“The Moog Fucks Me Up”: DJ Alex Gloor Takes Mel Ottenberg Into the Annals of Smylonylon

30 years ago, in October ’94, I discovered Smylonylon on my first weekend trip to New York. Located on Lafayette between Spring and Broome, Smylonylon was a psychedelic explosion of a boutique that sold hideous deadstock 70s clothes and blasted the weirdest mix of crazy, far-out music that I’d ever heard. I bought into this alternate reality instantly and hard, and it’s been my thing for life. I wore disgusting seventies leisure suits and bell bottoms and polyester, just the ugliest clothes imaginable. And the music! They were selling Smylonylon mixtapes of the crazy music, and on that first day I bought Smylonylon 1. We played it on the way back to RISD and could not stop laughing at this ridiculous garbage. They called it Uneasy Listening, and all the mixtapes were by this DJ Alex Gloor. They became the soundtrack to my life and have been ever since. Alex Gloor was always the ultimate DJ god to me but we never connected, until recently. After Mr. Gloor put all the Smylonylon mixes on Bandcamp, we connected about his old tapes and growing up in the golden age of porn.

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ALEX GLOOR: Hello there.

MEL OTTENBERG: Hello, Alex. It’s nice to meet you. I’m forever in love with you.

GLOOR: Thank you. I’m flattered.

OTTENBERG: I think I’m your biggest fan, although I’m sure you have other mega fans, but I’m a real mega fucking fan of yours.

GLOOR: That’s great.

OTTENBERG: I think at least Chloe Sevigny and Tiffany Godoy of Japanese Vogue would know why I’m your biggest fan on earth, because they also have your mix tapes. But we got to tell the story, right?

GLOOR: Yes. We have to tell people about the 30 mixtapes I produced between 1994 and 1999 for a shop called Smylonylon In New York. What I intended to do back then was to educate people that there is more then just hip hop and house music.

OTTENBERG: Because this is the time of Dr. Dre. Hip hop is incredible at this time, rap is incredible, but house music is not as amazing as it was in 1991.

GLOOR: Yes. That’s why I put a track list on every tape. People like Andy Butler from Hercules [& Love Affair] could take my tapes and go to thrift shops and do some digging to understand what I was selecting. No other DJ put a track list with artist name on there tapes.

OTTENBERG: Listen, I’m not a DJ, but I learned about Cristina, Man 2 Man—so much stuff. Also, they weren’t playing any of that music anywhere in New York other than at Smylonylon. How did you get started with those guys?

GLOOR: In May of 1994, I was walking around Soho enjoying a lovely warm and sunny spring day in Manhattan when out of the corner of my eye I spotted what appeared to be a Pucci dress hanging in a dark alley called Crosby St. I went up the block to investigate and met Chris Brick, the owner of this boutique called Smylonylon. Chris was playing obscure records like Bill Plummer And the Cosmic Brotherhood in his store, Chris and I instantly bonded and became friends. It was the first time i heard anybody play music i’ve been collecting for 10 years. I suggested to him that Smylonylon would be the perfect location to sell my mixed tapes with Easy Listening, Disco  Lounge music and obscure Moog records all mixed together into a 90 minute mixtape. The first batch of 10 tapes sold out within three days and Chris kept asking me for more and over the next 6 years we sold over 6000 tapes. It was unbelievable, an important point is that it was the pre-digital era, you were not able to buy those tapes anywhere except in the Smylonylon shops.

OTTENBERG: Exactly. It was just this freaky world. Also, easy listening was popular at the time, but you were doing uneasy listening. It was disgusting. It was hideous music from the past.

GLOOR: Yes, in New York I would go to the five boroughs thrift shops and buy everything for $1 and go home and select and mix the great tracks together on mix tapes.

OTTENBERG: Were you wearing the clothes of Smylonylon at the time?

GLOOR: Some of it. Synthetics were not my thing during hot and steamy New York summers.

OTTENBERG: I have this really clear memory of going to this rave called Sputnik Six in 1995. I was wearing red bell-bottoms and two layers of nylon t-shirts. All from Smylonylon. I took acid and I was dancing and sweating so much that I started bad tripping, hallucinating that the entire rave was laughing at me for being soaking wet. That was a hard lesson to learn, that plastics don’t breathe. I’m always telling my staff about the vibe there and I have no pics.

GLOOR: I took lots of photos of Chris, he was a great influence on all of us with his outrages shops.

OTTENBERG: He’s a great looking guy. Burn out hippie British commune type. He really looks like the old man in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, it’s insane.

GLOOR: He was.

OTTENBERG: When was the last time you talked to Chris Brick?

GLOOR: There was a key moment when I had lunch at a restaurant on Second Avenue near Houston and music was playing at the bar and I’m like, “This sounds very familiar.” I realized after the second song, “This is my mix!” I went to the bartender and asked, “What’s this you’re playing?” He’s said, “Oh, this is DJ so-and-so.” People start copying my tapes and selling them under their name. I went down to the Smylonylon shop, that was 1999, and I took all the tapes back and said, “We’re done.” They’re like, “But we’re selling them.” Me, I don’t care. I just sensed that it was played out. People caught up with us. It was time for me to do something new, that’s when I got into In Flagranti with Sasa [Crnobrnja], which just celebrated the 25th anniversary in 2024.

OTTENBERG: In Flagranti is such an amazing Instagram and such a great place for weird and groovy music as well. How are you selling the fantasy now with In Flagranti?

GLOOR: In Flagranti still produce music every day, he lives in London, has a studio there, and I’m in Switzerland. We’ve worked together for the last 30 years and since I moved away from New York after 9-11, we work over the internet. I do my part, send it to him, he does his and we go back and forth. We’re never in the studio together.

OTTENBERG: The best place to get your music for In Flagranti is on Bandcamp, right?

GLOOR: Yes. Codek, is our record label, there you can buy music that we produced over the last 29 years, which is great.

 

OTTENBERG: What I also think is amazing is the synthesis of what you’re interested in, too. The extreme seventies stuff and sleaze—that’s all really still intact. Can you explain exactly what your big actions are that go into In Flagranti and Codek?

GLOOR: In 1971, my dad had a pop-up shop in the basement of his drugstore in Basel. It was very hip shop selling Mary Quant Cosmetics & 7″ vinyl singles of the latest pop songs. After school I would be the DJ in the pop-up shop and select music on the jukebox. In the 70s i grew up with all this great music, movie and magazines that I work with now. Magazines like Stern had a lot of nudity on the covers, there was a porn movie theatre across the street from me home that had pictures of nude people with black tape on D&T&A’s. There was a red light district five minutes from me home where I would go and hang out and I would see the photos and lobby cards. I grew up with all that sleazy imagery and it stayed with me all these years. I was always drawn to the sleazy part of town, like Forty Deuce [42nd St.] in New York, back in the early 80s a was fantastic place to hang out an see an incredible mix of  people and characters, I have this great photo book by Joyce Baronio called “42nd Street Studio”. All this reflects on what i do on instagram or my collage work. I learned to dig where others don’t. You can see it in my work.

OTTENBERG: Right.

GLOOR: For Instagram I go and find cool footage online and I see what year it was made, let’s say 1974. Then I go into my DJ library and I pick a song that fits the mood and I put it together, it’s my twisted idea of the past, I fake history!

OTTENBERG: I have something in mind that is actually the perfect thing, so I’ll be hitting you up about it. It’s funny that you haven’t talked to Chris Brick since 1999. I got in touch with him on Facebook and I think he told me that he lives in a van and paints and doesn’t have a single piece of Smylonylon anything anymore.

 

GLOOR: My goal for the 30-year anniversary of the Smylonylon tapes was to have everything online, so Chris and everybody else can just go listen to them on Bandcamp.

OTTENBERG: I kept all my tapes, but slowly over time. I didn’t have a tape deck anymore and I only had CDs, and then iTunes was birthed and I didn’t have anything Smylonylon. So I was missing a key piece of my essence. Then I found one guy on the internet who changed that, who I want to shout out. He had a blog called Dalston OxFam Shop (now called D.O.S.), probably around 2009.

GLOOR: Todd (D.O.S.) put up 10 of my Smylonylon mix tapes online and they’re still there. We just started to work on a new project with him and Michael Hamer called Bonds St. Sessions on Codek Records.

OTTENBERG: Yeah so, he had one Smylonylon tape, I think it was Smylonylon 29. I emailed him being like, “Dude, this is such a huge deal. I am the biggest fan of Smylonylon. ” He responded. We started talking and I was like, “Listen, because we’re both into the same thing, I feel like I can trust you. I’m going to send you all of my Smylonylon tapes and you can digitize them if you promise to send them back to me. ” And he’s like, “You have my word. ” So I went to the post office and I sent him all my tapes and he digitized them, turned them into MP3’s, because I didn’t know how to do that. He posted them all to his blog and sent my tapes back. He also sent me the files. So I’ve been listening to his files until now that anyone can listen to all 30 volumes of Smylonylon on Bandcamp, right?

GLOOR: Correct.

 

OTTENBERG: The vibe of tape one starts with some super uneasy listening, like Moog nightmare fantasy, then over time Smylonylon evolves into this disco thing. I’ve been listening to Smylonylon 8, which I never owned. It’s the Moog shit, man. The Moog fucks me up. Which borough had the best records back in the day?

GLOOR: All five boroughs had great records shops. The one I really liked was Academy Records up on 18th Street in Manhattan, there was a place across the street called Skyline Books with bins of $1 records, amazing stuff. I got an LP by Jerry Allen called Re-Organises with a fantastic version of “Fly Me to the Moon,” which I played at a Vivian Tam fashion show during New York Fashion Week in a tent on a fat sound system. Anyway, you would just circle around and go to every flea market and buy all this obscure records nobody wanted.

OTTENBERG: What do you think is the sickest mixtape for now? My favorites are 19, 21, 22, and 23.

GLOOR: I like the Smylonylon 1 because I see what influenced me, early Moog records, Ez Listening, Disco, Cosmic, Funk etc. If you look at the track list, it’s a real surprise that somebody would do this. I like Smylonylon volume 30 and volume 18 very much.

OTTENBERG: 18 is just unbelievable. Come on.

GLOOR: It has “Black Devil” on it, which was an important record, which I got through Chris from Jonny Sender. He was the bass player at Konk, an 80s band. I don’t know if you’re familiar with them.

OTTENBERG: No.

GLOOR: Konk was an early 80s New York underground band like Liquid Liquid. It was very percussive and it influenced In Flagranti tremendously. Bernard Fevre’s Black Devil – Disco Club  from 1978 was the first Italo disco record. He was a Music Library producer for film and is wife told him, “Why don’t you make disco music? That sells!.” So he made something and it was so wrong, but it was so brilliant that it became the foundation of Italo disco.

OTTENBERG: They need to play that side of Smylonylon 18 at my funeral. It’s just the most fierce fucking thing. There’s certain things that I need to find, like the Friday on My Mind remix, but the tape broke in 1999.

GLOOR: That was Chilly – Friday on My Mind, thats a great german disco group from 1979.

OTTENBERG: It’s great. It’s just some electronic thing. The timing of this is cool because young people are really into analog. Casa Magazines, my favorite magazine store in New York, is saying their best customers are 13-year-olds. The kids are up on what you’re smoking, man. One last question: do you remember when Prada ripped off the Smylonylon Fritz and it was like a mini-scandal?

GLOOR: No, I probably was already gone. When was that?

OTTENBERG: You were. It was 1996. It’s one of my favorite Prada collections. Do you still have any of the Smylonylon clothes?

GLOOR: I have a Center for the Dull t-shirt and an Italian leather jacket I got for 10 bucks, like a real mafia jacket. You want to see it?

OTTENBERG: Yes.

GLOOR: Hold on. [Shows Mel the jacket]

OTTENBERG: Oh, it’s disgusting. I love it.

GLOOR: It’s so cugine, if I walk around in Switzerland with it, people get confused.

OTTENBERG: It’s so perfect. I had such a great time talking to you because this comes from a real place of excitement and love and fandom for me.

GLOOR: You didn’t ask me who my favorite trans person is, which is your standard question in interviews.

OTTENBERG: [Laughs] Who is your favorite trans person?

GLOOR: Anjita Wilson. She was a stripper on 42nd Street and became a fashion model, moved to Italy and became a porn star,  had a car accident in 1987 and died. my favorite film of her’s is Black Aphrodite from 1977.

 

OTTENBERG: Wait, let me take another picture.

GLOOR: Alright.

OTTENBERG: Alex, do you know Clara 3000, the DJ? She knows you via Codek. I introduced her to Smylonylon and she somehow found a Smylonylon 2 tape and give it to me. Isn’t that incredible?

GLOOR: That’s very cool.

OTTENBERG: I saw her at the Miu Miu show, where she did the soundtrack. And she was like, “Wait, I have something for you.” She went away and came back with a Smylonyylon 2 tape in perfect condition.

GLOOR: Wow!

OTTENBERG: Best gift ever. Tapes are back.