It's taken Michael Schwartz -- a k a Mix Master Mike -- twenty-eight years to hone his cutting and scratching chops to perfection. |

Now he's so busy he doesn't just juggle records, he juggles projects: The DJ's touring with the Beastie Boys through September, promoting his new debut solo CD, Anti-Theft-Device (Asphodel), working on the soundtrack for an upcoming Playstation video game, and recording a full-length CD with his crew, the Invisibl Skratch Piklz, for their own Skratched Records label.

So just how did Mike impress the Beastie Boys enough for him to be invited into the fold? "They knew about me from all my DJ battles," Mike says. Anyone keeping up with the hip-hop/DJ/turntable scene knows that the Piklz have won so many turntable battles that they were finally asked to retire and become competition judges -- you know, to give others a chance.

Second, there's the matter of taste. "[The Beasties] liked my style," says Mike. "It related a lot to the Beastie style. On "Jimmy James," [the Beasties] scratched Jimi Hendrix guitar riffs; I do the same thing. So, it's like the same formula there, the same chemistry. They like me because I show them what comes from my heart and I don't hold nothing back. If I don't like something, I let 'em know."

Third, Mike worked it: "I met Adam Yauch at the Rock Steady anniversary in 1995 and, ever since then, we exchanged phone numbers and kept in contact. When he wasn't home, I would leave these crazy scratch messages on his answering machine, which drove him berserk. He called me up to work on [the Beasties'] Hello, Nasty. After that project, he asked me to become their permanent DJ. Who's gonna refuse that?"

Now that he's the man, do the Beastie Boys ever sort of, well, suggest what he should play? "Sometimes they do," he admits. "They don't tell me how to do it. They just bring it up to me. It's a suggestion. They put it in the suggestion box."

Mike is more of an artist than a craftsman, drawing on spontaneous inspiration instead of prepared routines. "It just comes from my heart and how I'm feeling at the time," he says. "I have so many tricks in my head,and whatever I remember at the moment -- like bend the record or do a lazy scratch here or a one-hand hydroplane scratch here or juggle two records at once -- it just goes in order of the way I feel. I'm not into sitting in my room and perfecting the whole DJ set. That's too robotic for me. I like stuff random. I move at a random pace." At a recent performance at the World Trade Tower's posh Windows on the World, Mike busted out with Rush, Hendrix, and countless other barely identifiable song samples that flew by as fast as his hands could cut, scratch, mix, fade, juggle, whatever. The crowd ate it up.

Mike can shift work modes without missing a beat, playing with the Beasties ("more mellow than you think") one day and the Piklz ("one gigantic scratch robot") on another, noting that the experiences are like night and day. "When I'm with the Invisbl Skratch Piklz, we're a scratch band, a scratch orchestra," he says. "Being with the Piklz, my hands are constantly moving to keep up the drum beat or scratching a hi-hat or horn riff. Being with the Beastie Boys, I just kick back and let them ride, and wait for my part to come in. I'm more relaxed up there. It's totally improvised. They let me do whatever I want."

What Mike really wants is to help spread the turntable word. "I'm trying to push this whole turntable phenomenon universally just to show the whole world that the turntable can be an instrument also. And hopefully, one day you can walk into a Tower Records and they'll have their own category like scratch music or turntable music. That's what I wanna do."

JAMES OLIVER CURY(August 28, 1998)