The Wild Life Manifesto...

We at the Wild Life headquarters think it's a good time to explain what we're trying to accomplish with our new, and hopefully innovative party beginning next month.

From Lifepartner:
"I'm from the East Coast. Growing up I drew a lot of cultural and musical influence from reggae, dancehall and old school hip hop. After coming out as queer and a short stint in New York, I realized I wanted to try my hand at DJing (I mean I had all these dancehall 45's, and knew that if I put my mind to it, I could learn to hold down a fierce riddim). It was something I saw as being an act of defiance; a gay man playing dancehall and hip hop. I taught myself how to beat match on a shitty pair of belt driven turntables, and began to play music out. I had fallen in love, and knew that this was going to become my passion in life.
After college I moved to Portland for it's burgeoning arts and music scene. I had this fantasy of Portland being this beautiful queer mecca filled with bike riding homos that loved to dance, composted, were culturally challenging and inspired and made the most amazing art around. 2 months into 2007 I realized I was dreaming.
After attending many queer dance parties around town I noticed a recurring theme: the most packed dance nights played the same music every time. It was the typical dance party soundtrack, the DJ's played it safe with gay classics and top 40 pleasures.
It took me about a year to find a couple of other DJ's that weren't playing the same shit in Portland. I drew inspiration from them and tried to start parties with them, but they never lived up to my hopes and never lasted more than 6 months.
Toward the end of 2008 I began to talk with some queer DJ friends in other cities (Boston, New York, San Francisco, Chicago) about what they were doing and found another recurring theme: queers in other cities weren't pushing for cutting edge music to dance to either, and like the DJ's, were playing it safe.
With so much new and innovative dance music coming out, why weren't queers at the forefront? At that point, I said 'fuck it' and decided to try and do my own thing and hoped that Portland would catch on. 2009 has been an inspiring year for me as a DJ. I had the chance to play with a lot of bigger acts from around the globe, produced a ton of tracks and discovered so much incredible music. After a trip to New York in August, I found even more inspiration. I had the chance to play to a crowd that really got what I was doing. My a-ha moment came when I dropped a UK funky house track 'In the Morning' and looked out at the crowd to see a bunch of fags voguing.
Wild Life is my latest attempt to catch Portland gays up with what's going on in dance music. UK Funky House, bassline, speed garage, soca, meximore club, future bass, sissy bounce, Chicago juke and more. We're going to draw on what's happening around the world, queer it up and get your ass to dance real hard. It's 3 years of dreaming, resisting and defying normativity finally taking shape.
Our first guest, on January 28th, is Portland based, soon to be SF resident, DJ Nolita. She's excited to get the chance to play bass heavy gay music.
I hope people vogue."

See you in the new year!
xo
LP