On Djing...

the dj who bridged me to the gig last night, sweet kid, was adamant to me about how 'tech house' was bad and over and that he's really into 'deep tech' whatever tf that is

This fellow needs reminding, genres are for police informants

saer otm, as usual

haha, great posts everyone :)

Amazingly I got a gig here - some kids are starting a club night and they know my music, and hit me up out of nowhere when they found out I lived here. Never thought that would actually happen. I'm fully prepared for no one to be there, but glad to be asked and that that won't my responsibility. :) Looking forward to getting a set together.

― change display name (Jordan), Sunday, October 17, 2021 8:03 PM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is really cool! way to go.

and karl otm. that moment where everything melts away into collective ecstasy.

I've been playing out almost once a week recently which is fantastic, although I'm starting to worry I can't rely on the same group of friends to keep coming to my gigs.

I played after an Afrobeat band a couple of weeks ago.

Then it was my first time putting on an actual paid night of dancing with my Terrain group, and that was basically the best night of my life as I got to close the night going back to back with another DJ and we just played nothing but "global bangers" as we put it. I did get pulled up in a half jokey way by a mate afterwards for slipping in a BLACKPINK track in among the harder afro and Latin riddims we were playing, but, (in his words) "you did it with guts and conviction". So maybe that's the key, map, when it comes to playing stuff outside the perceived genre lines: just fucking play it and if people don't like it, act like they are?? I dunno. I'm still getting used to this myself.

Oh and then down the pub the other day I did a nice straight up house and techno bobbins set and that was so much fun. As usual people only really started dancing half an hour before closing time but still... Oh yeah and these two students who had more or less been dancing for quite a while came up towards the end of my 4hr four-in-the-floor dance set and requested Smash Mouth. I never know what to say to those kinds of people really...

In other news, I figured I'd occasionally like to bring a few records out to play as opposed to digital decks so I've just invested in some Ortofon Concorde needles. Bloody hell, so expensive! I really hope I can justify these as it'll take about three pub gigs to pay for them

the genre restriction thing is so weird to me - I started clubbing when the 2ManyDJs style of wilful eclecticism was a big deal, and in Glasgow we've always had the Optimo/Numbers axes of DJing where the approach seems so omnivorous and unrestricted.

I think it just comes down to there being a much larger audience for dance music in the UK and Europe vs a place like SLC. Even here in Austin, which has a large music scene, it's oriented much more around live music than dance stuff.

the genre restriction thing is so weird to me

i dont see how its weird? like theres room for a plurality of approaches to playing records ... some of the most life affirming dancing experiences ive ever had were just like several hours of house music with only slight variations in groove and hi-hat patterns and chordal flourishes ... no shade to people here but i think a more heterogenous approach is a lot harder to pull of well than people think, like there's a difference between having the ability to draw from different genres and styles and reveal emergent connections between seemingly disparate records versus just throwing random shit at the dancefloor and hoping something sticks (yeah i realise this is a bit of an extreme binary but i suck at expressing myself; also just to reiterate again i dont mean this as criticism of anyone posting here because youre all great!)

sorry if that came off as combative

Eclecticism is for agent provocateurs. They try that when the police informants have drawn a blank.

Its the good cop bad cop routine don't fall for it lads

I mean more the idea of a crowd being so "against" hearing something outside narrowly defined parameters. I can't imagine being aghast at going out to hear one type of dance music and the DJ playing something from "outside" it if it made sense.

(I mean, obviously if I went to Berghain and someone was playing EDM remixes of chart pop I'd be disappointed)

oops sorry, guess i wasnt following the convo well enough. im an idiot, time to stop posting

don't be silly!

Will admit that a lot of my impressions about this are based far more on the mixes I come across online vs real life experience, although I strongly suspect there isn't a very diverse scene around here just waiting to be unearthed.

I like most approaches to deejaying, but I think that during my more active clubbing days, I usually went "for" specific genres, and would be turned off by those who strayed. I remember when I used to promote and occasionally spin for an industrial/goth/post-punk night, and while I would sometimes get a little "tech-y" or whatever, one of the other people who would spin occasionally did sets that consisted of mostly Eurodance hits of the early 90s, and i would just be fucking apoplectic at him. You have a crowd full of people who came to cruise and dance to Front 242 and Ministry and shit, please don't play "Big Fun" right now.

That said, because San Francisco is San Francisco, I also saw Optimo and crew DJ a pretty substantial number of times, and I loved every moment of it.

“meaningful eclecticism” is totally cool but “look all at me hop styles, do u see what I did there” and shit like erland oye’s dj kicks usually fucking sucks

omg i have always dreamed about playing slow moody industrial/tech/ebm at a bathhouse or private party tbqfh.

i feel like genre hopping is a very advanced skill i'm still working on? a little bit goes a long way. you've got to know your music. some jumps work very well, some not so much. underground to pop is real tricky imo. it seems kind of imperative that your crowd trusts you at least a little bit.

coincidentally i just played some optimo stuff on saturday! the severed heads dub they did sounded incredible on a big system.

my genre hopping for that set was, like, patrick cowley, a hip house track from ben cenac, the severed heads dub, some wild tech / ebm, some dark disco with hard trance flavors, and then an analog nu disco stormer. we'll see if that ended my association with this venue haha! n.b. they're getting sold for more condos next year anyway.

yeah, I'm not trying to do some crazy Naked City-style mash up of genres. My approach is more like starting off with some mid-tempo, melodic House tracks and gradually ramping up over the course of a couple hours to harder, darker, faster tech stuff, as opposed to, say, playing 100 different hard acid tracks all at 140 BPM.

I think you could totally slip "Big Fun" into a postpunk style set, but yeah you'd have to earn it, maybe put it in about three quarters of the way through when everyone's comfortable with what's going down, maybe play it after a more consolidated banger like Blue Monday or something, and then make sure you get back on piste after

I ran my own new wave / post punk night in a pub a while back and I know for certain that once you start digging out the synth pop bangers it's really hard to come back from them.
Once "Don't You Want Me" comes out and all the people who had turned up but not necessarily to hear Medium Medium start dancing and singing along, you're screwed

I wanna go to one of map's nights

Anyone a member of any DJ pools / MP3 pools? I'm not and never have been but I'm considering it. Not even sure how you go about it. Is it worth it?

I know it's not true, but I really want to believe we are talking about slipping all 4 sides of Miles Davis - Big Fun in the middle of an industrial set because that would be amazing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzS7zVNgWrg

I ran my own new wave / post punk night in a pub a while back and I know for certain that once you start digging out the synth pop bangers it's really hard to come back from them.
Once "Don't You Want Me" comes out and all the people who had turned up but not necessarily to hear Medium Medium start dancing and singing along, you're screwed

― Urbandn hope all ye who enter here (dog latin), Tuesday, 19 October 2021 00:47 (twelve hours ago) link

lollll

I wanna go to one of map's nights

― Urbandn hope all ye who enter here (dog latin), Tuesday, 19 October 2021 00:48 (twelve hours ago) link

hey thanks! likewise, your sets always sound like a ton of fun.

re: dj pools, i used to be a member of one, i think it was dj city (i remember the red and white interface but not the name), back when i was trying to hack it in a gay bar on saturday nights. it's worth it if you're playing a fair amount from contemporary top 40 or one or two neighborhoods away (i.e. edm or reggaeton). i remember seeing a couple of surprises on the weekly lists though. they have a lot of music. i also used to be more doctrinaire about lossless vs mp3s, but i don't know, all that stuff is produced to sound just fine as an aac or 320 mp3 afaict.

i think most of the pools let you look at what they're putting out before you try them.

this "don't you want me" / "big fun" discussion is giving me serious flashbacks. i can still picture exactly who sang along to 'a little respect' every. fucking. sunday. lmao

my boyfriend at the time (the dj) used to cane "strike it up." he liked anything that had what sounded like drill sergeants in them. went apeshit over purple disco machine - "body funk". his business was making fascist sounding fitness music so it makes sense.

haha, love this

if I'm being real honest, eclecticism to me means mixing in some hard house tracks into my techno set that sound like they were recorded by the d-bags from Jersey Shore

like a good portion of my rave experiences involved sharing space with 'roided up assholes from shitty New England suburbs, and I think some aspect of that is permanently imprinted in my musical taste

I think the reason I mention "Big Fun" in particular is that obviously I love the track, but it really didn't fit with the vibe of the night or the crowd. That club was one of the last times I got the whole party on the floor around midnight with this absolutely exquisite remix

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdt8xCenLko

well that and the enormous queer warehouse party where i fucked up my triggers and ended up playing the Treasure Fingers remix of Fergie's "Glamorous" twice, but the crowd went mental when it started over again so I just let it do its thing.

truly miss deejaying.

oh man, that depeche mode remix is ungh

good ungh or bad ungh

it makes a certain type of crowd go ape, but it's also pretty lol in a lot of way.

good ungh, sorry!

i need a little lol or ridiculousness in my dance music to get me smiling you know?

yeah, that's what i thought. i love it, but i have a sort of embarrassing love for Stephan Bodzin. weird bald baby-man making very trancey tech-house.

what's the song? it's showing as unavailable

oof. it's the Bodzin/Huntemann remix of "Everything Counts"

Sounds sick

My dj gig was canceled because 'the club double-booked', oh well. At least I have a fun set ready to go for next time, or if I need to do a radio mix.

I know it's not true, but I really want to believe we are talking about slipping all 4 sides of Miles Davis - Big Fun in the middle of an industrial set because that would be amazing
― Mr. Cacciatore (Moodles), Tuesday, 19 October 2021

not miles davis but Peter brotzmann and 20 different djs playing at once, mixed signals, 4 AM pirate radio signals blending into each other. Requires a dj set to be chopped up into 20 different pieces then sloppily mixed in and out of each other, but it's fun, maximum hooligan plunderphonics. https://soundcloud.com/confccrew/tusk-mix

like a good portion of my rave experiences involved sharing space with 'roided up assholes from shitty New England suburbs, and I think some aspect of that is permanently imprinted in my musical taste
― Mr. Cacciatore (Moodles), Tuesday, 19 October 2021

of course. Dance music without arseholes is just cultural kitsch, instead of deferring to the state orator (der mussolini) it's the freedom to keep banging away, away, and away at the same mediocrity for 30 years, please allow me to pretend I think, sir.

DJ update:

- Yesterday I hired a studio just so I could use their CDJs and get to grips with getting my tracks on a USB in some usable order. It took an hour to wrap my head around the latter, and then an hour of mixing. It's all quite different from the Serato controller I use at home. It was well worth it though and now my anxiety about using club CDJs is calmed.

- Been asked to do an hour long guest mix for a local digital station which is great cos I had a mix of ravey bangers I wanted to make anyway. I'm trying to get better at mixing to different tempos rather than just blithely going up the BPM column as I'm wont to do. It means I have to be a lot more dextrous and creative about what I do each time. Had a go at the mix yesterday and it's actually pretty good but I'm gonna have another crack at it today

I like the idea of testing out the CDJs. Were they Pioneer? What were some things you figured out about them?

I'm trying to get better at mixing to different tempos rather than just blithely going up the BPM column as I'm wont to do.

I'm curious about what you mean by this

i have literally never mixed on CDJs 😮