This is music as martial law. Tons of stuttering trombones bleat out a shuffling time like “Taps” on cocaine. Snares back up against each other and pop-pop like automatic gun fire. Demanding bass reinforces the boom-clack-bounce-shuffle of the breaks and the militancy of the samples–repetitive staccato orders like “Watch out for the big girls!” and “Open it up! Give ’em some room!”

In the middle of this mayhem, behind a p-popping honey with inch-long green and white acrylics and a wifebeater-sporting man so buff he looks like an action figure, stands all 5′ 4″ of Baltimore’s Club Queen K-Swift. Despite her size and her baby face, 26-year-old Khia Edgerton cuts an authoritative presence behind the turntables. Surrounded by scattered CDs and vinyl, she’s full of studied, pouty-lipped cool, even as the sound system repeatedly gives out. The second it comes back on, she’s back on the mic again, entertaining the crowd with such salvos as “Everybody who wants to get laid tonight scream!” and “Everyone who has $2 in your pocket throw your hands up!” That last command is clearly delivered tongue-in-cheek, as Edgerton is playing to a warehouse full of Baltimore indie rock kids, most of whom probably don’t have more than $5 to their name.

On a normal Friday night, Edgerton would most likely be controlling the decks at urban nightspot Club Choices. Choices–with its roster of guests like Rod Lee, Redz, and DJ Technics–is the place to hear what’s known as “Baltimore club” (or, if you live in Maryland, simply “club music”). Though it’s been around since the early ’90s, Bmore club is slowly becoming the next form of regional bass music–like Chicago’s ghetto house, Detroit’s ghetto tech, Washington D.C.’s go-go, and Houston’s screw music–to leak outside its small urban confines and out to other audiences around the country. Formerly only accessible through underground mixtapes and Baltimore radio stations like 92Q, club records are starting to be carried at NY record store Turntable Lab and played by electronic DJs like Diplo. All of which leads us to how, on this hot Friday night, K-Swift ended up rocking a room full of kids in Weezer glasses and thrift store tees soaked with sweat.

“The most shocking thing about that party was that there was a whole other crowd that was into the music that I didn’t even know about,” says Edgerton, who’s speaking to me on the phone while waiting to board a roller coaster at Six Flags. “It floored me and to this day I can’t believe it.”

Edgerton may be surprised that art school kids like her music as well as urban crowds, but she’s never had any doubt about her talents. In between shouting at her friends and passing off the phone, she explains how she got into DJing at the age of 11. “I’ve always loved music,” she says, her Maryland accent drawing out the “u” in music until it sounds like “mewwwwsic,” rounded and syrupy. “My father was a DJ for years. He played oldies but goodies–what I call 25-and-older music like Earth Wind and Fire, The O’Jays, disco music like Masterdon Committee’s ‘Funkbox Party’ and Strafe’s ‘Set It Off’ As soon as he would leave for work I used to be like, whoosh…in the basement and messing with his stuff. Eventually something did accidentally get broken and that’s how I got caught. I had a long conversation with him and told him that’s what I really wanted to do. [My parents] got me my own stuff so I could tear it up.”

Starting off with records like Kid ‘N’ Play’s 2Hype and Run D.M.C.’s “Peter Piper”–and with female DJs like Cocoa Chanel and Salt ‘N’ Pepa’s Spinderella as idols–Edgerton learned how to scratch. She eventually moved on to beat matching in 11th grade, when she started playing high school dances and fashion shows. Around the same time Baltimore club was starting to jump off and Edgerton got an influential internship at WERQ FM (92Q), Baltimore’s biggest urban station. Her outgoing personality–and her unusual status as a young female in a male-dominated scene–meant it was only a short ride until she got the station’s best slot: weeknights from 6-1 p.m. with co-host Squirrel Wyde.

“I’ve always been outgoing and I never had low self-esteem or none of that,” she explains. “But the worst thing I’ve had to go through [DJing] is being a female and having the guys hate on [me] so bad. Guys don’t really want to see a female grow and expand. There would be a lot of [guys saying] ‘She’s a girl. She’s wack. She can’t do it,’ without even hearing me. But you just got to keep to your own because everybody hates on everybody. You always just got to stay focused and don’t worry about what anybody else thinks about you.”

Since being crowned Club Queen–a title she says she was basically given by the people of the city of Baltimore–Edgerton hasn’t really had to deal with the haters. She’s got a radio show, a management company, and is a record pool director at Unruly, a club music distributor. Her last mixtape, Vol. 6: The Return, just sold 4, copies in Baltimore alone, and she feels more comfortable than ever, whether on air or behind the mic at gigs. (“It took a lot of courage to do it at first but now I can’t do a party without saying something to the crowd,” she explains. “I feel as though you need to let people know that you’re there. Ain’t nobody going to promote you like you’re going to promote yourself.”)

More than that, she gets to have fun everyday, playing jams from the dirty (Doc Slice’s “Asses Wigglen”) to the melancholy–like the a capella of John Legend’s R&B tear-jerker “Ordinary People” set over the Lyn Collins “Think” break or Rod Lee’s uplifting-yet-depressing ghetto anthem “Dance My Pain Away” (“Bill collectors on me/Have to file bankruptcy/Need some help from somebody”). More than anything, K-Swift likes the harder stuff, like Blaq Star’s “Get My Gun,” whose refrain threatens “You keep on fuckin’ around, I’m gonna go get my gun.”“I’ve seen a lot of crazy fights,” she laughs. “Especially when you play ‘Get My Gun’ or [the Bmore club remix of] Lil’ Jon’s ‘Throw It Up.’ That’s when everything goes craaaazy.”

“The Drama goes way back, so far back I can’t remember,” shares Joel Speasmaker, the founder and creative director of the Richmond, VA outfit with the suitably melodramatic name. Founded in 2000 as a collective of likeminded underground Virginian artists, The Drama’s core seven members (who now live all over the country) organize art shows and run an online store, as well as publish a totally awesome art and design magazine. Issue six of the zine (also called The Drama) was recently released, which features work from Wes Lang, Ron Rege Jr., Harrison Haynes, and Brian Roettinger of Hand Held Heart/Dim Mak; past issues of the $6 tome (available through the website and at independent bookstores worldwide) have highlighted heavyweights such as Commonwealth Stacks, Typevsm, and Isaac Lin. “One of our biggest goals has always been to make each section of the magazine as equally important as another,” says Speasmaker, “so it’s almost like you are reading a book or a story as you go through the issue.” Of course an unintended goal of The Drama’s growing popularity is to make Richmond a future stop for visual art tourists and avant-hipsters. If you go, Speasmaker recommends “First Fridays, Bell Isle, Carytown, The Bottom and Tobacco Row, and walking around the Fan.”

When it launched in 2002, the Semi-Permanent design conference–curated by online magazine/portal Design Is Kinky–made everyone jealous they didn’t live in Sydney, Australia. But this fall, the little design conference that could will journey from the land of wallabies to the home of 50-cent franks and papayas. Semi-Permanent NYC 2005 (held September 9-10 at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall) will feature events and lectures with a worldly group of unusual suspects from art and design. Interactive guru Joshua Davis from Praystation will rep hard, as will XLR8R contributor and 19-year-old boy genius Chuck “NoPattern” Anderson. Lobo and The Orphanage (behind the fx for Superman Returns and Sky Captain) are on hand for motion graphics tips, t-shirt company Threadless and French graf writer Fafi will discuss inspirations, and NYC’s art and fashion stalwarts Visionaire (of publishing and gallery fame) will explain how it all gets done. Aside from sheer, giddy inspiration, Semi-Permanent attendees also get to take home a 240-page design book with work culled from the presenters.

Jason Forrest’s music (formerly released under the Donna Summer alias) is a crazy pastiche of recognizable pop themes and postmodern noise, from glitch to cock rock. But before 34-year-old Forrest was performing demented laptop surgery, he was a kid from the deep South finding solace in punk rock; and somewhere–in between playing dubbed cassettes of Bad Brains and Minor Threat down to the nibs–a friend turned him onto Public Enemy. PE remains a major inspiration to Forrest’s work, particularly their production techniques and philosophies, which were steered by the Bomb Squad’s Hank Shocklee (who is behind the amazing production of 1987’s Yo! Bum Rush The Show and 1988’s It Takes a Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back). With Shocklee working on his multi-armed music company Shocklee Entertainment and Forrest about to release a new album on Sonig, we used the magic of transatlantic phone lines to connect the two for a discussion of the whys and hows of bringing the noise.

Jason Forrest: Obviously the Bomb Squad did something no one else really had done at the time when you first began producing. Why were you so interested in all this noise?

Hank Shocklee: We wanted to do something that we knew was going to wake up people. We wanted to alert them to a message that was frustrating us. We were calling it noise because nobody wanted to hear it–they didn’t want to hear our ideas, they didn’t want to hear our ideologies about music. So we bottled it as noise and threw it at them.

I always like how Chuck’s MCing, this idea of a hard pill to swallow, matched up with this literal idea of noise–of a Prince guitar solo being fed back and looped so that it made this big slab of sound. How did you decide to choose this aesthetic?

Rhythm was a very big key with PE. I’m into harmonics from a dissonant point of view. I like the way harmonies work together, and I can also appreciate harmonies that don’t work together but they gel. PE was basically an experiment with sound. I wanted to make sure that the sound that we were doing matched the mood of what we were about. We were very angry about everything at the time–noise was something that was coined out of the aggressiveness that we were creating. If you go back through musical history, anything that was done that pushed the envelope was perceived as noise. Rock ‘n’ roll was noise. Classical music was noise. We came across with a new form of music–basically taking music that was already pre-recorded and pulling out the frequencies and sustaining them and stretching them and bending them and controlling them in a fashion that felt to us like rock ‘n’ roll. We took anything and made it feel like a rock guitar, whether it be a horn blast or a violin string pad.

There’s so many small elements of other people’s music that do pop out and are recognizable in your music. I’ve mentioned Prince, the intro for “Fame” from David Bowie, Beatles bits. Why did you allow things to be recognizable?

Because that was the fun in it. It was the musical hook, if you would. If everything is unknown then it gets washed out. Some things have to have some context to it. So you could go, ‘Oh! I know where that part came from!’ but you’re not going to know where all the other things came from.

Every record we made was a one-off. There is so much done in those records that we don’t even know where these things come from. If we put a kick drum onto a track it would be layered with two other kick drums so that it would create one sound. If we wanted to do a deep bass sound we might use the 808. Or we would make our own 808 and we would truncate the parts differently. We would take the attack off the 808 off the front and just use the sustain portion. We may take [the sound] off of a record and scratch it and then take the warping sound of it and trigger that inside. There was no one technique that we used on anything. You can never just sit there and go ‘Okay, I’m going to go pull up an SP1200 and pull up a stock sound of a kickdrum and a snare and I’ll get your sound.’ That’s not going to happen.

Another thing I was always so bewildered by initially and have come to cherish are the little cut-up parts between tracks.

To make these records work was very detailed, it took a lot of time. We would do a lot of preliminary work before we would go into a studio. We’ve always wanted to make the sound as visual as possible. We were doing foley that cats would do in movies on albums. Say, for example, we wanted a speech that said things in a certain way but the speech only said half the phrase. We may go back in and recreate the way the speech was recorded using all the studio effects we have, then insert them in as samples so that those things became seamless. We would add in the hiss, we would add in the crackle–all of the things that made it appear like it was a sample.

Now those are presets, but we created those things before all these companies even knew what the hell was going on. When you look at filtering, for example, that was a thing that we were doing because we stumbled across it. It was actually a defect in the original SB12 design. When you plugged in the plug into the mix out of a SB12, and the cord doesn’t go in all the way, it still makes a connection but it shaves off the high end; what was left was the bass portions of the sound. When we realized that we said ‘Oh wow, that’s a cool effect.’

What did each member of the Bomb Squad do to make up the sound? That part to me seems really mysterious.

We all did everything. Besides me, Keith, Eric, and Chuck, there was Flavor Flav and Terminator X. Everything was divvied up to whoever was feeling what at that particular moment. If Eric felt like ‘I can add a little sequence part here’–it may just be a tambourine loop–then he would add that. If Flav feels like ‘I wanna add the timing to this little drum sample,’ he’s going to add that. Everything went through my control because I’m the one that’s overseeing the entire process. Nobody had a station, but what we did do is get down as a band. Eric might be on the drum pads, Keith might be on another set of drum pads, Chuck might be on a turntable, Flavor might grab a bass, Terminator was on a turntable, I might be on a keyboard sampler. And we’re all just jamming–just making a fucking mess–but we’re running tape. Every now and then you’ll get a moment that will be the most incredible five seconds and that little piece might end up being a part of a record.

We did not sequence things. We wanted everything to have our feel. If you really listen closely, a lot of the timing on things is not correct and it’s not supposed to be correct. You can easily take a high hat, put it into a machine, quantize it at 16s, and let it run from beginning to end. That sounds very mechanical. You’re not going to get the loose feel of it. When we play it by hand, the high hats are at different lengths and different timing. When you start stacking those things, you’re getting a groove that’s being created from all the things that are a little bit off. The reason why most records made today are boring is because they’re linear. They begin and end doing the same patterns, the same spacing, the same timing. Records are supposed to be a living, breathing thing.