A Dilly of a Career / The Bay Area's Invisibl Skratch Piklz have become world stars of turntablism

It's a bright and balmy afternoon in San Francisco's Excelsior district, where the residents of Moscow Street are lining the sidewalks to watch the latest shenanigans at the powder-pink house on the corner.

The Invisibl Skratch Piklz are gathered in front of the home their ace DJ, Q-Bert, shares with his parents, hamming it up for a photographer and shooting the breeze while their cell phones ring unheeded.

This is the first time in months the five DJs have managed to gather in one place at the same time. Mix Master Mike (real name Mike Schwartz) has just finished an American tour, Q-Bert (Richard Quitevis) and Yogafrog (Ritche Desuasido) are back from gigging in Hawaii, and Shortkut (Jonathan Cruz) and D-Styles (Dave Cuasito) have returned from spinning in Amsterdam.

Still in their 20s and world champions several times over, the Piklz are one of the world's most lauded DJ crews. Rolling Stone named them among the 50 most influential artists in hip-hop. Spin has profiled them twice, and last February they graced the cover of Urb.

Their mix tapes disappear from store shelves as soon as they arrive, and their frenetic solo and group shows draw crowds in places as far-flung as Italy and Japan and as close as the New Arena in Oakland, where they opened for the Beastie Boys last month.

Things are hopping on the recording front, too. On November 10, Q-Bert, the Pikl most revered by the hip-hop community, releases his debut CD, "Wave Twisters," on the crew's own Galactic Butt Hair label.

Unlike Mix Master Mike's debut album, "Anti-Theft Device," released in September on Asphodel, "Wave Twisters" is less concerned with creating a kaleidoscopic aural universe than it is in constructing a symphony of virtuoso scratching.

It's also perhaps the first CD by a bona fide turntablist -- a DJ-musician whose instrument has styli and motors instead of strings and pickups, and whose reworking of beats and samples takes the records they spin so far from the original arrangements that they qualify as works of art all their own. The Skratch Piklz have been guiding lights of the turntablist movement for years.

"It's about time people started recognizing that, with all these new scratch styles, the turntable has developed into a real musical instrument," says Q-Bert, leading the way into the Skratch Piklz business office, which used to be his parents' dining room.

Every wall is lined with turntables, mixers, computers, recording equipment and floor-to- ceiling albums and tapes, ranging from a Japanese collection of insect mating calls to a host of movie soundtracks.

"You can take any sound and make an instrument out of a turntable, and it can blend with any music," Q-Bert continues. "You can do jazz, rock, hip-hop."

A brief DJ primer: "Scratching" is the movement of a needle across vinyl to create percussive, screeching effects that reconstruct beats and vocals; "beat juggling" means cutting back and forth from turntable to turntable to create new break patterns; a mixer balances all the ingredients, allowing the turntablist to fade a record in and out and transform a beat with lightning speed.

Thanks to the Skratch Piklz and other DJ iconoclasts, the Bay Area has become a breeding ground for turntable mania. From DJ

Shadow's reconstructed hip-hop to the Automator's psychedelic funk remixes, the area's sonically and culturally diverse hip-hop scene is experiencing a full-blown renaissance after a decade in gangsta rap's looming shadow.

The days of block parties may be over, but they've left a legacy that is turning into the most exciting musical movements of the moribund '90s.

Inspired by the work of late-'70s, early-'80s DJs such as Grand Wizard Theodore (widely considered the inventor of scratching), Grandmaster Flash, Kool Herc and Afrikaa Bambaataa, young turntablists have created a near-perfect fusion of live and electronic music, mixing reggae-fueled scratching with Kraftwerkian synth sounds and classic funk with techniques borrowed from free jazz, thrash metal, TV commercial Muzak and everything in between. These DJs are still chasing four- bar break beats -- but they're chasing them much farther than their predecessors.

Shortkut admits that the genre's sudden popularity after years as an underground phenomenon "feels pretty crazy, but in a good way. Playing the Oakland Arena was like being at a Warriors game, except we were slam-dunking records.

"It was fun, though. I was happy to be able to bring scratching to a wider audience."

Though major labels have been snuffling at their doorstep for years, the Skratch Piklz have resolved to safeguard their idiosyncratic empire and stay independent. In addition to launching their own record label, they run a distribution company that sells instructional videos, T-shirts and DJ supplies via the Piklz Web site: www.skratchpiklz.com. Demand often exceeds supplies, with orders coming in from places as distant as Iceland and South Africa. True to hip-hop's egalitarian roots, the Piklz are sharing some of this abundance with the community: This year they co-sponsored the Asian American Arts Foundation Music Scholarship, and they hope to start a scholarship of their own.

DJ Vin Roc, the 1996 International Turntablist Federation champion who relocated to San Francisco from New York last year, thinks the Skratch Piklz have sparked nothing less than a turntable revolution.

"They're leading the way and opening a lot of doors. A whole new generation of kids is picking up on DJing and taking it to the next level."

Even Q-Bert confesses to being "amazed at how quickly kids advance nowadays. But then, they don't have to do all the research because we had already invented the styles and methods for them."

Q-Bert was a student at San Francisco's Balboa High when he started hanging out in nearby Crocker Park, watching break dancers and graffiti artists and singing along to the Sugar Hill Gang's "Rapper's Delight."

It was while hanging out with graffiti artist UB40 that he adopted Q-Bert as his tag name. When he moved his art from walls to turntables, the moniker stuck.

He learned the fundamentals of mixing, beat-juggling and scratching from Mix Master Mike, a Sacramento teen who dropped out of high school to become a full-time DJ. The two eventually teamed up with another ace DJ, Apollo, and went on to win the international DMC (Disco Mixing Club) championship three years in a row before being asked to retire in 1993 because their track record was intimidating the other teams.

But it sparked creative fires, too. "Q-Bert and Mike were an inspiration to everyone," says Yogafrog. "When they started winning all those competitions it encouraged others to try, and suddenly there were DJs popping up all over the Bay Area."

The future Piklz -- with a slightly different lineup -- started working together as a mobile DJ unit, playing weddings and proms and running through several names before settling on the Invisibl Skratch Piklz in 1993.

The name, for those who wonder, carries no hidden meaning: Like all fine DJ products, it was chosen simply because it sounded good.

Live, the Invisibl Skratch Piklz are a study in inspired chaos. Synchronized jams fracture into kinetic solos that dismantle rock guitars, found sounds and funk rhythms, recombining them into a percussive cacophony.

Beats are broken down; tempos flare and shift. Vocal tracks are transformed into stutter ed mantras delivered in a panoply of scratch styles, of which there are currently 350.

"We get the negative people who say turntablism is a fad that'll get played out like break dancing," Q-Bert says with a shrug. "But we're not too worried.

"The real heads will stay with it, just like the true breakers stuck with their dope dancing. Whether it blows up or not, we'll still be here. It's what we do; it's what we've always done."

"As long as there are turntables," Mike adds, "the Piklz will just keep on transcending."

A SAMPLING OF PIKLZ PARAPHERNALIA

-- CDS

Q-Bert: "Wave Twisters" (Galactic Butt Hair)

Mix Master Mike: "Anti-Theft Device" (Asphodel)

Invisibl Skratch Piklz: "The Shiggar Fraggar Show" (live radio recording, Hip-Hop Slam)

-- VINYL DJ ALBUMS

"Toasted Marshmellow Breaks"

"Bionic Booger Breaks"

"Black Market Snuff Breaks"

"Sqratch Fetishes of the 3rd Kind"

"100 Mile Per Hour Backsliding Turkey Kuts"

"Dirtstyle Deluxe Shampoo Edition"

"Battle Breaks"

"Needle Thrashers No. 1-4"

-- MIX TAPES

"Rekonstrukted Elements" (Shortkut)

"Stylus Wars"

"Demolition Pumpkin Squeeze Musik"

"Neckthrust One"

"Rescue 916"

-- VIDEOS

"ISP vs. Klamz Uv Deth"

"ISP vs. Xmen Battle"

"Wrists of Fury"

"Turntable TV Annual Special 1"

"Turntable TV v1.0 -- Attack of the Robots"

"Turntable TV v3.0 -- The Smegma Return"

"Turntable TV v4.0 -- Toiret for Godzirra"

"Turntable TV v5.0 -- Canadian Kung Fu"

"Turntable TV v6.0 -- Reverse Oyster Beard"

TURNTABLES ON THE WEB

-- Vinyl Exchange: www.vinylexchange.com. San Francisco's homegrown newsletter for turntablists, DJs and vinyl junkies is now online.

-- FourLives Hiphop: www.myd.com/ 4lives. Also includes sections on graffiti art, B-Boy style and mix tapes.

-- Hip-Hop.Com: www.hip-hop.com. Everything on anything hip-hop, including the International Turntablist Federation home page.

-- Wicked Styles Turntablist Page: www.wicked-styles.com. Interviews, events, music and more.

-- Christo's Turntablism Page: www.cwo.com/ christo/Index.html. A fanzine bursting with reviews and news.

-- Super D's House of Hip-Hop: www.gl.umbc.edu/ dlovet1/HoHH/index2.html. Includes a page on turntablist techniques, links and publications.

SO YOU WANT TO BE A DJ / HERE ARE A FEW THINGS YOU'LL NEED

Essential items for the beginning DJ, including six starter tracks:

-- "Turntable Mechanics Workshop" video

-- Two Technics SL 1200 turntables

-- A Vestax 05 Pro Mixer

-- Shure 447 cartridges

-- "Scratching to the Funk," Cash Money

-- "The Magnificent Jazzy Jeff," Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince

-- "Fresh Mess," Knights of the Turntable

-- "Star Wars," Hijack

-- "The Invisibl Skratch Piklz vs. the Klamz uv Deth," Invisibl Skratch Piklz

-- "Rockit," Herbie Hancock

INVISIBL SKRATCH PIKLZ