Peter Makebish: Sound and Vision

If you’ve recently been chilling out in the Living Room of the Standard, New York, you’re likely to have been serenaded by resident DJ Peter Makebish, who since the early 2000s has been one of hotelier André Balazs’s favorite soundsmiths for his portfolio of hotels in New York, Miami and Los Angeles. “I have always played at [Balazs’s] hotels,” says Makebish. “Its a good combination. Me plus Andre plus hotel equals fun.” The DJ is something of a rock'n'roll renaissance man: formerly a band photographer and filmmaker, his pals include Michael Stipe and Billy Corgan, the latter of whom he joined on tour with The Smashing Pumpkins as a documentary filmmaker in 1999. When his 30 hours-plus of Pumpkins footage turned out to be unusable due to label conflicts, he decided to set out in a new direction, landing his first gig as a DJ at New York’s Vig Bar––on the ground floor of his then home––and subsequently received bookings from all the right places in the city. More recently, he’s been active as a remixer, initially under the pseudonym Michael Skype (he cleared this with the REM singer beforehand) and then as himself, with collaborators including electro-pop acts Freezepop, Tegan and Sara and CSS. His latest obsession is curating: this April he mounted his first show, In Dialogue, at New York’s Anonymous gallery, bringing together pairs of artists including Kenny Scharf and Kadar Brock, and Ouattara Watts and Dustin Yellin, while his sophomore exhibition—though all quite hush-hush at the moment—is tentatively scheduled for September. Today, we present "Stop By and Say Hi," an original track from Makebish in collaboration with John Wolfington, which started its life as a remix for Danish twee-pop band Asteroids Galaxy Tour, and ended up a completely new composition. The seasoned DJ, who was shot for NOWNESS by photographer Dana Lixenberg, has also put together a pitch-perfect summer playlist for us, which you can check out in full here.