Band Bio

DJ Deluxo

Keyboards, Guitar and Vocal

Growing up in Boston, DJ Deluxo  has always been drawn to music. Sure, banging around on analog instruments with his older brother didn’t hurt, but it wasn’t until he got dragged to a Daddy’s Junky Music store in Salem, NH by his mother on an elusive hunt for a good deal on a “real” guitar for his brother, that DJ Deluxo fell in love with the synthesizer. It was either the Prophet-5, the OB8 or the ARP Odyssey - or was it all three?

Regardless, with Christmas fast approaching, little DJ Deluxo was begging his parents for a synth. Spying a huge box under the tree, he thought it was synth for sure. Nope - it was only Yamaha CP10 digital piano. How boring! “It only had piano and harpsichord sounds, and the only weird thing it could do was tremolo and sustain,” recalls DJ Deluxo.

An older friend and local music legend taught him how to play Canned Heat’s “Hill’s Stomp,” though, and it was the perfect sound for that tune. “Then he taught me "Cause We’ve Ended As Lovers" by Stevie Wonder,” says DJ Deluxo. “It was OK until he showed me how to use the tremolo...and blew my mind. I was now officially hooked on keys!”

A few years and a few bands later, DJ Deluxo can tick off the infamous rooms he’s played all around the Boston area: Avalon. Axis. Bunratty’s. Chet’s Last Call. The Channel. Green Street Station. Inn Square Men’s Bar. Jumpin’ Jack Flash. The Rat, T.T. the Bear's Place. The Hard Rock Cafe. DJ Deluxo is adamant that “hands down, in the ‘80s, Boston had the best local music scene on the planet.”

And if you ask him nicely, he’ll tell you about the time he partied with The Fixx on their tour bus…or jumped on stage with Trent Reznor at an early Nine Inch Nails show…

Fast forward a few more years, and DJ Deluxo has applied his multimedia mindset to everyone from Avid to Solid State Logic to Fairlight (where he met Johnny Fingers) to Panasonic. He’s also followed  his “Back to the Future” stan-dom all the way down the space-time continuum...

But since music has always been his first love, reconnecting with Johnny and firing up the engines on DMC12 has been a way to put the flux back in his capacitors, so to speak. In his own words, “adventure beats boredom.”

And if you're gonna start an electronic music band in 2020 inspired by the sounds of the '80s, why not do it with some style?

DJ Deluxo and Johnny have some big plans, too. Like collaborating with Lenny Kravatz on a cover of Christina Aguilera. Or producing a big band version of The Blue Nile’s "Tinseltown in the Rain.”

Or opening for Ministry performing that band’s “With Sympathy” album in its entirety because, as DJ Deluxo says, “Lord knows, Ministry would never play it these days” But their older fans would freak out! And DJ Deluxo knows that old school guys can teach young musicians AND fans how to really put on a show. “There are no showmen anymore - they just stand there and play!” BORing.

But next up for DMC12? In addition to the first single and an upcoming album, DJ Deluxo and Johnny Fingers are going to be launching a DMC12 YouTube show about restoring old synthesizers. “It’ll be like “This Old House” for synthesizers,” claims DJ Deluxo. “I’ll be Bob Vila,

Honza from Monza

By Edward Murry

It might seem a long way from Wilber, Nebraska (“The Czech Capital of the USA” - really! You can Google it) to his current home in Okinawa, Japan, but for Honza from Monzas, the journey up I-80 to Chicago seemed even longer as a midwestern boy busting loose from his polka roots.

It’s also a trip measured in keys - 88 of ‘em, to be exact. From learning “Chopsticks” and the Beatles’ “All My Loving” on piano to getting turned on to Rick Wakeman and Joe Zawinul as a teen to majoring in music at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, for Honza from Monza, a career in music was almost a foregone conclusion. 

When you work in music your whole life, you’re bound to have a bunch of interesting experiences. Here’s a sampling of what Honza seen and done:

  • Once jammed with Matthew Sweet at the Moose Head Lodge he became famous.
  • Got sawed in half by Weird Al Yankovic “Like a Surgeon” tour.
  • Played sitar for Kevin Matthews, a radio personality in Chicago.
  • Played the aforementioned sitar with Joe Walsh for 8,000 people at Alpine Valley. Honza recalls, “Joe gave me the nod for a solo in ‘Funk 49.’ Sitar is pretty much a drone in C with a 5th above. ‘Funk 49’ is in A. You can guess how it sounded…”
  • Worked with Michael Mann on the film “Heat.” Another memorable moment, “He said ‘Hi John’ to me one time when we were working at Todd-AO in Los Angeles.”
  • Enjoyed matzo ball soup with songwriter Mark James (“Suspicious Minds”) and his wife.
  • Gave Stevie Wonder a demo of the Fairlight MFX3 at Wonder’s studio in LA. He had to hold his hands and show him around the keys and jogwheel on the controller.

And if you buy him a beer or three at his local “tasu” bar, he may even tell you about the time he and his American International School cohorts tried to smuggle a female Afghan schoolteacher and a former American Airlines pilot out of Communist Afghanistan in the late ‘70s...

Reconnecting during the midst of a pandemic with old friend and Fairlight colleague DJ Deluxo  for DMC12 is also allowing Honza from Monza to apply some of the musical lessons he’s learned along the way, from terraced dynamics and sketching out a new musical idea every day (via Randall Snyder, his 20th Century composition professor at UNL) to composing quickly (via Charles Brown from CBIII music, a Chicago music house for TV and radio commercials in the mid-’90s) to learning that when you boost EQ, you should have a very narrow Q (via Noburo Karikawa, a former NHK and Fairlight Japan audio guru) to nonstop writing, transposing parts up an octave, and how to use Melodyne (from Alex Bang in Seoul to mixing backing tracks at a very low db level (thanks, Thomas David!). You can also hear Honza from Monza applying his, ehrm, fingers to a variety of electronic music styles at www.honzamusic.com.

Like DJ Deluxo, Honza from Monza has his own musical bucket list. Such as collaborating with driver Lewis Hamilton (who’s as into making music as Johnny is into Formula 1. He’d also like to work with Trevor Horn, Peter Gabriel or anyone else that has signed the CMI Series III keyboard. Honza would also jump at the chance to produce a duet LP with Ringo, Sheena and Bjork, because “it would be nuts!” And he’s more than a little interested in working with the Japanese rock band  Love Psychedelico.

But before he gets to any of that, he’s really excited about working with DJ Deluxo, Rick Carlson (mixing) and Thomas David (mastering engineer) on DMC12. Now if only he could get DJ Deluxo to ship his DeLorean to Okinawa…

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