Dave Nada

The creator of the Moombahton genre, Baltimore-based DJ Dave Nada came up with the hypnotic, exotic style of house music almost by accident. In 2009 while DJ-ing his cousin’s “skipping party” — a noon-time party where kids skip school to attend — he began to get paranoid, thinking any hard-hitting techno or flashy house music would drive this young crowd of delinquents to extremes. Feeling like a chaperone, Nada chilled the crowd by pitching-down Afrojack’s remix of “Moombah” by Silvio Ecomo & Chuckie and mixing it with some pitched-down reggaeton beats. The crowd went wild — a good kind of wild — so Nada returned to his home studio and began recording a series of edits and remixes in this style, which he dubbed Moombahton. In 2010, the T&A label would release Nada’s Moombahton EP along with the DJ’s Moombahton remix of Steve Starks’ track “Lydia”. A year later, Moombahton fan and fellow DJ Diplo would hire Nada to select the tracks for the Mad Decent release Blow Your Head, Vol. 2: Dave Nada Presents Moombahton. ~ David Jeffries