At 10 AM on Thursday, July 6, Chris Widman, Henry Self, Luke Stokes, and Joshua P. Ferguson will settle into the studio for WLUW 88.7 FM at Loyola University’s School of Communications—they’ll have to get comfortable, because they’re planning to stick around till 6 AM the following day. The DJs regularly appear on WLUW as the hosts of Abstract Science, a program that’s focused on the breadth of electronic music rather than a specific genre beneath that large umbrella, but their block usually takes up the last two hours of Thursday night.
Self found his “in” while working at 7th Heaven, a Kansas City record shop a stone’s throw from the high school he attended with Widman; the store’s incense vendor was a hip-hop DJ who was looking to get out of the nightlife game by the mid-90s. “He mentioned that he was looking to offload his turntables ’cause he and his wife were starting a family, and he needed to settle down,” Self says. “I was like, ‘My friend and I need turntables—how much are they?’ And we got them for a steal.” Self, Widman, and a couple other friends chipped in for the decks and a sound system. Their friend Adam Brown lived in an old farm house—the family’s plot of land included an old barn, and the aspiring DJs set up their gear in the barn’s loft. It was the spring of 1995—Widman and Self’s senior year—and Widman, who was the section leader of his high school’s drum line, took to DJing. “I’d tried to play in some different bands and things like that, but it was hard to find people to collaborate with on that level,” he says. “DJing was sort of the next best thing—an even better thing, because you would collaborate with other people, but as far as performing you could do it on your own.”
Self enrolled in law school at UCLA, and for a few years couldn’t do much with Abstract Science. Once he graduated in 2002, he found a way to contribute from the west coast. “I was remotely pre-recording a segment, burning it to CD-R, and mailing it up to Chris’s house in Chicago,” Self says. “Fortunately bandwidth has extended since then, and I no longer have to mail them anything—I can just upload my portion to Dropbox.” While Self buried himself in law books, Widman and Stokes quickly built up a reputation for Abstract Science in Chicago.
Widman saw a partner in Ferguson and asked him to join the Abstract Science team in 2012. Ferguson offered not just a new voice, but, as he says, “I could bring this extra element of contact with artists, so either having them do guest sets with us or being able to do interviews.” Ferguson would regularly interview artists through Time Out, and anything that couldn’t make it to print was game for Abstract Science. Through the years he’s brought Abstract Science interviews with pop-forward LA-based producer Bonobo, German heavies Modeselektor, and Danish chillout wiz Trentemoller, among others. “We had [Public Enemy Bomb Squad member] Hank Shocklee come in and do an interview in the studio,” Ferguson says. “He was here doing a press junket for that 808 documentary—I was able to ask him a few questions live, which was a really spectacular honor.”
