Mark A. O. van ryck deGroot
Born: Guyana, South America

I grew up in a home where music was always present in different forms. From the Soulful sounds of Sam Cook and others my mother listened to and the Spirituals, Gospels, and Church songs my Grandmother and Father played day and night on the radio. When I was about 9 or 10 I chose to play the violin in music class. That marked the beginning of a long relationship between music and me. After the violin came the piano. I became a very accomplished classical musician at a young age but I didn’t stick with classical. In 1976 I was introduced to DJ music at house parties in my then hometown of Montclair, New Jersey. Back in the day, not too many DJs mixed records so much as played one hit after the next. I got into the DJ world in less than a year and that’s when the wild ride of Disco, House, and Hip-Hop was just starting. It was all just music back then. Most folks just called it Disco. Who knew what we were all doing back then would become an industry unto itself?
I spent most of my adolescent days honing my DJ skills and hanging out in places like the Brownsville, Brooklyn and tracking down rear beats at just about every good record store in NYC, Newark, and East Orange, New Jersey. I was what you could call obsessed. That is my whole life was about DJing, no movies, girls, no anything. It was me my turntables, my computer, and my schoolbooks. When I graduated HS in 1984 my parents told me there was no real future in what I was doing so I needed to get a “real” education. That’s just what I did graduating with a degree in Electrical Engineering. Even in college though my one true love was the movement of what I call “new music”. That’s hip-hop, rap, house, trance, ska, and all the stuff that’s built on what came before. The way I see it, if we are not taking the music to another level or in a different direction then why even be involved.