Motion Potion

Not satisfied with simply playing the music of his heroes, he co-founded the SF Funk Festival to bring them to SF, which led him also to co-found Sunset Promotions (nowHUSHconcerts ). Since the 1997 founding, Sunset has produced over 1000 concerts and operates not only SFFunk but also legendary New Years event Sea of Dreams , the Halloween artfest Ghost Ship and North Beach Jazz, All Shook Down and Spectrum festivals. Through it all, he satisfied his passion for the funk by working with, among others, James Brown, Parliament Funkadelic, Bootsy Collins, Morris Day & the Time, and producing reunions for Fred Wesley & the JB’s, the Family Stone and Mandrill.
His passion for psychedelic rock made him the first DJ asked to play seminal rock festivals such as High Sierra and Gathering of the Vibes and earned him invitations to play Jamcruise II and dozens of Phish, Allman Brothers, and Widespread Panic after-parties in New York’s vibrant post-Wetlands jamband scene. This led to the Syn parties, where MoPo spent months gathering, studying, and experimenting with the live-recordings of the new generation of psychedelic rock acts like STS9, Disco Biscuits and of course Phish. In time, this, and his deep skills with funk, soul and disco would lead him to an invitation to play the Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival in 2002, an invitation he would have the honor to receive for a record 9 consecutive years. But from 2002-2004, MoPo was the festival’s only DJ, rocking 5-hour nightly sets in the Arcade. In 2005, Bonnaroounveiled the USA’s first Silent Disco production and MoPo was the guinea pig, beginning a passionate love affair with the emerging technology that would last to this day. His 2007 launch of the massively successful Silent Frisco is a testament to his passion for the format.

2004 also led him back to the Burning Man Festival where he was faced with his first real artistic roadblock. Literally dragged to this hotbed of progressive club music to play rare groove and hip hop, he found himself under-armed for a world that bopped hardest at 4am. Said MoPo “I remember wishing I had harder, faster, and bigger tracks and, really for the first time ever, feeling a bit underwhelmed by the funk. I felt like I had brought a knife to a gunfight.”

The experience sent him on a deep dive into electronic music, searching for answers to his “need fatter funk” dilemma. Not satisfied with simply playingstraight-up EDM records, he dug far and wide for tracks that could bridge the gap between his funk/rock style and the newer beats that propel the late-night. Thankfully, this search coincided with many a technical and artistic development, including the one that brought such funk/rock/disco-drenched producers as LCD Soundsystem, Unkle, Kraak & Smaak, and Fort Knox 5 to the forefront. The development of tempo-taming production technology like Ableton Live led to an explosion of mashup/remix culture that has since allowed MoPo to stay thematically on mission but tether his funk, rock, and disco to beats and bass-lines as fat as any.

With these production tools at his command, in 2004, MoPo unveiled his own first tentative, somewhat raw attempts at production. Although his skills were crude, the arrangements were born of a decade of DJing and thus many of the mash-ups, cut ups and remixes he released at the time found huge regard. Among them were the first of his many Radiohead-related releases “Just Break” which was featured on BootieUSA’sseminal The Best Mashups in the World Come from San Francisco. His annual trips to Bonnaroo led to tracks based on the festival’s lineup including work devoted to Phish, Widespread Panic, Dave Matthews, and Buffalo Springfield, all of which would be released as the “Bonnaroo Bangers ” compilation.

Other, more advanced explorations saw him focus tracks around themes of specific emotions or settings. Thus emerged Saturdazed, featuring 7 different Saturday-related samples or the breakbeat workout Conflageration which uses6 different tracks about fire. All of these would be featured on the 3-EP series he released on 2008 entitledElectric Nostalgia Vol. 1-3. This propelled more than 3 years of touring (while simultaneously running both SunsetSF and launching Silent Frisco). The progressive rocker now found himself invited for the first time to electronic festivals like Shambala,Camp Bisco, and WMC Miami. Clubs in Spain, Holland, France, Germany, and more than 40 US States welcomed MoPo and his enthusiastic, eclectic and inclusive approach to dance music.

To some degree exhausted by this pace and the 2010 loss of his beloved mother, MoPo decided to spend more time in San Francisco, which led to further focus on Silent Frisco and SunsetSF. A 3- year run in a monthly Silent Frisco residency in Santa Monica led to deeper investigations of the music of Radiohead, James Brown, Widespread Panic, Talking Heads and P-Funk and planned EP releases and mixtapes to deal with each. In 2015, he merged SunsetSF and Silent Friscoand launched HUSHconcerts .