Daniel B Vigil

Daniel "Dust One" Vigil's love for music began at an early age while listening to his father sing and play the guitar and hearing his mother's extensive Latin record collection blasting throughout the house. In the 3rd grade, he took up the violin which he loved to play. However, the next 2-3 years is where he started to really pay attention to a new type of music and dance, coming in like a whirlwind; Hip-Hop and B-Boy'ing.

In 1982 at the age of eleven while listening to the infamous KSOL 107.7 FM, he caught a segment of DJ Michael Erickson mixing and scratching two identical records together, Egyptian Lovers Egypt Egypt. He was hooked and started scratching records with his parents home stereo. After his father witnessed him doing this strange thing with his record player, he finally bought him 2 turntables and a mixer for a present. He would practice day and night and would spend his whole allowance on records every 2 weeks until he had enough records to perform at parties. The rest is history

Sometime in 1984 Dust One broke out of the Bedroom DJ environment and started DJ'ing at parties with MC Vicious Lee. Dust would provide the beat, by scratching a records bass and snare drum sound back and forth or mixing two identical records together looping the same beat pattern. MC Vicious Lee would rap on top of the beat, they were a hit.

Later Dust One hooked up with best friend dj L.O.C., the human beat box. They put together a group with Milo's friend Hershel and started creating a demo for Smiley and Friends, a music production company from San Francisco. Once they submitted the demo for a potential record deal, the production house said we would not make it because we were not from New York. However, they were willing to use Hershel in someway and offered him a record deal and left Dust and L.O.C. empty handed.

While in High school, Dust One put together a rap group with 3 friends and produced their first demo; the Alphabet Rap. He hooked up with the infamous Cool Raul (DJ EFX) in his home studio in the San Francisco mission district. However, the 3 rappers were not serious with the project, so Dust One called the session off and they parted ways. Dust One later worked with DJ EFX for a mix-tape record, but at 16 years old it was hard to come up with the funds to produce and distribute the record. Dust One then with L.O.C. and Dust One's High School friend Edmund started a new DJ group called Audio Dynamix and later joined the San Francisco legendary Imagine! Productions.

Dust One officially retired from DJ'ing in 1990 after his record collection was ruined, so he concentrated on writing music. He got together with long time friend Kai (Kaizmind Entertainment Network), who knew someone with a studio that could help him record his record. They got together in Alameda, California at DJ Glen Aure's (San Francisco 106 KMEL) house and started recording Dustys Groove. However, life happened and he was not able to complete his project.

It wasn't until one day as he was surfing the internet he saw an Apple commercial and saw a fellow Bay Area DJ, talking about scratching; the legendary DJ QBert. After doing some research, he found out that a few DJs from the Bay Area made successful careers out of what we did as a hobby as teenagers. A couple years later, he received a voice message from Kai marked urgent and said he needed to talk to me. When I called him back he didn't even say hello, he played some music... It sounded very familiar and then it clicked. He then said, I found it, I found it! While spring cleaning his house, he found a box with a bunch of cassettes, one of them being my studio recording of Dusty's Groove! This was a sign.

Here is where it starts all over again!

In 2001, Eleven years after "retiring", he got the bug again… However instead of being a DJ, he wanted to produce music. He purchased a software package called Reason, then a ProTools setup and after work would spend hours making beats and remaking Dusty's Groove. His wife saw that he had such a passion for this and talked so much about his DJ days, that she surprised him with two new turntables and a mixer for his birthday. This really motivated him to start getting serious about his re-discovered passion. However, I am not sure if she thought it was a good idea after she noticed he started spending his weekends crate digging and came home once from Maryland with one thousand records in the trunk of his Jeep...

Dust One was visiting his family in San Francisco in November of 2006 for Thanksgiving. He read in the paper that a Gurp City show was going on that Friday night, so he headed down to see Eddie K, Dj Quest with LiveHuman perform. Before the show started he met up with Quest which led to him asking Dust to submit some beats for a upcoming project. Dust sent Quest a couple beats and one really struck Quest's interest enough to ask Dust to be on his Questolous Album.

A week later Dust One working from the East Coast and Quest from the West Coast started working on the track. It was Modern Day Technology at it's best... Two different platforms, Dust One on a PC Laptop (now a MacBook), Quest on a Mac, two different versions of ProTools and e-mailing samples back and forth until they had a finished product; Recognize (Track 6 on Questolous).

This is Dust One's official come back, although the L.O.C said that Dust One did not go anywhere to come back from... ;) So don't call it a come back, I've been here for years!