Don't bother scanning tourist guides for Club Deco. If it was any further underground, it would scratch the earth's molten core.

On the outskirts of San Francisco's Tenderloin district, a musical renaissance is underway. A narrow building near the corner of Larkin and Turk is a safe harbor in the neglected TL. Dubbed "Club Deco," a tiny bar sits idly on the left and two pool tables beckon attention at the end of the entry. Hard beats overpower a small dancefloor where nobody is dancing.

Turn the corner behind the DJ booth, head down the rickety steps, and you'll find turntable scratching's subterranean Mecca. Downstairs is where the new breed of instrumentalists gather to jam. Inside this haphazardly arranged basement, graf writers crash out on couches and sketch tags in ringed notebooks. Aspiring DJs line up to spy the techniques. B-boys lean against I-beams, suck on skinny joints, and peer through bloodshot eyes. The sonic squall pulses out of the cheap speakers chained to the ceiling, and the waft of humid, dank smoke gives the scene a queasy, underwater feel.

All attention is focused on the men crowded in the corner. Illuminated by cheap track lighting and drippy votive candles, a black platform holds two Technics 1200 turntables plugged into a Vestax mixer. Over beats slowly rotate at 33rpms on turntable one, the second platter of samples is chopped into a sonic stew by the DJ's hand. The free hand manipulates the crossfader and creates the cuts. The sound pumps out of speakers chained to the low ceiling.

Q-Bert is hunched over the mixer. With twelve years of turntable experience, he's point man for this burgeoning musical trend called "turntablism." Q's hands work independent of each other. At one point, he squiggles out an orbit, a trick that mimmicks the Doppler effect. His hands are working the record, the on/off switch, the pitch control, the crossfader, and the separate turntable pod on the mixer -- sometimes all at once. It's all on beat, and the entirety of his work is balanced on two diamond needles the size of a paint chip. He then performs the same trick, but "crabwalks" it, by using each of his fingers to move the pod up and down. Again, everything is on beat.

Throughout the bilateral freak show, Q-Bert stands practically motionless. The gathered tribe soaks up the underground sound, exhales skunk-flavored "ooohs" during key junctures, and applauds when Q completes a well-executed solo.

Back upstairs during a break, Q-Bert compares the scene to bebop's heyday when Minton's Playhouse host Theolonious Monk and other greats of the era. It's like that, he says, a freestyle-jazz thing with turntables and scratching, stylus, and bass.

"I'd rather just stand still and let people listen to it," Q-Bert says. "I've been studying a lot of Miles Davis. Before him was Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie; they'd smile and play to the crowd. Miles was like, forget that. I'm going to stand still and do my thing." To those unfamiliar with turntablism, the comparison to Miles Davis should be laughable and excessive. Should be, that is, if Q-Bert and the rest of the Filipino American turntable posse -- the Invisible Scratch Pickles -- weren't rightfully lauded as visionaries within the DJ world.

The Pickles' importance to hip-hop is undeniable. The crew -- Mixmaster Mike, Shortkut, and Q-Bert -- has taken every worthwhile mixing competition title through sheer precision and creativity. The style was so wild, so otherworldly, they were forced to "retire" from the foremost DJ mixing contest, the DMC, because their presence was deemed "too intimidating." Since then, they've set up their own turntable mixing competitions under the International Turntable Federation banner and toured the world's turntable hot spots -- Japan, Australia, France. Wherever hip-hop music is heard, the Pickles are treated like shamen.

The Pickles formed ITF with the X-Men and Beat Junkies because the crews were unhappy with the share of profits in the lucrative world of videotaped battles. Plus, it was just time. "There were all these competitions -- the DMC, NMS, Zulu Nation -- we just thought we don't have our own battle," said Q. "We wanted to do our own thing. And instead of them making money from videotapes, why don't we make money?"

Most importantly, they've wrested the DJ spotlight away from the East. When the Pickles won its first DMC championship in 1990, NYC's hip-hop cognoscenti were forced to respect the West. Plus, the Pickles are all Filipino American. The impact of the Pickles snatching DJ honors from New York DJ's is tantamount to a small Asian nation soundly trouncing the Dream Team by double digits.

"Q-Bert opened a lot of doors for Asians and us Filipinos," said Rhettmatic, a member of the mostly Filipino American DJ crew, the Beat Junkies. "It's hard for us Asians and Filipinos to get recognition and respect in hip-hop. Asians have been stereotyped as good imitators and not good originators. I think the Invisible Scratch Pickles and ourselves are making a difference."

During one of the Pickles show-stopping demonstrations, one scratches a bassline, the other scratches a drum beat, the third scratches effects. In larger venues, the music takes on a life of its own, looming large and impressive. It's much more than three guys on turntables. To accurately describe the sounds is like trying to describe chupacabras; you're crazy, until you've been touched by it.

It is this three-man assault that opened up an entirely new style of music. It's as if the Pickles leapt through the sky and fearlessly entered the DJ's Black Hole, expanding into territories yet to be discovered. With six hands and three mixers and three turntables, the Pickles are blowing away the simple "scratch and pose" technique like alien fart dust. They can safely say that nobody in the world is making music like this.

Along with the other Pickles, Q-Bert has released Needle Thrashers and Toasted Marshmallow Feet Breaks series of breakbeat albums that form the arsenal of any DJ worth battling. The live cassettes of Radio Free Berkeley shows (dubbed the Shiggerfragger series) trade hands as soon as they're dubbed. Soon, two albums will be released, one called Invisible Scratch Pickles vs. The Clams of Death, along with an as-yet untitled album of creations, three volumes of instructional videos, a webpage (www.hip-hop.com), even a CD-ROM.

Edison invented the modern turntable more than one hundred years ago. The turntable-as-instrument appeared on the scene around 1976, credited to Grand Wizard Theodore. If you credit the turntable as band to Grandmaster Flash, credit the turntable as orchestra to the Pickles.

Turntablism, says Q-Bert, is still in its infancy. "I see it as kindergarten," he says. "Look at how primitive the turntables are: the pitch control only goes to positive eight and negative eight. 45 and 33RPM. You want the pitches to go from zero to a million. A piano has 88 keys, a turntable could have 10 keys."

Q-Bert appeared on Kool Keith's Dr. Octagon project and the new Return of the DJ II. Q-Bert, Shortkut, and Disk (who left the Pickles) contributed to Bill Laswell's vaunted Axiom release (along with Grandmaster DST, Prince Paul, X-Men, and DJ Krush). The biggest break came when DJ Apollo (another ex-Scratch Pickle) received an invitation to tour with Branford Marsalis' Buckshot LeFonque, not as a between band buffer, but as a musician in his own right.

"I learned a crazy amount," said Apollo. "I learned how to play with musicians, I learned how to be around people that I'm not normally around. I'm brown, and in the music world, you've got to be either white or black. It's a hard come-up and I learned how shit works as far as that's concerned." When asked if his appearance on tour with Branford legitimized turntablism as an art form, Apollo is quick to disagree. "It helped people get hip to it. Most of their crowd have never seen a DJ scratch. It's new to them. I'm trying to educate people, spreading it out to people who don't know what time it is."

"I still think there's a lot of things that need to be discovered," said Shortkut, who won the DMC in 1994. "Someone made a point they couldn't tell the difference between an orbit and a plain scratch. And that's the problem with the public; they don't know what's up with DJing. They don't know a difficult scratch, what's a simple one, what's a complicated beat. they don't understand the concept of juggling, breaking down the beat. It's at a level where people can't comprehend anymore. Back then, old DJs like Cash Money -- they did simple scratches. It's at a level where its kind of crazy, to a point where they don't understand how hard it is. There's still a lot of things that need to be discovered."

Soon, the Pickles hope, the vernacular indigenous to turntables (orbits, rips, flares, transformers, juggling, and so on) will spread to the general populace. A summer of 1996 turntable tour with New York's venerable X-Men pushed the art of turntablism to the masses.

"We see so many areas where we can take it," said Q-Bert. "I see it going toward turntable musicians having a band. I see a futuristic sense of music, where instead of playing guitars and horns, there's more into it because there's more sounds you can use with turntables. There's a whole universe that's yet to be discovered with turntables.

"And the needles skip. Why do things skip? I believe on different planets, there's musical instruments you can scratch and there's no needles. It'll never skip. Can you imagine if guitars had needles and they were skipping? In the future, there'll be a mechanism to manipulate sound without use of needles." (For the record, Q uses Shure M44G's or M447's).

"There's a lot of ideas I have in my mind. I can't get to them yet, but it takes a lot of practice getting to them ideas. As I get on that path, I invent new stuff along the way."

When has any other genre of art-painting, performance art, film, jazz or rock -- been able to feel such artistic freedom? With turntable technology constantly improving, and no shortage of vinyl sources, the Pickles are careening across a frontier that is untouched and ever changing. The possibilities are endless -- a world literally at their fingertips.