COLLINS MIX
Feb 1, 2002 12:00 PM, By Simona Rabinovitch
Sandra Collins is just waking up. She answers the hotel phone in sleepy-voice — that raspy, morning-after tone that usually betrays funny business of the evening before. Today, however, Collins' midday grogginess is not the consequence of debauchery but of jet lag.
“I'm so tired,” she says with a sigh. “I don't feel like getting up at all. I've been playing four or five gigs a week. When I'm not on a specific tour, I try to only do gigs on weekends. I can't do the Tuesday gig in some small little town somewhere anymore. I was just so sick all the time.” Still, Collins digs life on the road. “I'm enjoying playing, especially in Europe, in London. The crowds there are a little bit older, and they're very educated.”
Ordering oatmeal, orange juice and tea from room service, Collins is clearly ready to take on the afternoon. The busy DJ and producer just arrived in New York the night before to play a gig in support of her Cream mix CD. The stop is part of a hectic tour schedule that has her spinning in as many as five cities each week and has turned her life into a whirlwind of airports, hotel rooms and clubs — not that Collins is complaining about her jet-setting lifestyle. Lounging in the feather bed of a posh hotel alongside boyfriend Justin Scott Dixon and awaiting the arrival of her room-service brunch, Collins may be tired, but she's clearly happy. If anyone can keep up with life in the fast lane, it's the United States' so-called trance goddess.
“All I can say is it's flattering,” says Collins about her unofficial title, which was bestowed upon her by legions of fans who, throughout the past decade, have been moved by her moody progressive-house and emotional, melodic trance and sets. Describing her sound as “hard music with a woman's touch,” Collins has earned a reputation as a party girl unafraid to shake her stuff on the dance floor alongside her fans, showing that she is into the music as much as the kids whom she continues to amaze. Although some A-list DJs diss big raves and favor the more sophisticated atmosphere of clubs, Collins remains connected to the pulse of the scene she helped create.
“Sometimes it's tiring going from the airport to the plane to the hotel to the club to the airport, then home to do laundry and back to the airport,” she admits. “But I love going to different cities and performing, making people happy, creating a vibe and playing the records I love. Someone asked me for an autograph in an airport in Peru! If I'm not too tired, I'll go out and dance. I'm very approachable; I talk to everybody and give them a moment of my time. I think it's important.”
“Somewhere between a rum and coke and a scotch on the rocks,” is how Collins, who first ventured behind the wheels of steel in 1987, describes her age. Collins discovered the joys of DJing from a boyfriend who owned a pair of turntables. “I started screwing around with the decks and became good at it,” she recalls. “I realized it was something I wanted to do.”
Soon afterward, Collins began spinning hard, industrial techno in the Phoenix club scene and was discovered by techno legend Frankie Bones. “Frankie flew me out to New York to do a huge party,” says Collins of her early gigs at Bones' Storm raves in Brooklyn, a series of parties that helped shape the East Coast rave scene. “Then I went on tour with him. It was really big. I was like, ‘Whoa!’ But I did it with confidence. The experience totally inspired me to want to be a DJ, because it felt so good to perform in that way.”
Biting the bullet, Collins took the risk and moved to Los Angeles to make it as a DJ. The city's nascent progressive-trance scene provided the ideal backdrop for Collins to develop her skills and explore the melodic palettes of tough sounds that formed the basis of her gorgeously mournful, hard sound. Soon she landed residencies at L.A. clubs Sketchpad, from 1992 to 1995, and Metropolis, where she shared the decks with Doc Martin and Taylor from 1995 to 1998. She also released her debut mix CD, 1997's Lost in Time, on L.A. trance label Fragrant, along with two 12-inch singles, “Ode to Our”/“Red” and “Flutterby.”
In 1998, to take her career to the next level, Collins took another leap and relocated to New York, where she soon found herself spinning at the now-defunct Twilo alongside Sasha and Digweed, Paul Van Dyk and Carl Cox. More residencies followed, including stints at Chicago's Crobar and Las Vegas' Utopia.
A milestone for Collins' career came when she played a gig at the much-hyped Woodstock '99 music festival. Collins went on after Moby and introduced an audience of rock fans to the art of melodic trance. “It was amazing to play to 80,000 people,” she says. “It was a different crowd. They were into the bands, but I managed to capture their full attention the whole time.” Then, in 2000, Kinetic Records enlisted Collins to mix Tranceport 3, her second compilation and the third installment of the label's highly successful series.
Now that she's paid her dues, Collins has since moved from New York to Orlando, Fla., to lead a more “comfortable” life. “It was a little hectic living in the city,” she says of her time in Manhattan. “I realized I'd done my thing here in New York.” Collins' newfound comfort is evident in her latest Kinetic offering, Cream, the first Cream-branded U.S. release by the UK superclub of the same name. The compilation features tracks from Carissa Mondavi, 16th Element, Piece Process and others. “This one is a little easier to listen to than Tranceport,” she says. “In a club, when I have three or four hours to spin, I can start slow and peak out. This CD got going a little faster and took different directions: a little melodic, a little dark, a little groove.”
Considering her comfort with the jet-setting party lifestyle, as well as her natural performance skills, it's not surprising to learn that Collins comes from a famous show business family. She was born and raised in Vegas by an actor father and a model mother, who reportedly dated Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra before marrying Collins' dad. Her godfather is comedian Milton Berle. Sadly, Collins lost both parents at an early age — her father died when she was 5 and her mother when the DJ was 19. Despite being encouraged by her family to pursue an acting career, Collins' only big moment on the silver screen was a nonspeaking role in the '80s comedy Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. “I started as an extra, but my friend's mom did craft so my role got bumped up,” she says.
As a child, Collins always gravitated toward music, taking her own records to the local roller rink and experimenting with guitar and drums. “I didn't learn much from it except how to twirl the drumsticks,” she laughs. Although she enjoyed music, Collins didn't know that her early interests would lead to a musical career. “My mom knew better than I did. She started getting into house music with me, and she bought me my first keyboard, a Korg Poly 800.”
A Kurzweil K2600 has replaced the Korg, yet Collins still considers herself more of a DJ than a producer. She has only released three compilations and two singles, which is unusual for a DJ of her stature. Although many DJs produce tracks to promote their names, Collins has risen to the top without producing loads of records. “I'm more of a DJ,” she explains. “Every DJ's next step is to do production. It took me so many years to actually do something. Because I tour so much, it's hard to do a lot in the studio.” In an endorsement of “quality over quantity,” both Nick Warren and John Digweed licensed Collins' “Flutterby” single for their compilations, Global Underground and Bedrock, respectively. The 12-inch was released in 1998 by Scotland's Hook label and is regarded as a genre-defining progressive-house record.
Regarding her production techniques, Collins freely admits that she relies on engineers to push her buttons. “The engineers did the hands-on work on my records,” she says. “Deepsky did ‘Ode to Our’/‘Red,’ and Jim Stout in Denver did ‘Flutterby.’” As far as her creative process, she simply goes with the flow and relies on serendipity: “I just went in the studio with no ideas. Everything was an accident. I don't come prepared, and it's kind of good that way. I just let things happen.” Collins' live-in boyfriend, Dixon, aka Voyager, engineers her mixed CDs at their home studio in Orlando. “He produces dark and different progressive house,” she says. “Before we started going out, we wanted to work together. He helps me engineer my CDs, running my mix through Pro Tools and making it sound better than the records.”
Collins says that she wants to learn engineering skills and lay down some new tracks herself in the couple's home studio. Patience, however, is her biggest challenge, perhaps as a result of her much-publicized battles with attention deficit disorder (ADD). “I'm trying to learn, but I'm very fidgety,” she says. “ I don't have a lot of patience.”
Although she hopes to score commercials and soundtracks eventually — “When I'm a little older, above a scotch on the rocks!” — her immediate goal is to develop her singing voice. Collins is taking singing lessons from vocalist Sam Mollison, who is featured on many of Sasha's early records. “He's helping me strengthen my voice,” she says. “He's also kind of my personal trainer and chef. We do yoga together to help me get the breathing right.”
Collins has played in clubs all over the world, but she has discovered that the most amazing sound systems are in the United States, particularly at Boston's Avalon, L.A.'s Giant and, of course, New York's recently closed Twilo, with its legendary Phazon system. “The sound system there was so overpowering,” she reminisces. “It was fun being the man behind the curtain. Twilo's disco ball was sold on Ebay. That's when I knew it was really over!” As far as DJ gear, in addition to the prerequisite set of Technics, Collins has a thing for the Allen & Heath Xone:464 mixer: “It's a fun mixer. The sound is very clean, and it has filters on each channel.”
While shopping for records, Collins doesn't mind spending time searching for that elusive, different sound. “I dig and dig and dig for obscure stuff, looking for something that grabs my attention,” she says. Hard-to-find white labels often appear in her sets. “I love those one-timers that I've never heard before. I get a lot of stuff in the mail, and I'm in the Balance record pool, which is great for end-of-the-night tracks.” Collins' current favorite is the Deep Dish remix of Depeche Mode's “I Feel Love.” When she's not working, Collins' taste in music bounces all over the spectrum: “I like Coldplay, Supertramp, Mazzy Star, the Virgin Suicides soundtrack, older stuff. What I listen to is completely different than the dance music I play.”
With her ear to the ground and her sights on the sky, what advice does the trance goddess have for aspiring DJs? For Collins, it all comes down to risk taking, confidence and humility. “I've lived in Orlando, New York, Arizona, Vegas and Los Angeles,” she says. “If you're living in a small town, move to a bigger city. Do something new and fresh that hasn't been done before. Be comfortable with yourself, because people treat you the way you treat yourself. And listen to yourself.”
Distracted, Collins glances down at the tea bag steeping in the cup of hot water that she's neglected for the past 15 minutes. “Oops! My tea is probably really strong right now,” she says. Perhaps she could have used this potent brew to give her day a caffeine-injected jump start about an hour ago, but now she's fully in high gear, as energized from talking about music as her fans are during the peak of her epic sets.
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