Chris Kirkham
http://www.angelfire.com/hiphop4/djkirkham/
kirkham@uiuc.edu
http://www.angelfire.com/hiphop4/djkirkham/
kirkham@uiuc.edu
Personal Info
I was born on April 20th, 1984 in Winona, MN. Since then, I've lived in central Illinois my entire life: for a short time in Arcola, then to Jacksonville until I was 3, then on to the north side of Springfield until age 7 when my parents divorced. After that, I moved to the south side of Springfield, in the Chatham school district. I played football (I was a center) from 6th grade through my senior year, and hockey (goalie) my senior year, which was the first year that my school had a team. I devoted most of my high school life to sports and most of my friends were from my sports teams. I've always had a keen interest in music, however. During high school, music just played a secondary role.
After scoring well on my college entrance exams, I was accepted to the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. I studied my first 2 years as a biology major, then abandoned that for lack of interest in the field. I am now a senior and a history major, although I don't think that I'll do anything professionally in history.
My mother, Lianne, lives in Springfield with my eldest sister, Kalli, who is 16 and a junior at Glenwood High. Kalli is active in rodeo (2005 State Champ in barrel racing and national contender) and poms. That's one hell of a combination, I know. My Dad lives in Carbondale with my Step Mom, Gina. I also have 2 half sisters (Courtney and Camryn) and a half brother (Colton) from my Dad. My Dad owns 1,748,937 horses, a couple goats, a donkey, some dogs, chickens, and 7.6 x 10^23 barn cats that eat his mice, which are most likely more numerous than the cats.
I also have the coolest and hottest, and smartest, and hardest working, and nicest, and awesome-ist girlfriend in the world, Lauren DeDecker. Lauren is in her last year at Parkland and is studying occupational therapy. She graduated from Centennial High School in Champaign. Lauren is a big supporter of my DJing and has quickly become my biggest fan. Whenever it's possible for her to go, she'll be at all my parties to deflect drunk horny girls who can't resist hitting on the guy in the headphones... and believe me, it doesn't matter how fugily a DJ is, someone is always going to hit on him. Something about the headphones.... So don't bother trying to hit on me... or do. There's nothing like a catfight to spice up a party.
Musical History
My music career started in 4th grade when I went to the informational meeting for the school band, wanting to learn guitar. When the crowd of almost 300 interested students learned that guitar wasn't offered, over half left the auditorium. Determined not to give up that easy, I decided on clarinet because I had a friend that played it. Despite my hasty decision, I stuck with it all the way through 8th grade. Along the way I discovered my interest in picking up new instruments. During that 5 year time period, I also learned to play guitar, bass, and a little bit of piano. I started guitar not long after beginning clarinet. I switched to bass when my first rock band formed in 6th grade. Although I, as well as my fellow band members, was obsessed with the idea of quitting the band and rejoining a day later (for dramatic effect...i guess), I was consistently a bass player in a band that contained different players over the years until sometime around my junior year of high school.
It was during my senior year that some of my friends began DJing. They were mostly into trance and breakbeat stuff, which quickly caught my interest. Although I wanted to begin DJing right away, I knew it wouldn't be the best decision considering I was about to make the transition into college. Besides, the music scene for trance and breaks wasn't much around where I lived.
At the University of Illinois, however, things were quite different. Since most of the students here come from Chicago or the surrounding suburbs, a lot of them were into the music that was popular in the big city. Knowing that I was now in a trance-friendly environment, combined with the fact that DJs were hired on a weekly basis here for frat after-hours parties as well as clubs, I decided in November of my Freshman year that it was time to begin.
As luck would have it, I basically had the chair of opportunity pulled out from under my ass about .2 seconds before I sat in it. The city of Champaign made a key decision that would permanently alter my DJing career. During my freshman year, the bars closed at 1am. That was too early for everyone to go home, so frats had afterhours parties (usually between 200-500 people) every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. But beginning my sophomore year, the city began allowing the bars to stay open until 2am. Now if you've been around the U of I bars much, you'll know that an extra hour can really kick your ass. People were ready to go home and eat/sleep once 2 rolled around. So there went my high hopes of DJing after hours. It was time to come up with a new plan.
Making use of my high school friends' loyalty and hard work, I quickly established a large network of campuses that I could potentially DJ at. The biggest problem? You guessed it: they didn't want trance and breaks, they wanted hip-hop. I've always loved rap, but as any DJ can tell you, building up a collection of vinyl is very expensive and time consuming. Determined not to give up, I slowly and painfully (financially painful) built up a rap collection. My first customer, and still loyal to this day, was Illinois College in Jacksonville. For a college of just over 1,000 students, they throw some wild parties. I think the secret to their success is that when people go out at IC, they all go out to the same place. Luckily for me, I got to DJ at these parties and build up some useful experience.
Since then, I've DJed parties at Southeast Missouri State in Cape Girardeau, MO; Northbrook, IL; Peoria, IL; Bloomington, IL; a couple at school here in Champaign, IL; as well as some back home in Springfield, IL. I pride myself on being a little bit better at each party than I was at the last, and I'm constantly changing my style and set-up so that I can do something new and original each time I perform.
I owe all the success I've had to my extremely loyal friends from Glenwood High that have worked their asses off to get my DJ career moving. Without them, I would still be in Champaign every weekend, probably bitching about how the bar hours got moved back and killed my opportunity. Also a big thanks to the men of Phi Alpha and Sigma Pi at Illinois College for giving me my first jobs and continually providing me with opportunities to grow and improve as a DJ. I'll always consider IC my school away from school.
