Dano

Dano is Dan Hruby, the DJ and producer who founded Red Melon Records and still runs it. His story starts a long way from any dancefloor he would later fill. In late 1989 he was an architecture student in Copenhagen, and the city's small clubs put underground house and techno in front of him for the first time. Something in those rooms stuck. Buildings were the plan, but the music had other ideas.

Two years later, in Sun Valley, Idaho, he met Jay Zimmermann. Jay was already throwing mashup underground house parties for the tourist crowds that came through the resort town, and he showed Dano the basics of DJing: how to line up one record against another and keep a room moving. That lesson set the course for everything that followed, and Dano soon began his own career behind the decks.

In 1994 he moved to San Francisco and came up through the Wicked and Come-Unity scene, and the city became home. For a year he shared 1 Ashbury Street with Daniel Wherrett, better known as DJ Dan. Sharing a house with a DJ of that calibre was an education of its own, and the friendship carried into the studio. Dano engineered DJ Dan's remix of "Acid Worm," and he also sat behind the desk for Crispin J. Glover, aka Caucasian Boy, on “Body Rockin’” (Kontraband, 1998). Those sessions were hands-on lessons in how a record is put together, the other half of a craft he had first approached from the decks. DJ Dan passed away in March 2026, aged 57, and he remains part of the Red Melon story.

In 1996 Dano founded Red Melon. Jay joined about a year later, and Fred Zirdung (Fredness) became the critical third member. The label settled into funky, dubbed-out tech house, much of it made with friends and kindred spirits, and its records came out of the same spirit as its nights. Friends made the music, friends played it out, and the name on the label tied them all together. With Joeski, recording as The Twisted Pair!, he cut Twisted Horns, a record that went into Carl Cox's top ten and carried the label's name well beyond its home city. His remix work travelled as well: Hybrid's "If I Survive" got the Dano treatment in the form of his Tribal Dub.

Those records took him around the world, often to places he had never expected to see from behind a pair of turntables. He played the main room at Fabric several times, as well as The End and The Arches. He played Zouk in Singapore and Propaganda in Moscow. On 21 April 2001 he played Locomia in the Algarve, and on 19 February 2002 he was at Perpetuum in Brno. Closer to home there was Lake Tahoe in 1997. Further afield, trips took him to Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta, and in October 2003 he played Bilbao. It is a map drawn by records, one booking leading to the next.

What ties those nights together is a habit he picked up in a ski town and never lost: playing for the people in front of him. The friends who taught him, played beside him and made records with him are woven through every chapter, and the label has always been as much about those people as about the music they made together.

Then came a long quiet spell. Red Melon went still, but Dano never stopped building. In 2007 he founded his own architectural design firm, Daniel Hruby Architects, focused on custom homes, where he kept making house from a completely different angle: floor plans instead of dancefloors, structure instead of stabs, rooms designed to hold people rather than move them. For a time it seemed the label might stay quiet for good. It didn't. In 2024 the label returned, this time from Carlsbad, reopening with the Therapy Remixes, made with Liam Connolly and sung by Robert Owens. It was a fitting comeback record: a trusted collaborator, a legendary voice, and a label picking up where it had left off.

Today Red Melon is a working home again, for old friends and new voices alike. The founder who first heard house in a Danish club and learned to mix from a friend at a mountain party still steps into the booth himself, playing occasional cameo sets at Shelter in Encinitas. More than three decades after that first lesson, the records still come first, and the room still decides where the night goes.