On Thursday, Jan. 18, techno DJ and producer Silent Servant was found dead in a downtown loft in Los Angeles. The DJ, also known as John (Juan) Mendez, was with his partner Simone Ling and Jose (Luis) Vazquez, the post-punk musician who performed as the Soft Moon. Officials suspect that all three people died due to a fentanyl overdose, according to the Los Angeles Times.

This was a loss felt around the world. Both Mendez and Vazquez had loyal, global audiences for their work. In particular, on social media, Mendez’s openness and willingness to help out other musicians was widely remarked upon. And his loss is felt with particular acuity in the Twin Cities, where he lived from 2008 to 2011.

Mendez moved to Minneapolis to work as an art director for the ad agency PMH. Hidden from the spotlight, he worked alone as Silent Servant. Mendez was also part of the label and group Sandwell District, a long-distance operation that also included the American Dave Sumner, AKA Function, and the British Karl O’Connor, AKA Regis, both respected producers and DJs living in Berlin. Commingling techno with post-punk sounds and aesthetics, Sandwell District’s admixture had, and continues to have, an enormous impact on the modern sound of techno music.

If there’s a rock band with a career trajectory analogous to Sandwell District’s, it might be ’90s post-rock act Slint — short-lived and not overly popular, but still wildly influential. “The newer generation especially — that was their connection to that style,” says Zak Khutoretsky, aka DVS1, the Minneapolis-raised DJ and producer behind Aslice, who has lived in Berlin for more than a decade. “Nobody realized the importance until the group wasn’t as visible anymore. People were like, ‘Sandwell District — wow, this is a supergroup. We need more of this.’” 

There was, briefly, more of it: Sandwell District reunited for a series of European shows last summer, including a gig at the festival Berlin Atonal. And Silent Servant was a consistent club draw in the U.S. and abroad. When I saw him perform in September 2018 at Novo Festival, at the Loring Bar, I wasn’t prepared for the sheer assault. But it wasn’t merely an assault — it was thrillingly and unmistakably musical, one of the most charged sets I’ve ever caught in person.

“For any artist, the moment you become definable by your voice, you’ve succeeded,” says Khutoretsky. “If you wanted to get Silent Servant, you couldn’t book somebody else to play that role. You needed to book him.”

Mendez had never intended to stick around the Twin Cities. “When he came [to Minneapolis], he was like, ‘I think I’ll be here maybe a year minimum, maybe a couple years maximum,’” says Khutoretsky. “There was never a thought that he was going to stay there. I don’t think he liked the winter.”

But that isolation focused Mendez’s work. “It felt like the lack of distractions came at a time in life where you get a little older and you figure out what’s important to you, and you have the experience to execute things that way,” says Dustin Zahn, another Minneapolis techno DJ and producer now based in Berlin.

Khutoresky and Zahn left Minneapolis after the thriving rave scene of the 1990s grew largely barren in the 2000s, while Berlin increasingly became techno’s center; Mendez himself would briefly move there “a year or two before the pandemic,” Zahn recalls. Obviously, dance music did blow up in the U.S. during the 2010s. But the big EDM wave was a pop-oriented epoch that largely left techno, proper, out in the cold. And in European clubs, techno in the late 2000s was still dominated by the increasingly enervated “minimal” style. But in the 2010s, techno got a shot of energy thanks to an increasing commingling with darkwave and industrial music — an engagement that directly follows the footsteps of Silent Servant and Sandwell District.

Named for a borough on the edge of Birmingham, in the British Midlands, Sandwell District augured a paradigm shift in techno. Beginning in 2007, one year before Mendez’s Twin Cities arrival, the trio began issuing 12-inches rooted in the dub-inspired, heavily atmospheric sound of the ‘90s Berlin label Basic Channel. But Sandwell District, and Silent Servant on his own, brought in a different kind of energy, one based heavily in post-punk and proto-goth bands like Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire, whom Mendez once called “the basic building blocks of what we do,” adding: “We’re making techno music. But it’s club music for non-clubgoers in a way.”

Sandwell District also converted a lot of non-clubgoers to techno. Angelica Iannitti, the Minneapolis DJ and resident of Dungeon Synth Sundays, a monthly at Little Tijuana, recalls seeing Silent Servant DJ at the final show of “a very short-lived venue called the Glitterbox” in 2009, playing between psychedelic bands. “Everyone who was there now remembers it,” she says — though she didn’t find out who the DJ was until years later. Previously, techno had bored her; then, in late 2011, she heard a Sandwell District record and everything changed. “Suddenly it feels like something that shares my musical influences,” she says. “It was as paradigm-shifting as any musical event in my life. I would not have ever started DJing if not for that.”

“I think for a lot of people, the attraction is that Silent Servant was on the tip of the goth stuff — darker, industrial kind of vibes,” says Steven Centrific, who promotes parties locally as Intellephunk (along with his wife Jasmine Seuling and Zahn). When Centrific heard Silent Servant play in 2008 at one of his events, it helped bring his own sets away from “a clubbier kind of thing” back to “a very stripped-down vibe that was in touch with my roots — the Basic Channel vibe,” he says. 

If you were in the Twin Cities and paying attention to local music in those years, you may wonder why you haven’t heard of this guy before. Well, maybe you had: Mendez and his ex-wife, Camella Lobo, had a darkwave duo called Tropic of Cancer that gigged occasionally at the Turf Club, among other places. “I think he was a little bit more satisfied artistically with that than with techno, to be honest,” says Zahn. 

But Silent Servant also intentionally kept his profile here low. “In Minneapolis, he was purposely reclusive,” says Zahn, because Mendez knew his time here would be short. Even the city’s techno lifers were often unaware that a giant was in their midst. Moe Espinoza — another Angeleno techno DJ-producer who works as Drumcell — had introduced Mendez to Zahn. “I was really shocked, because how does a person doing that kind of thing in Minneapolis live here and I’m somehow not aware about it?” Zahn says. “To be honest, he had one foot out the door on the DJ stuff at that point anyway. He’d already had a successful DJ career years earlier, as Jasper — so for him, this was kind of a restart. But he didn’t really see it going anywhere — which, to be fair, at that time was probably realistic.”

Nonetheless, Silent Servant did play a notable role in Twin Cities dance music during his time here. In 2010, Mendez and Khutoretsky — neighbors in northeast Minneapolis, as were Centrific and Zahn — collaborated on a mix for the now-shuttered Chicago-based dance-music blog Little White Earbuds. “There’s a Silent Servant vs. DVS1 podcast,” says Khutoretsky. “It was because we were living in proximity that we decided ‘Hey, let’s do this.’”

Silent Servant also played a handful of DJ gigs in the Twin Cities in this period, and he even designed the logo for Intellephunk’s long-running Sunday party Communion. At first Zahn asked Mendez for a logo hoping for the “early-’80s punk-rock zine-type artwork” he’d become known for. Instead, Mendez gave him something much more straightforward. “It was rectangular — real clean-cut,” says Zahn. “I’m like, ‘Actually, that works better.’” Mendez refused any payment for it.

This was in keeping with his overall ethos. “He would tell everybody, ‘Don’t quit your day job. Keep the art, art,’” Zahn recalls. Years after returning to L.A., Mendez did end up quitting his day job to concentrate on his music and artwork for others. “His friends, we reminded him about that,” says Zahn. “He didn’t find that to be too funny. I know that it bothered him that he had to take something he loved and squeeze it a little bit harder for cash.”

Mendez was renowned in the ad world. Prior to coming to Minnesota, he’d worked for the accessories and lifestyle brand Paul Frank. “That was his bread and butter for quite a while,” says Zahn. Then in 2008, Mendez took the PMH job. “Target was one of the biggest clients for him at the time,” says Zahn. “It was all stuff that, artistically, he didn’t really enjoy doing, but the thing that he did like is that he got to do things the way he wanted.”

Even in semi-seclusion, Mendez’s creativity worked around the clock. “He’d always bring over one-off T-shirts and pins and trinkets,” says Zahn. “I was so jealous, because it’s exactly what I wanted to do, and there’s nobody that does that style better than him. Then he’s like, ‘I think I’m going to start a blog.’”

As Mendez explained to Resident Advisor in 2017, “You were busy and not busy all the time. I was working at the agency, this is when Sandwell District had the blog too — the whole thing was just make something every day that you’re free . . . it didn’t matter what, just make something. You finish work and have two hours to kill, what are you gonna do?”

Dubbed What’s Next?, the Sandwell District blog, long since deleted, featured regular posts of the group’s musical outtakes. It also featured plenty of heated back-and-forth. Argumentation (including the occasional scuffle) was a big part of Sandwell District’s dynamic, internally and externally. “A lot of things happen without discussing them, without planning them,” Dave Sumner, aka Function, told The Wire in 2011. Karl O’Connor, aka Regis, added: “It’s often the case that a record comes out and one of the artists says, ‘Hang on, that wasn’t the mix I submitted.’”

“It was representative of the chaos that was between them,” Khutoretsky says of the blog. “The storytelling was art. The arguments were art. The creative energy was art. Everything they did was pure art.”

Mendez returned to Los Angeles in 2011 — and Sandwell District closed its doors shortly thereafter. “Those guys, especially Karl/Regis and Juan, shared the same idea: ‘Kill it while it’s on top,’” says Zahn. “That was the plan all along. It wasn’t like they had an argument and killed it.” Once on his own, Mendez began to DJ more frequently as Silent Servant, beginning a monthly two-hour show on NTS Radio, the famed London online station. (I highlighted a couple of those shows, along with some other great Silent Servant sets, here.)

“He spent roughly three-ish years in Minneapolis,” Zahn says in conclusion, “refining his craft and setting himself up for what the next 10-15 years would be to follow.” The outpouring in the wake of his death demonstrates clearly that Mendez’s path will be followed for a lot longer to come.