Halo
Brian Varga grew up in Chicago, and the question was never whether the dance-music bug would bite but when. By sixteen he was tagging the city with the graffiti name Halo. In high school he found Hip House, the record store where DJ Sneak gave him a job, and his weekends belonged to Frankie Knuckles and Ron Hardy. Customers listened to his mixtapes and booked him for their parties, and a three-year A&R job at Moody Records followed.
That Chicago grounding never left him. "Being from Chicago, I still love the vintage drum machine sounds mixed with organic rhythms," he has said, and his music has always balanced the robotic and the human: classic machine drums with live-feeling percussion, warm chords and deep basslines.
In 1999 he formed H-Foundation with his close friend Hipp-E, and in 2000 he moved west to San Diego. A set at the Winter Music Conference led to their first European booking, at a new London club called fabric, which became his first foreign residency. Being there at the start of one of the world's great clubs says something about how far the West Coast sound was travelling at the time. He went on to run his own labels, CityDeep in Las Vegas and later Surface, and in 2009 his track "Future" was voted No. 95 in Resident Advisor's top tracks of the decade. He was also part of the 6400 Crew circle alongside Joeski, Onionz and Tony Hewitt.
Halo's personality as a DJ comes from that record-shop upbringing: a crate-digger's knowledge of the history, used in service of a floor rather than a museum. His sets and productions are deep and soulful but never sleepy, with the jack of Chicago always somewhere in the drums.
At Hip House he produced his first record with his close friend Andy Adams, aka DJ Attack. "Future" was one of the first things he made right before leaving Chicago. After San Diego came a spell in Las Vegas from 2007 and then Northern California, before he returned to San Diego in 2009, where he launched Surface and ran a monthly party, Lost N Sound. He has also played in South Africa, a scene he admires for putting deep house on everyday radio. As he put it, his roots are in Chicago but his life is on the West Coast. Surface's early slate included music from Sascha Dive, Tuccillo and Andrew Grant, and by 2012 H-Foundation was back in the studio after a six-year break.
On Red Melon he and Dano formed Cloud City for the Cloud City EP in 2001, two tracks, Show U Love and Divebomb. On Show U Love, Niara Scarlett sings and Sen-Sei plays the keys. It is a meeting of Chicago, San Diego and San Francisco on one record, and a fine example of the collaborative, friends-first spirit that runs through the label.
