The Sly Life: Music-Biz Escapee Matt Robinson Finds Happiness as DJ Mattnifique

Watching Robinson DJ is an event unto itself. He sings and dances while he spins, acting out the lyrics, miming various instruments with un-self-conscious abandon. No one plays air anything — guitar, drums, keys, horns — like Robinson. He takes the stance, he fingers the notes and rocks every piece of every arrangement like he wrote the chords himself.

When Robinson found his way to Ashtanga yoga a few years back, he says, “that’s when it got really vibrant.” During his two-hour, six-day-a-week morning practice, he met yoga teacher Joan Hyman: “Wicked practice, body out of control ... I was always staring at her, fucking up my drishti [gaze].”

Spinning dharma: Mattnifique

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More About

• Matt Robinson
• Joan Hyman
• Center for Yoga
• Old School Hip-Hop
• Hip-Hop and Rap

Hyman asked him to put together some tracks for the Vinyasa Flow classes she teaches at Center for Yoga. The music amped up her classes big time and it wasn’t long before they decided to put it all together. These days, Robinson deejays her Friday-afternoon classes — he sits in lotus, turntables on the floor and mixes up “really inner-soul sound music” — smooth funk, samba, soul, Indian grooves, Neil Young, the occasional dollop of Radiohead.

“And then it got supernice,” Robinson says. “... and now I do it every Friday. It’s my favorite DJ gig ever.”

He still spins at Stone Rose, and at the Circle Bar in Venice, but his heart is in the yoga, the only gig that doesn’t pay him in dollars, but feeds his soul for real.

“And at the end, the students all clap for me — polite applause,” he tells me, happy, humble, proud. “It’s like, ‘Wow, I’m so adult now ...’”

We burst out laughing in the same moment.

“... sorta.”

Robinson DJs Saturday nights at the Stone Rose Lounge at Sofitel L.A., 8555 Beverly Blvd., L.A., and Tuesday nights at the Circle Bar, 2926 Main St., Venice. Friday afternoons at 4:30 p.m. he’s at Joan Hyman’s Vinyasa Flow class at the YogaWorks Center for Yoga, 230 N. Larchmont Blvd., L.A.