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.

The engineering background is worth pausing on. 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. That breadth mattered on a label whose own releases moved freely between dubby tech house, warm deep house and jacking West Coast grooves. A DJ who could travel across all of it in a single set was a DJ who could represent the whole label at once.

The clearest picture of that life is his calendar. His bookings through 2001 and into the start of 2002 survive as a running list, and it is a revealing one: a record, date by date, of what a working San Francisco house DJ's year actually looked like. It is not the diary of a headliner flown in for one big night. It is the diary of a DJ who was there week after week, building the label's reputation one room at a time.

It begins in January 2001 with House Beautiful in San Francisco, which appears again and again over the following weeks, on January 5, 19 and 26, and on February 2, 9 and 23. Running alongside it is a party called *flavasauce, with dates through January, February and March and again in early April. On March 26 he was in Miami Beach, playing Flavor during the Winter Music Conference. April brought JetSet in San Francisco and two dates on Watermelon, out on San Francisco Bay, on April 6 and April 29. In May he played Radiance in Oakland.

The summer was busy. In June there was Quench in San Francisco, Spundae's Acquaviva in Oakland and a Mayonaise night, followed on the Fourth of July by another Watermelon. July 20 was Reverb, and the next night, July 21, was Melon at DNA Lounge. August brought a second Mayonaise date and, on August 4, 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. There was D'Core in San Francisco 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 New Year's Eve was listed simply as "TBA." The new year opened with Submerge on January 5, 2002, Melon on January 12 and House Beautiful on January 26.

Read as a whole, the list shows a DJ at the heart of a scene. There are the label's own nights, the Bay's boat parties, events across Oakland and San Jose, a beach party down the coast, a trip to Miami for the industry's biggest week, and a regular return to the same San Francisco rooms. Melon, Red Melon's night at DNA Lounge, runs through the whole year like a spine. Along the way there was a Fredness chart, too, and two short films shot at Melon at DNA Lounge.

Two of those Melon nights at DNA Lounge survive in full. The club recorded its own events, and those recordings were later preserved online, which is how a DJ who never released a record still has his sound on file.

The first comes from July 21, 2001, the same Melon date that appears on his gig list. Red Melon presented Fredness, JZ, Dano and Chris Udoh. Fredness plays first, for roughly the first hour and twenty-three minutes, before Jay Zimmermann takes over, followed by Dano and then Chris Udoh. Only part of the night's tracklist is known, but what is known 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, not from any one DJ's set, but together they show the spread of a Red Melon night, from Latin house and West Coast deep house to Italian dream house and Minneapolis funk.

The second recording comes from Melon at DNA Lounge on November 2, 2002, more than a year later. 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, are as good a document as exists of 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 around the Bay. Fredness made no Red Melon records. He made Red Melon nights, and the label's history is the richer for them.