Phoenix Rife, 9 years old, ran the lights and turntables at Hard Heads’ Kids-Only Deck Night on a recent Saturday night. Photo by Quay Skankey
At the all ages Holland Project on Vesta Street, on a Saturday night, the sound of intense, hard-hitting music flowed into the alleyways nearby, coming from a source whose age has not yet reached double digits.
Phoenix Rife, a 9-year-old who goes by the DJ name Alexander the Great, was the young talent showcased as part of an event put on by Hard Heads, a local group of DJs who love intense EDM.
“My first show was at my birthday,” Rife says, “...this is my second time playing in public.”
His father, also a DJ and founding member of Hard Heads, helped him learn how to perform, as did other members of the collective.
“One of them [the DJs]... helps me with beats and stuff but then kinda says ‘do it on your own,’” Rife said.
Hard Heads aims to bring hard dance music, an umbrella term for electronic dance music characterized by fast tempos and hard kick drums, to the younger people of Reno.
“I’m hoping,” said “Cricket,” another member of Hard Heads. “Eventually we’ll be able to bring Hard Dance music to the general area with bigger headliners, bigger shows, booking out bigger clubs and bigger venues, but we’re kind of fighting an uphill battle.”
“It is fast paced 4-by-4 high-energetic music,“ Anthony Lopez, also with Hard Heads, said when asked to define hard dance music himself.
Hard Heads’ screen during Rife’s performance at Kids-Only Deck Night. Photo by Chase Dulude
“It is very intense and very in-your-face. It can go in many directions. Hard dance is a genre of music that is not exactly very popular among people in Reno, but it’s something that we wanted to bring awareness to.”
“One of the things we’ve noticed is that there's a lot of the younger demographic that is becoming more aware of it, so we wanted to open it up,” Lopez said of organizing a youth DJ night. “We thought it [The Holland Project] was a perfect place where people that are older and [have] aged out of the scene…can bring their kids to a place a little bit similar to when they used to go to shows.”
“To me, it [hard dance] is not just music, it’s a lifestyle,” Richard, another Hard Heads member concluded. “Like there’s big festivals where their whole thing is like ‘we are one’, like a collective ideology.”