Abe Duque

SLAMMER JAM Duque bides his time on the road to clubland stardom.

Photograph: Robert Corbett

The self-described “oldest new guy on the block,” techno producer Abe Duque is a study in perseverance. Rife with near-stardom highs and fat-chance lows (a 2005 album on International Deejay Gigolo was titled So Underground It Hurts), his stop-and-go career path would have been enough to convince the most enthusiastic young pup to turn to a steadier gig. Yet, after two decades in the biz and at age 41, Duque—a native New Yorker who lives in the non-techno oasis of Queens—is standing taller than ever, largely on the strength of his recent long-player, the acclaimed Don’t Be So Mean (Process Recordings). The strength of the album—a collection of moody and muscular acid-tech chuggers, laced with moments of depth and beauty—is the easy explanation for his current high standing. But really, his cachet is just the product of his disciplined mind-set, honed in the mid-’80s by an organization not normally associated with electronic dance music—the U.S. Marines.

“Have you been in the Marines?” Duque inquires with a laugh. “They will break you down and force you to face the limits of your body and your mind, which forces you to build yourself up again. I think it’s really important to know your limits; if you don’t, you just end up worrying about what you can and can’t do all the time, and you end up just worrying about that instead of doing what you can.”

Duque began releasing records in the late ’80s (many as Kirlian, a project that absorbed elements of ambient music and deep house as well as techno) and played keys for Victor Calderone and Gene Le Fosse’s seminal early-’90s techno duo, Program 2. But it was a stint behind the decks at Limelight during the prime club-kid years that Duque credits with changing his life. “Limelight was an eye-opening experience and a life-changing experience for me,” he says. “I went from being an innocent boy to a seasoned old veteran in no time at all. I saw it all there— any crazy thing you could possibly imagine— and I can really say that nothing since then had lived up to that.”

After leaving the fabled club, he continued pumping out tracks (for the Disko B and Sonic Groove labels, among others), but clubland singles don’t pay the bills, and Duque took a job refinishing furniture for a company that services the offices of such clients as J.P. Morgan. “I actually kind of liked that job, and the pay was pretty good, but one day I just found myself saying, ‘I have to get out of here!’ So I talked to my wife about going back to music full-time, and she was okay with that.”

That was in 2000, and despite a few bumps in the road (his affiliation with the popular Gigolo label undoubtedly helped to smooth them out), Duque’s been ascendant ever since. “Abe has been one of the most overlooked guys out there, but I think he is finally having his time, and that’s for a couple of reasons,” explains producer John Selway, a longtime friend and frequent Duque collaborator. “The first is that he’s managed to stick with it for all this time, and that in itself is something. But the more important thing is that he’s used that time to really refine his sound into something that’s his own. I was listening to something he had just recorded the other day, and I told him, ‘That sounds so much like an Abe Duque track.’ And he was like, ‘Well, yeah—it is an Abe Duque track!’ ”

“I spent a long time developing my sound,” Duque says of his dark, stripped-down style “and once I realized I had it, I held on to it.” It’s the key to his success, and has allowed him to bypass what’s probably been his biggest obstacle—not living in a techno capital like Detroit or Berlin. “New York never had a huge techno scene,” he says, “and I think that does hurt people from here. If you’re a techno guy from Detroit, you can put out some music and people go, ‘Hey, check out this 17th-wave Detroit guy’ or whatever. If you are from there, you obviously have a strong connection with the music, I suppose. Still, it can be kind of frustrating, but I just stick my nose to the grindstone and keep going.”

And the strategy seems to be working—Duque’s wife is still with him.

Abe Duque spins at Cielo’s Biatch Corp. party Sun 22. His new single, “What Happened” (Process)—featuring remixes from Marc Romboy and Max Cooper—is out now.

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