David Ruck: A Life in Music
Choir, drums, grunge, electronic music, DJing and production all came before most of my business career. More importantly, they came before the internet made discovery easy. If I wanted to find music, people, venues or an audience, I had to physically go out and find them.
The cassette with no name.
I was about twelve when someone I knew handed me a cassette tape they had found in the gutter. Whatever had once been written on it had worn away. There was no band name, no album title and no useful clue about what I was about to hear.
I took it home and played it. The reaction was immediate: this was the sound I had been thirsting for. I wanted more of it badly, but I did not even know who I was looking for.
Years later I finally discovered that the cassette was Nirvana’s Bleach. By then Kurt Cobain and Nirvana had become one of the defining musical influences of my teenage years.
You could not just sit down and find the answer.
There was no YouTube, Spotify, Shazam or search engine waiting to identify a half-destroyed cassette. If you wanted something, you had to go out into the world. Ask people. Visit record shops. Swap tapes. Read flyers. Talk to DJs. Find the person who knew the person who knew the track.
I was internally much more awkward than I probably appeared. I learned to push that aside and approach people anyway. That mattered far beyond music. Years later the same behaviour showed up in event promotion, sales, radio, business development and almost everything else I built: if I wanted an outcome, I learned not to wait for it to arrive.
Choir became drums. Drums became bands.
Music had started even earlier. I joined the Treble Boys’ Choir at about four while attending St Andrew’s College in Christchurch. At around twelve I left Christchurch for boarding school at Timaru Boys’ High School, started drumming and became much more interested in rock.
I wanted a band badly. The problem was not wanting to make music. It was finding two or three other people who were equally motivated, rehearsed and actually going to turn up. I spent plenty of time trying, but that dependency frustrated me.
DJing solved a problem.
DJing meant I could still build an entire musical experience without waiting for the rest of a band. I could hunt for records, decide exactly what I wanted to play, prepare it and put it in front of people.
My taste was never confined to one lane. I was heavily influenced by 1980s hip hop and later became most naturally associated with a harder edge of electro and house. I also loved selected drum & bass that felt genuinely engineered rather than generic, including the harder territory around Panacea, Metalheadz and Usual Suspects. When dubstep emerged, the darker and heavier end of that interested me for the same reason.
That eventually fed directly into the late-night PulzarFM After Dark shows, where Friday leaned into harder electro and house and Saturday was deliberately pushed toward harder dubstep and drum & bass. Read the PulzarFM story →
Production: the work I was least willing to release.
I was always interested in production as well as DJing, but I was extremely hard on anything I made. Most tracks stayed with me because I could hear every flaw and usually decided they were not good enough.
One exception began as a technical exercise. I was practising time-stretching a vocal over a completely different genre and built a drum & bass remix around an Eminem vocal. It was not even especially representative of my main DJ sound.
The audience disagreed with my assessment. The remix accumulated hundreds of thousands of listens on SoundCloud in my recollection, which eventually convinced me to put it on YouTube. That upload has since passed 35,000 views.
The track I nearly kept to myself.
I still hear the experiment and the flaws. Other people heard something worth replaying. That difference taught me an important lesson about releasing work instead of endlessly judging it in private.
What listeners said
“Best remix I’ve heard so far.”
“amazing! still repeating. make more :)”
“love this song and the beats”
“Daaaaamn straight fire”
Music taught me to move.
The part of this story that matters most to me is not genre trivia. I grew up before discovery became frictionless. Finding the right record, finding musicians, finding a venue, finding a crowd or getting a flyer into the right hands required movement.
I was not naturally fearless. I learned to act while feeling awkward. I learned to walk up to strangers, ask questions, hand people things, promote ideas and tolerate rejection because there was no digital shortcut around doing it.
That habit eventually became one of the most useful skills of my working life.