(Tod Louie/ Dick Dennis) is a DJ, club promoter, label boss and a recording artist. He’s been a fixture on the Oslo DJ circuit as a resolute lynchpin for Det Gode Selskab collective and Oslo’s queer club scene.
Born in rural Norway his father was a night life mogul, who had raised the nascent Tod Louie on the dance floor, nurturing the curious Dybdahl’s passion for playing music and making people come together. Emboldened by a love of vinyl that has been there since elementary school, the farm boy eventually swapped the pitchfork for a pair of Technics 1210s, giving Tod Louie a huge head start on his path to becoming one of Oslo’s most celebrated selectors. By the age of thirteen, he had played on the same bill as Sasha, and by the time he was old enough to enter a club, he wept like Alexander, for there were no worlds left to conquer.
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In Oslo, he founded the Det Gode Selskab with Chris Solaris, a significant cultural highlight on Oslo’s clubbing circuit which today comprises a DJ collective, festival, a weekly residency and several annual events around Oslo. Taking clubbing in the Norwegian capital al fresco, swapping stale basements for the sun, the Selskab breathed new life into Oslo’s clubbing community, and today they’ve proliferated that spirit through their label and the only vehicle for Dybdahl’s productions as Tod Louie.
Dybdahl is and will always be a DJ, and from House to Garage to Techno and even Trance, he’s embraced a varied musical palette throughout his career. Today his DJ sets both as Tod Louie and Dick Dennis are personified by unbridled energy. Fueling the fire on the dance floor, his eclectic and groovy sets travel from bouncing breaks to stark soundscapes in his pursuit in finding those rare emphatic symbioses with his audience and the dance floor.
Whether he’s playing to the yearning masses as Tod Louie at Jaeger, or if he’s indulging nocturnal fantasies in the darkroom for Evrysome as Dick Dennis, Dybdahl is a stoic presence in any booth and can modulate easily between these two contrasting characters. Dick Dennis is Darth Vader to Tod Louie’s Luke Skywalker and loves to dwell on the darker fringes of the club floor. And where Tod Louie would never play an Hi-NRG Disco record, the flamboyant Dick Dennis doesn’t suffer taboos. He’s the naughty, bold city kid to Tod Louie’s inner farm boy and the progeny of his grandfather, who was a poet and a butcher. Born in an imaginary orgy at Paradise Garage, sired by Freddy Mercury, Patrick Cowley and Frankie Knuckles, Dick Dennis is a little dangerous, he prefers life on the edge, going full throttle with no brakes and no seatbelt, indulging guilty pleasures for queer motives.
Where Dick Dennis and Tod Louie converge is where Terje Dybdahl exists and maybe if you’re lucky, you might find Tod Louie going back to back with Dick Dennis someday because today they co-exist in the same shell as an artist, label boss, promoter and first and foremost a DJ.