Fredness

Every label has people whose names rarely show up in the credits but who shaped its story just as much as the artists did. At Red Melon, Fred Zirdung, known behind the decks as Fredness, is one of them. Born in Kitchener, Ontario, and a former engineer at Dolby Labs, he came to the label through the DJ booth rather than the studio. Dano founded Red Melon in 1996, and Jay Zimmermann joined about a year later. Jay, a consummate connector, introduced Dano and Fred in 1999, and Fred became the third member of the team. Together the three of them shaped the label's sound and its parties.

Dolby is a company built around how sound behaves, and Fred spent part of his working life there. It is a fitting résumé for a DJ whose contribution to the label was always about what happened in the room: the sound coming off the speakers, the flow from one record into the next, the feeling of a long night that holds together.

His sets cover the whole range of house the label cared about: vocal house, deep house, tech house and funky house, blended into one long thread. On a label whose releases moved between dubby tech house, warm deep house and jacking West Coast grooves, that let him represent the whole label in a single set.

His bookings through 2001 and into the start of 2002 show what a working house DJ's year looked like. It began in January 2001 with House Beautiful, which came round again and again over the following weeks. Running alongside it was a party called *flavasauce, with dates through the first months of the year. On March 26 he was in Miami Beach, playing Flavor during the Winter Music Conference. April brought JetSet and two dates on Watermelon, out on the Bay. In May he played Radiance in Oakland.

The summer was busy. In June there was Quench, Spundae's Acquaviva and a Mayonaise night, followed on the Fourth of July by another Watermelon. July 20 was Reverb, and the next night was Melon at DNA Lounge. August brought a second Mayonaise date and a Summer Splash Beach Party in Santa Cruz. Melon returned on September 2, and later that month he played the Loose Caboose in San Jose.

The autumn kept the same rhythm, with D'Core on October 6 and Melon again on October 13. On October 27 he played Trick or Treat in Boise, Idaho, the state where the Red Melon story first began. Melon came back on November 10, Wednesday Sessions followed on December 5, and the new year opened with Submerge, Melon and another House Beautiful.

The list shows a DJ at the heart of a scene. There are the label's own nights, the boat parties, events around the region, a beach party down the coast, a trip to the industry's biggest week, and regular returns to the same rooms. Melon, Red Melon's own night, runs through the year like a spine.

Two of those Melon nights survive in full. The club recorded its own events, and those recordings were later preserved online.

The first comes from July 21, 2001. Red Melon presented Fredness, JZ, Dano and Chris Udoh. Fredness plays first, for roughly an hour and twenty-three minutes, before Jay Zimmermann takes over, followed by Dano and then Chris Udoh. Only part of the night's tracklist has been identified, but it gives a sense of how wide that room could run: Powder Productions' "Cuban Fire," Doc Martin and Tony Hewitt's "Music From My Soul," the Paradise Version of Sueño Latino, Prince's "Controversy," The Digital Kid's "Bleeps And Noises" and a dub of Weekend World's "The Word." These come from across the night, spanning Latin house and West Coast deep house to Italian dream house and Minneapolis funk.

The second recording comes from Melon on November 2, 2002. Fredness is again on the bill with Dano and Jay Zimmermann, joined that night by Jon Terry. Two recordings of the same night, sixteen months apart, with the same core crew behind the decks, document what Red Melon sounded like in its home room.

What those recordings and that gig list share is constancy. Across 2001 and 2002, Fredness appears again and again next to the label's founder and its first recruit: at the label's own night, on the water and at parties across the region. Fredness made no Red Melon records. He made Red Melon nights, and the label's history is the richer for them.