DJEritch

DJ Eritch is Erick Grau, a Cuban American kid from Hudson County who started spinning in New York in the late 1980s and never really stopped. The name has been spelled Dj.Eritch, Dj.Erich and, later, Count Eritch, depending on the flyer. The records were the constant: punk, psychobilly, goth, post-punk, new wave, dark wave and classic industrial.

He held down nights at the Pyramid Club on Avenue A, the back room at Limelight, and Censored at The Building, the pinnacle of industrial music in New York at the time, spinning eighties new wave, dark wave and goth. He shared turntables across the early-1990s goth and industrial circuit. When he was not in the booth he was behind a board: running monitors on the road with the Ramones in 1991, working rooms like CBGB and The Ritz. In 2013 the alias was still on flyers, as Count Eritch at Psychomania.

The booth taught him one thing he still lives by. When the room starts slipping, do not turn everything up. Find the one thing causing the feedback.

Then the booths changed. The monitor desk led to Apple, then to running IT for a $4 billion hedge fund, and in 2014 to founding Chibitek, the company he still runs as CEO. He told that whole arc for Forbes, from punk rock to the cloud, and landed on the same lesson: technology without trust is just noise.

Thirty-some years later, the same ears made a record. Velvet & Fire is the first release under the name: four songs, eleven minutes, nothing polite. The next one, 1968, is already on the way. Same night, different man.