Second Story heats up Fridays with Plasma

"Plasma" is a noun derived from a Greek word that means "to shape." But Friday nights beginning this month, Plasma is an event at Second Story Nightclub, 201 S. College Ave., where local and national DJs and their audiences come together to shape a sound, light and movement experience.\nPlasma highlights the skills and talents of DJs representing various genres, including house and techno, hip-hop, drum and base and electronic music, sound producer Ryan Schilling said.\n"This is not your high school DJ playing the hits," Schilling said. "These are professionals who have spent years perfecting their craft … good DJs match pitch and tempo and styles or types of songs into a set that is a whole."\nJerold Huebner, a DJ who not only plays at Plasma, but also books all the Plasma shows for Second Story, has been described by an audience member as creating a journey through a soundscape of emotion.\n"I consider all good DJs to be artists … they create an audio collage out of pieces of music," Huebner said. \nTonight, Plasma will feature Derek Plaslaiko, from Detroit, playing from midnight until 3 a.m. Opening at 10:30 p.m. will be tribal/house DJ Ian Paris, an Indianapolis resident, formerly of Bloomington.\nSchilling said Detroit is known as a breeding ground for electronic dance music internationally. This is a chance for Bloomington to experience an emerging DJ from this breeding ground, who has been praised by well-known Detroit DJs John Aquaviva and Ritchie Hawtin (Plastik Man).\nPlaslaiko said he looks forward to playing for three hours, a much longer set than he normally plays. He compared playing a set to painting a picture, trying to respond to the energies happening in the room. He said it is similar to finding one's way over a mountain, step by step. It is an adventure, looking for something one can't quite put a finger on and having fun.\n"If I see people at the end of the night with big smiles, and they can only giggle and wipe the sweat from their faces and pull their shirts out and fan themselves, I feel like I'm right there with them, like I was dancing the whole time," Plaslaiko said. "It's a warm feeling, indescribable."\nSchilling said he had the idea for Plasma and does light and sound for the series. He has been doing sound for 15 years, and has been involved with electronic music for nine years as a light and sound producer. He grew up in Brown County, and after a stint in the army, he toured nationally for several years, often in Florida. In the past five years, he has settled in Bloomington and started a family.\n"I am doing this because I love the music," Schilling said, summing up his involvement with Plasma. "Sometimes, when a show has really gone well, I've found myself in the back of the room, with shivers running up and down my arms, in awe of the artistry on the stage."\nHuebner has developed roots in Bloomington with electronic music with his DJ crew, Rice and Beans.\n"Rice and Beans was started in 1992 by a group of friends, Indiana University students, some of them living together, who DJed parties around town," Huebner said. "The name came from the fact that they almost always had rice cooking in the kitchen!"\nThe "beans" were added, Huebner said, to represent the varied ethnicities of the members, who included Asians and Mexicans, among others. Including original members who have left Bloomington and new ones who they have brought in in their new locales, there are now about 10 members in Rice and Beans. The only one of them living in Bloomington is Huebner, who started out with the group doing light and sound and then began DJing with the group in 1995.\nPlasma continues every Friday evening at Second Story.\n"We plan to continue to make available to the public the infinite variety of what might seem to be the small world of electronic and dance music," Schilling said.