Dj brings motion to Pittsburgh

DJ Motion Potion and Silent Soundclash

Rex Theatre

April 14

9 p.m.

Tickets… DJ Motion Potion and Silent Soundclash

Rex Theatre

April 14

9 p.m.

Tickets $10.50

Robbie Kowal, better known as the genre-hopping disc jockey Motion Potion, can only attribute his success to one factor: fate.

“There are people that say that they were chosen for a specific profession,” Kowal said. “That was the case for me. I was fated to do this.”

Kowal will follow his calling across the country this spring and stop in Pittsburgh on Wednesday to perform at the Rex Theatre.

The San Francisco-based DJ with an insatiable musical appetite, said his calling was a long time coming. Before trying his hand at the turntables, the DJ toiled as a maintenance man at a mental hospital, an ashtray changer at a hookah bar, a lawn mower and a Massachusetts health inspector, after graduating from Tulane University.

“I’ve had every crappy job in the service industry you could ever have,” he said.

Longing for a purer, freer existence, Kowal, still in his early 20s, became a freelance writer, accumulated the funds for a plane ticket and flew to Greece.

“I just wanted to live in the Greek islands and write for a while,” he said.

Kowal found a job as a bartender. But when the bar’s DJ took two weeks off to get married, Kowal said the owner asked him to fill the vacancy.

“I had no idea how to DJ — had never even thought about it,” he said. “There was very little music there. They had 30 CDs, 30 records, a couple commercial CD players and a crappy commercial turntable [and] a really lousy mixer, and I managed to make it work for those two weeks.”

But eventually, the position became a fulltime gig for Kowal and he DJed at the bar almost every night.

“That was a pretty quick education,” he said. “Having to construct five-hour sets every single night with a very limited amount of music forced me to be incredibly eclectic right from the beginning.”

Despite improving in Greece, Kowal was far from an instant success upon his return to San Francisco. Having to eke out a living in one of the United States’ most expensive cities proved a constant challenge.

“It took me four years in San Francisco just to figure out how to make a living there,” he said. “You don’t want to move there when you’re poor.”

With time and persistence, however, Kowal’s name gained traction in the Bay Area, and he now describes himself as a “sort of grizzled bluesman of DJing” — which isn’t to say that his music is confined to the blues.

Kowal’s tastes, based on a childhood diet of Southern rock, classical music and funk bands, are notoriously omnivorous, and a voyage through his mixes will touch upon artists as disparate as James Brown and Paul Simon.

“I like to keep things fresh,” he said. “Frankly, I’m into so many different kinds of music that I really want to play them all in the course of a night.”

In each case, however, there’s a unifying motif: energy.

“I know that there’s certain types of music that people will react to,” he said. “If you can bring all those worlds together in one mix and in one night, in one club — even one song — you’re going to make a lot of people happy.”

Because his sense of the dance floor is so acute, Kowal said his sets are largely improvised.

“I never have my set worked out in advance,” he said. “I typically have a plan, an idea of how I want to attack a certain audience.”

To outsiders, this might seem chaotic, but for Kowal, it’s all part of the adventure.

“I’m just kind of incredibly thirsty for experience,” he said. “I’m going to live a rich existence.”

If experience is what Kowal wants, he’s off to a great start. When he’s not retooling nor releasing tracks on his website, the DJ spends much of his time traveling the country and performing in front of thousands of gyrating strangers. He said it beats the hell out of being a health inspector.

“There’s nothing about this job that is anywhere near as mundane and difficult compared to the things that people do to make a living,” he said. “I’m so incredibly fortunate.”