No Club Scene for Old Men
- Thread starter Corpsey
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- a cowshed in the pennines a fedora and football scarf acid croaking rainforest baggy bumhole due to heroin crystallized diarrhea his outfit screams optimism loose flappy bumhole marquee flapping matching hawaiian shirt and shorts combination rui da silva shag a stranger in a tent socially distanced outdoor sit-down brunches swaying about a bit with a pint the parisian fun police trench-foot you expecting good weather mate?
just to point out again - I've seen the RX-2 used as the sole piece of gear at a venue in Seattle that was at full capacity with the paying attendees, and by the headlining DJ that was paid to fly out there from Chicago - someone that Helena Hauff tried to book for a European festival before covid shut everything down
No, of course not. But i have cdjs and i use them standing up, whereas my computer is at a desk.
It's easy to use controllers, you can't deny their worth, but an RX is about 900 quid (a grand?) and you can get cdjs and a decent mixer for less in terms of just using them. I have used this RX you're on about, or a variant of, but i the lack of seperate screens isn't as intuitive if you are mixing on the fly, and wish to work more than one track ahead.
From a no clubs for old man perspective I just dont see the point in buying something for double the price, then carrying it around to gigs with you, rather than just carrying two usbs (or one if they're linked) and a pair of headphones. If you're playing low cap venues then turning up with a giant controller just makes other people's lives difficult, as well.
Of course the worst discussion in the world is what's better- djing digital vs analogue, so i am glad to have got involved
yeah but the good thing about a controller (you don't even need to get an rx2, a second hand traktor s4 will do the trick) is that it's modular. cdjs are just the comfort food of djing, they really should be seen as cheating much more than laptop/sync button, but people think an old technics 1200 is still the goldstandard even though things do start to drift out of the mix because of the platters, and uncalibrated pitch, as happens with all vinyl mixing.
Oh, I wasn't meaning to suggest they carry it to gigs, necessarily. It was more of a suggestion of something they could buy that would serve at least a dual purpose: It's something they could use to practice that is close to club standard, and something they could use in other situations if they wanted to throw their own parties, and it's something that could still be used with a laptop if they wanted to use additional programs.
Another thing that's nice is the ability to record sets off of one of the USB slots, while playing off the other USB and/or the additional gear plugged into the mixer like turntables or whatever else.
It's also what I use these days to record vinyl and tapes.
you shouldn't even be looking at the screen for djing, all your buttons should be mapped to perform precise actions. another disadvantage of cdjs. so you looking at the screen of the rx is a bad habit and cheating. You can even automate the lengths of rewinds and scratch banks with a controller, which iirc you can't do with cdjs. another good thing is a jog wheel can be good for vinyl mode and beat juggling/scratching, rather than having to buy a cd unit which supports vinyl mode (400s don't iirc.)
don't blame your personal failures on the tech, every dj does this and its infuriating. luddites.
don't blame your personal failures on the tech, every dj does this and its infuriating. luddites.
another terrible thing about cdjs is that anyone can pull out the usb and then it can go into emergency loop mode. no problem like that with laptop.If it fails, just like turntables, it fails. you consciously adapt for that risk by keeping your laptop in tip top condition. who knows what kind of sticky filth gets spilled in club and house party djing areas?
i don't even have a controller anymore! just use the qwerty keyboard as a substitute midi interface. doesn't allow me to scratch but hey small price to pay for essentially not having to pay for any dj gear.
(although I can pre-automate scratch patterns, like I did in that mix) so it's not all bad. Always plan, never practice!
it's not supposed to be fun! you're supposed to be in the middle of an acid trip thinking about getting the next track in without even prelistening. Do you think Jeff Mills has fun whilst djing? of course not!
That does sound good to be fair
dilbert1
Well-known member
I’d take my current Numark controller over buying additional tech from 2007 @wild greens (cdj 400) but glad this generated some discussion
dilbert1
Well-known member
What if you get off on the danger? Some like to have it leaning over, could tip and fall at any moment!
Murphy
cat malogen
those booths, always taking the filth..
dilbert1
Well-known member
@thirdform and @version will get a particular kick, but come one and come all, and hear ye the good word!
Sermon to the ravers
Enough convulsing!
It's almost noon, and the high tide of chemical drunkenness is slowly starting to roll back. In ebbing it has given greater acuity to our perception of the dryness of things. All this sonic commotion, with everyone's nerves crashing against one another; all this streaming of electronic lightning bolts, cracking through time and streaking across space; all the colossal amounts of calories burned off by our bodies shaking - all this has returned to nothingness now that the sun is shining and the implacable, calm, triumphant prose of the world besieges you once more. All this agitation is incapable of holding it off for more than one day, and its only function is to cover up for a few hours the immeasurable extent of our aphasia, our unfitness for community. One more time we come out of it all alone, forlorn, and with our clothes reduced to rags by the pandemonium on parade. But above all, we come out of it deaf. Because every time a little more of our ability to hear is gone, and that’s just fine for those who don't want to hear anything. The cataclysm of decibels, like all the recourse to drugs, just serves to erode, numb, and methodically devastate all your organs of perception, peeling away all the flesh of your sensitivity layer by layer, as you inure yourselves like Mithridates to a world made of poisons. Moreover, it's urgent that you be inured to it when it comes to sound, since, as De Sade once said: "the sensations communicated by the sense of hearing are the most vivid." And so, hardly even past the age of adolescence, some of us will already be stricken by tinnitus, that acute buzzing in the ear produced by the ear itself, which makes a person forever incapable of hearing silence, even in the most distant solitary places. And thus, they will have lost the most physical of their metaphysical faculties: that of perceiving nothingness, and consequently their own nothingness. Beyond that point, the flow of time is but a more or less rapid process of inner petrification into hardheartedness, fatigue, and death. And so we come to enjoy the growing violence that is needed to affect us emotionally even a little, and in this sense we are absolutely modern, because "modern man has obtuse senses; he is subject to perpetual trepidation; he needs brutal excitements, strident sounds, hellish drinks, and short, bestial emotions" (Valery). So we see how these nights are the mirror image of the suicidal resignation of our days: the rave is the most imposing form of our leisurely self-punishment, where each of us commune with each other in the jubilatory self-destruction of all. As you can see now, this is a call to desertion.
All the tragic truth of the raver comes down to this: what he's looking for he doesn't find, and what he finds is not what he's looking for. And thus he has to coat his brain with ever more fantastic illusions, so that he can remain totally unaware of the abyss that separates what is from what he thinks is. And in the last resort, he drugs himself so as not to die of truth.
What the raver is after, in the first place, is a certain romanticism of illegality, a certain adventure in marginality. In fact, he's entered into a desperate quest after a real exteriority to the total organization of society, an existing place where its laws would be suspended, a space where he could at last abandon himself to what he thinks is his "freedom." But in the same way as it’s this society that commands the necessity of the phantom of revolt against it, this society dispenses, authorizes, and organizes its own exteriority, too. The Law also decrees where and when the Law will be suspended. The interruption of the program is itself part of the program. These free parties, which aren't really free in any sense of the word, are tolerated, in a gracious gesture, by the City Administration, when it's not the cops themselves that distribute the access maps, or, more pleasantly, save the facilities from being overtaken by mudslides, as happened recently at pH4. And so nothing, in this illusory space of freedom, escapes domination, which, undeniably, has attained a remarkable level of sophistication. But this lapse of judgment on the part of the raver would be but a comical irrationality were the reality is exactly the opposite of what he thinks it to be, in its principles and - almost imperceptibly - at its very heart. Because the raver is today the most precise metaphor that this society has come up with for itself. In both the one and the other, there are just these crowds of puppets shaking themselves to exhaustion in a sterile chaos, responding mechanically to audio commands given by a handful of invisible technophile operators, who they think are there at their service, and who create nothing, in both the one and the other, what we have is an absolute equality of social atoms to which nothing organic aggregates besides the unreal and booming cacophony of the world, obtained by the submission of the masses to the program; and in both, finally, we see the commodity and its hallucinatory universe centrally guaranteeing that people will tolerate the generalized drying out of emotionality, because all commodities are drugs. If, in spite of the obvious, the raver clings so dementedly to his blindness, it's only because he must at all costs maintain his illusions about the resolute hostility of Power and the furious energy of police repression. Otherwise he'd be forced to open his eyes to the frightening novelty of the most recent forms of domination, which no longer rest in a palpable "outside," simultaneously close by and far away - not in the authoritarian figure of a tyrannical master - but rather in the heart of all the social codes, even the very words we use, and carried in each of our gestures and in each of our thoughts. However, if he would for just a moment let go of his chimeras, he would have to recognize the revolutionary essence of his quest. Because this society's only authentic exteriority is political conspiracy undertaken collectively, aiming to overturn and transfigure the totality of the social world and move it towards a real, substantial freedom. And that's precisely what domination, which surrounds us so regularly with plain clothes cops, has now confusedly grasped.
...
Sermon to the ravers
Enough convulsing!
It's almost noon, and the high tide of chemical drunkenness is slowly starting to roll back. In ebbing it has given greater acuity to our perception of the dryness of things. All this sonic commotion, with everyone's nerves crashing against one another; all this streaming of electronic lightning bolts, cracking through time and streaking across space; all the colossal amounts of calories burned off by our bodies shaking - all this has returned to nothingness now that the sun is shining and the implacable, calm, triumphant prose of the world besieges you once more. All this agitation is incapable of holding it off for more than one day, and its only function is to cover up for a few hours the immeasurable extent of our aphasia, our unfitness for community. One more time we come out of it all alone, forlorn, and with our clothes reduced to rags by the pandemonium on parade. But above all, we come out of it deaf. Because every time a little more of our ability to hear is gone, and that’s just fine for those who don't want to hear anything. The cataclysm of decibels, like all the recourse to drugs, just serves to erode, numb, and methodically devastate all your organs of perception, peeling away all the flesh of your sensitivity layer by layer, as you inure yourselves like Mithridates to a world made of poisons. Moreover, it's urgent that you be inured to it when it comes to sound, since, as De Sade once said: "the sensations communicated by the sense of hearing are the most vivid." And so, hardly even past the age of adolescence, some of us will already be stricken by tinnitus, that acute buzzing in the ear produced by the ear itself, which makes a person forever incapable of hearing silence, even in the most distant solitary places. And thus, they will have lost the most physical of their metaphysical faculties: that of perceiving nothingness, and consequently their own nothingness. Beyond that point, the flow of time is but a more or less rapid process of inner petrification into hardheartedness, fatigue, and death. And so we come to enjoy the growing violence that is needed to affect us emotionally even a little, and in this sense we are absolutely modern, because "modern man has obtuse senses; he is subject to perpetual trepidation; he needs brutal excitements, strident sounds, hellish drinks, and short, bestial emotions" (Valery). So we see how these nights are the mirror image of the suicidal resignation of our days: the rave is the most imposing form of our leisurely self-punishment, where each of us commune with each other in the jubilatory self-destruction of all. As you can see now, this is a call to desertion.
All the tragic truth of the raver comes down to this: what he's looking for he doesn't find, and what he finds is not what he's looking for. And thus he has to coat his brain with ever more fantastic illusions, so that he can remain totally unaware of the abyss that separates what is from what he thinks is. And in the last resort, he drugs himself so as not to die of truth.
What the raver is after, in the first place, is a certain romanticism of illegality, a certain adventure in marginality. In fact, he's entered into a desperate quest after a real exteriority to the total organization of society, an existing place where its laws would be suspended, a space where he could at last abandon himself to what he thinks is his "freedom." But in the same way as it’s this society that commands the necessity of the phantom of revolt against it, this society dispenses, authorizes, and organizes its own exteriority, too. The Law also decrees where and when the Law will be suspended. The interruption of the program is itself part of the program. These free parties, which aren't really free in any sense of the word, are tolerated, in a gracious gesture, by the City Administration, when it's not the cops themselves that distribute the access maps, or, more pleasantly, save the facilities from being overtaken by mudslides, as happened recently at pH4. And so nothing, in this illusory space of freedom, escapes domination, which, undeniably, has attained a remarkable level of sophistication. But this lapse of judgment on the part of the raver would be but a comical irrationality were the reality is exactly the opposite of what he thinks it to be, in its principles and - almost imperceptibly - at its very heart. Because the raver is today the most precise metaphor that this society has come up with for itself. In both the one and the other, there are just these crowds of puppets shaking themselves to exhaustion in a sterile chaos, responding mechanically to audio commands given by a handful of invisible technophile operators, who they think are there at their service, and who create nothing, in both the one and the other, what we have is an absolute equality of social atoms to which nothing organic aggregates besides the unreal and booming cacophony of the world, obtained by the submission of the masses to the program; and in both, finally, we see the commodity and its hallucinatory universe centrally guaranteeing that people will tolerate the generalized drying out of emotionality, because all commodities are drugs. If, in spite of the obvious, the raver clings so dementedly to his blindness, it's only because he must at all costs maintain his illusions about the resolute hostility of Power and the furious energy of police repression. Otherwise he'd be forced to open his eyes to the frightening novelty of the most recent forms of domination, which no longer rest in a palpable "outside," simultaneously close by and far away - not in the authoritarian figure of a tyrannical master - but rather in the heart of all the social codes, even the very words we use, and carried in each of our gestures and in each of our thoughts. However, if he would for just a moment let go of his chimeras, he would have to recognize the revolutionary essence of his quest. Because this society's only authentic exteriority is political conspiracy undertaken collectively, aiming to overturn and transfigure the totality of the social world and move it towards a real, substantial freedom. And that's precisely what domination, which surrounds us so regularly with plain clothes cops, has now confusedly grasped.
...