Photo by Kelsey Shoemaker.
With a turntable in the hallway, shiny retro shelving and seating, and vinyl records galore, Dental Dimensions is not the average dentist office. And Dr. Brian Bishop is not the average dentist.
You may not expect to find the person who pokes and prods around your mouth DJing at a Deep Ellum club. But if Bishop is your dentist, you can’t rule it out.
Except there, in the late hours of the night, stationed behind his equipment, he is not a Lake Highlands resident and father of three Brian Bishop, DDS.
He is Vectorvision.
Bishop came up with the name about a decade ago, shortly after acquiring a Vectrex, a video game console from the 1980s, which is now displayed in his office for patients to see. The game’s vector graphics, crisp and angular, were a kind of visual representation of Bishop’s worldview.
“I’m kind of a perfectionist,” Bishop says. “I see things very black-and- white, very technical.”
The son of a dentist, Bishop grew up in the small East Texas town of Gilmer — home of the East Texas Yamboree festival and the birthplace of singer Johnny Mathis, the Eagles’ Don Henley and blues guitarist Freddie King.
Bishop has always been interested in music. (Heavy metal was the genre of choice during his early years.) But he was active in sports, too.
He had a scholarship to play base- ball at Tyler Junior College and studied there for two years before moving to Denton to finish up his degree at Texas Woman’s University.
Friends and teammates went to bars in their free time. But Bishop, who’s a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, doesn’t drink.
Bars bored him, but he discovered dance clubs and the rave scene did not.
“They turned into somewhere I could go by myself sometimes,” Bishop says. “I didn’t drink or do drugs, but I just enjoyed the music. I’m into things that are kind of futuristic.”
After awhile, he started thinking to himself, if he could make that kind of music, he could DJ.
Most of it was self-taught, though his best friend, who was a little more experienced, gave some pointers.
At the beginning, Bishop says, gigs are likely to be held at someone’s house. He did transition to public venues, but his hobby was temporarily interrupted for a two-year church mission in London followed by dental school at Baylor College of Dentistry in Dallas. His mother was from Dallas, and he has always liked the city, he says, so he moved here as soon as he could.
After he knew his family and career were taken care of, he started spending more time DJing.
Over the years, he has DJed in clubs as far away as London and Barcelona or as close as It’ll Do in Old East Dallas. He’s not a fist-pumping DJ. He just wants to enjoy the music, and he wants listeners to enjoy it, too.
“I like to make other people dance,” Bishop says. “I wish I could be those people, but I enjoy living through them and making them dance and enjoy the music.”
Sometimes, people clear the dance floor during his set. But it’s not necessarily a bad thing.
“That could mean that you’re playing something so different they don’t even know what to do with it — especially if you play for, I call it ‘normal people,’ people who definitely don’t know any of the music I’m playing,” he says.
He’s always searching for new music. On a recent trip to the Netherlands, for example, he spent nights at a music festival and days perusing record stores.
Connections made with DJs and artists in the ’90s, when he worked at Bill’s Records, helped Bishop land other opportunities in the industry.
Over the past 13 years, he has moved into producing music, releasing vinyl records on labels owned by people he met at Bill’s. He’s now working on developing a full album. The “average” person would probably describe it as techno, Bishop says, but it’s not really.
“It’s a little darker, a little more futuristic, a little more moody,” he says. “I like kind of melancholy music — not too, too happy, but not too extreme either.”
He also works in A&R (artists and repertoire) for Lone Romantic, a label owned by his friend and fellow DJ Maceo Plex. The hardest part of the job, Bishop says, is turning down artists. But it’s just part of the deal for someone looking for a unique sound.
“I think over time, my musical taste has developed almost like a chef, I guess. A good chef has a good palate,” Bishop says. “And so I think being a good DJ and producer, for sure a DJ, you have to have a good musical palate.”
Bishop’s priorities have been the same since he was in dental school — family first, job second. But music is third, and it seeps into his home and professional life.
He doesn’t want to force his kids into music, but he sees potential in them. His 14-year-old, a student at Lake Highlands High School, always has earbuds in listening to music. And his son likes to sing and takes piano lessons.
There’s always music playing in his office, located on Plano Road near East Northwest Highway. And the funky Space Age decor is a good icebreaker, Bishop says. It helps ease any patient anxiety and facilitates conversation with the dentist, a self-described introvert.
“Just helps humanize the dentist, I guess,” Bishop says. “I don’t want everybody to be scared of us. We’re people too.”
