RFI: Border Community - Nathan Fake, James Holden, The MFA, Petter etc.

-- biz (b...), August 25th, 2005.

dude the only reason anyone's arguing with you is because your idea of what constitutes good sequencing and seamlessness is so... i dunno...one dimensional. dullsville.

I disagree. Most dance DJ's can learn basic technical mixing (beat matching and phrasing) in a month or two. Great track selection, at least in dance music, is something that can't be "taught" and requires years of work to master.

I'll take a few botched transitions over uninspired track selection any day, whether at the club or listening to a mix CD.

xpost: what is my idea of good sequencing and seamlessness? the perfect example is Disc 1 from Northern Exposure. Orb/FSOL etc. What is one dimensional or dull about that? Have you heard that mix?

DELETE DANCE MUSIC KTHNXBYE

fe7 brings up a great point about Club vs. Home listening. At home, fade ins and bad mixes are less annoying. Hearing a DJ wreck a couple mixes will make me leave the club, no matter what his name is or what label he's representing. This feeling was even more extreme when i was taking ecstasy. I guess you had to experience a set by Sasha in the mid-nineties on E to understand his ability to work a crowd with his mixing skill. I doubt Mayer could ever come close to that type of performance.

why should mayer want to replicate "that type of performance." the point is he has his own thing going on and generally it's pretty awesome.

Reread my post, that's exactly what I said. You can't teach selection.

well, i doubt he's trying - what i was trying to goad ronan into admitting upthread is that mayer is aiming away from the club scene, or, at least, playing towards a different style of clubber.

really? cause you might be pretty pissed if you spent $50 to get into the superclub, another $50 on really good pills / orange juice / bottled water ...

* = for foreign readers, the olive garden is a chain of low-end american-italian restaurants renowned for their tacky decor and bland, heavy, unadventurous cuisine.

andrew, i don't get why my argument is dull and one dimensional. in my opinion a DJ should be able to match beats, mix in key and select great tracks. Mayer only does one of those things well. I enjoy his mixes but i don't think he's a good DJ. Is that one dimensional?

Is it passe for a DJ to try to take the listener on a "journey"? I know it's a terrible cliche but most DJ's i know still mix with this in mind.

Hearing a DJ wreck a couple mixes will make me leave the club, no matter what his name is or what label he's representing.

So if Mayer had played the Fabric 13 set out and you were there, you would have left in disgust at the shoddy mixing?

when i saw mayer he played very uptempo electro and melodic techno - things like LFO's "freak".

sort of a different journey, though. another thing kompakt/mayer have become sort of renowned for is the way they reference other musics. i am pretty impressed w/ how he manages to constantly reference groups like japan and t rex and so on, but if i was off my head on acid at gatecrasher or something i might not be down for that sort of trainspotting.

i think if he played at gatecrasher, he would play a banging set. i have some live sets from mayer that are pretty relentless.

also, mike h, you can buy border community vinyl from the kompakt online store. they usually ship stuff fast.

This is an unnecessarily restrictive dichotomy though. When, in Sasha sets, it's hard to tell where a track begins and ends, it's usually because the tunes sound exactly the same! The fact that Fundacion manages to make a lot of disparate tracks sound identical to one another is for me quite maddening (and again I say this as someone who loves Northern Exposure 1 & 2, etc.). The idea of the choice being between barely-mixed "songs" and indistinguishable tracks seems to reflect a rather myopic view of dance music as being tech-house first and foremost.

I think 2-step garage provides a good example of the fact that a lot of mixed dance music runs quite counter to this: in 2-step you could always tell when a new track was coming in, there were no two ways about this no matter how good the DJ was. But this was actually one of the best things about it: those moments in between tracks, when you could hear two tracks jostling for attention, were frequently thrilling.

You can hear a different approach again on Herbert's Let's All Make Mistakes: mostly very fast transitions, and often between quite different tracks, but those transitions are seamless in the sense that the tracks fit together so perfectly. Even though you know a new track is coming in, it feels like the most natural thing in the world.

I think wrt Mayer, if you listen to something like Immer, it's not clear what could be added by a more Sasha-like approach: ironically, I always thought that the album had a Sasha-like feel in so far as the album feels a lot like a single piece, there's a really consistent mood to it that works against perceiving it as a collection of separate tracks (perhaps one break b/w Immer and Fabric13 is that there's still a slight "DJ tools" feel to parts of Immer, the "big moments" being held together with grooves content to "pass the time" claustrophobically).

Plus the notion Mayer can't beatmix or is trainwrecking mixes is just inaccurate and a total overstatement of the case by both Vahid and Biz.

I accept Vahid's point that Mayer is aiming for a different kind of listener, absolutely, with the mix CDs. I was going to say so myself, that his (and Superpitcher's) mix CDs are more like artist albums in themselves rather than mix CDs, but I don't see the problem with that. Also the time I saw Mayer he absolutely killed it, to an Optimo crowd in Glasgow, I've seldom seen such an atmosphere, at any clubnight, and I've seen all the DJs discussed on this thread so far pretty much.

I really think you overemphasise the distance between Mayer and co (or other people you don't like! sorry!) and superclub culture Vahid. I can't think of many DJs I'd rather take drugs and see at the moment than Mayer. You should see the fever of posts on the board of the main Saturday night club here anytime anyone mentions Mayer, everyone wants to see him play, out.

The more he plays out the bigger he gets, I have no doubt about that. He is absolutely not building his growing rep on mix CDs (cos you can't do that anyhow, to really break through you need to get a trusted reputation in big cities around the world, only the dance music types listen to the CDs etc)

Fezaffe otm also, there is waaaaaaaaaay overstatement of Mayer as crap DJ here, even people on his side are accepting it too readily, he doesn't fuck up transitions!

Yeah there's a certain level of brashness to electro-house tunes that would totally resist a subtle lead-in - one of the thrills with hearing this music (and it's not unique to electro-house obv) in the mix is how a big synth riff from the cued track will suddenly burst over the top of the currently playing track as if to shove it out of the way. This is another way of explaining the problem with Fundacion (Sasha gets rid of this feeling).

In my head I'm hearing the sudden and explosive arrival of the Ewan Pearson remix of "Perspex Sex" as I type this.

i am aware mayer has a pretty strong european following, but again, i think it is coming down to reading a crowd, the types of tunes they like to hear, etc. even when you read people who write rapturously about kompakt djs (i am thinking of geeta and phil s) they tend to talk mostly about track selection, the djs affectations and personalities, etc ... it seems to me to be a very different sort of fandom/appreciation than what goes on around prog/trance culture.

He is absolutely not building his growing rep on mix CDs

not sure about this one, ronan. really?

To me this means everything, it's what attracts me to Mayer. A seemless set is great, no doudt. But a narrative requires a different skill altogether. Connecting emotionally with the crowd or the person listening at home, happens by history, which I feel Mayer works on, Superpitcher as well. I just listened to Larry Levan's Live At The Paradise Garage 2discs on strut records, and the beat matching is far from perfect. Yet, I sense a similar goal with a lot of Mayer's sets with vocal heavy tracks, and the emotional undertow. I might be way off with this comparsion, but narrative does strike me as a common pursuit among them.

I do think there is a different appreciation going on with Mayer, sometimes, a popist appreciation. But that's because there is a pop persona and a pop side to everything Kompakt does, something which lots of dance fans will always rail against. That really bugs me too, I think the pop element is fun and brings a bit of fun to proceedings, if Mayer was a shit DJ and had this persona then fine but he's not. Also surely DJing is about affectations and that kind of thing? I just hate this anti-popism, or the assumption that because there is a popist side to a DJ he is therefore not technically good. it's so facile. it really smacks of the sort of attitudes which would actually send dance music further down an alley.

just because something is fashionable does not mean it "lacks substance" etc etc etc, and just because something is technically perfect does not mean it is by default unfashionable. And there's a world of middleground here too. that's what bugs me about this debate, I don't think it's as polarised as Mayer=good selector, shit DJ, Sasha=poor tunes, amazing DJ. The truth is so far from that.

As for Mayer's rep, I don't think any DJ actually can build a rep just on mix CDs, I don't think it's possible, plus Mayer plays alot harder out than on his CDs. I listened to a live mix on the way to college this morning and the mixing is great, sure he chops stuff in quickly but it's never out of time and it reminds me of seeing him, that fast jump between tracks which creates a sort of "panic" type of tempo, it's really really effective, also I noticed how clever he is in terms of where he brings stuff in and out, he knows all his tracks inside out, in tracks with overly long intros he'll mix it in so you're not waiting too long for the vocals etc, and every track just "feels" mixed out at the right time.

I really was blown away by him technically in Glasgow, I remember saying to the people I was with that it made me understand why so many of the same records he played didn't work when I played them, cos he's got that energetic mixing style going on.

Another thing which struck me is that Mayer basically seems to be mixing electrohouse music and tech-house more in the style of a techno DJ, which surely quite fits both his past and the actual nature of electrohouse, which I think has enough of a techno feel to it that you can't do long segues perhaps, as Tim suggests too.

I also generally find the extended mixing between tracks as mind-crushingly boring.. usually resulting in a homogenous, bland result - something like reconstituted food; the chicken-nugget of mixing, as opposed to a dish where disparate ingedients combine to produce interesting results.

I much prefer music to surprise, and to push forward, to not stay on the same plateau but to ebb and flow, to give my ears and body chances to push-forward or to relax for a while.

(I infer)

I too read the Dissensus thread and found it a bit laughable. Those guys must have fecal matter up to their shoulders with their heads shoved so far up their asses. Good music is good music no matter what the tempo/beat structure/production quality and all genre's have bright spots to go along with the low points. When Grime dies (or is it dead already) they'll be dry humping the next fad with the most street cred.

boooring. wait, before i say that, do i have to read the previous 100 posts? if so, nevermind.