Junior High

To an average citizen of, say, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, prime time at the Sound Factory (Sundays, 4 to 10 A.M. or so) might feel as strange and threatening as a night in the Casbah. Or a picnic on Mars. But to the glittering night wanderers who gather to form the Culture of Sound—street kids; gym queens with buzz cuts and homeboy cutoffs; Madonna, Drew, and Bono; record execs and producers such as Nile Rodgers and Clivilles and Cole; models and gangstas—it is home, the temple. Yes, under the giant spinning mirrored ball there are definitely people dancing to the sounds of Master Blaster, and if someone had a gun to your head, you could probably get away with calling the place a disco. But like the legendary New York clubs—Paradise Garage, the Loft, the Saint—the Factory definitely rises above the usual boogie inferno. And the man who has stoked its flame for four years now is D. J. Junior Vasquez, formerly of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. No average citizen.

To say that Junior spins records is to reduce his art to a denominator so common he wouldn't deign to acknowledge it. Using three turntables, a tape deck, a DAT player, a reel-to-reel (for delay effects), his own imagination, and an arsenal of mix, remix, and sampling techniques, Vasquez creates - an aural atmosphere by turns assaultive k and hypnotic, primeval and technotronic. His mixes and remixes run the gamut from tribal to hard house to tranz. Imagine driving very fast down a highway during a nuclear attack with a voice on the radio whispering sexy things. The object, according to Junior himself, is "frenzy."

Some people think that Junior has a sadistic streak; that he takes perverse pleasure in "working your last nerve"; that the Factory is too intense. If this be true, sadism sells. Factory music is making headway in the mainstream. Artists and record companies want Junior to introduce their songs at the Factory—they know he can spark a hit. But he is more influential than that. You can hear some Junior-inspired licks in Madonna's cover of "Fever," in any number of the cuts on Janet JacksonJanet, even on Whitney Houston's "I'm Every Woman." To hear Junior's beat in a more undiluted incarnation, listen to the records he produces: dozens of club-style 12-inch singles, Cyndi Lauper's Hat Full of Stars, the new "Queen's English" single by Jose & Luis, and a set of upcoming songs for Lisa Lisa (without Cult Jam). Now he longs to work with Chynna Phillips, Boy George, and—are you listening?—Diana Ross.

Yet the foreman vows never to lay off his Factory duties. "If I was deathly ill, I would be there. I helped build it from the ground up. Every day I was there, like a construction worker," he says, sliding into a discussion of his current favorite tracks, among them "Dream Drums," by Lectroluv, and "Atom Bomb," by DJ Pierre. The songs he sees as up-and-coming include "Love, Peace & Happiness," by Soul Solution, "X," by Ellis D., and anything new by David Morales and DJ Pierre. Vasquez loves breaking records like these in his own club, where he and the rest of the Factory workers spend their nights and mornings in the service of the tribal Spirit of Sound.

GEORGE HODGMAN