odd people. And that’s just one artist. There are dozens of them that started all in the same kinds of places, who grew to have a very visible and powerful influence over the scene as it has developed.”

While he spoke of these artists as pillars of inspiration for the community at large, I felt he didn’t immediately recognize his own impact. Being a true and tried practitioner of turntablism, Vince is in part responsible for influencing a generation of DJs who seek to bring their performances beyond just contemporary mixing. “I’ve always firstly enjoyed the ‘live’ aspect of all music. I started in a band like anyone else I knew at the time, but I don’t have any reservations against someone who is just a DJ without any conventional music background. It’s not the instrument, it’s the intent.”

The way Vince delivers this remark, it almost reverberates throughout Spirit Crossing and the wider valley surrounding us, as if he was echoing some greater ethos of Solasta as a whole. “As far as why I decided to scratch in my sets, I like the vulnerability of it. I like putting myself out there and performing something live, knowing it could go terribly wrong at any moment,” he said, chuckling. “It also comes down to having a hip-hop musical upbringing. I grew up seeing Mix Master Mike cutting it up onstage. What really brought me directly here was Krafty Kuts. I was a breaks DJ, and whenever I listened in to him or watched what he was doing, it became extremely apparent that what he was doing was not only overtly technical, but took me for an absolute loop around the fact that this wasn't hip-hop: it was dance music. I realized that I wanted to step into that dynamic as well, to begin creating a much more immersive concert experience.”