hiya
re: the differing 'subtypes' of DJ identified in the first couple of pages - 'give them what they want' vs 'give them what they need'
i think sometimes those two positions can be brought a bit closer to each other. it's great when people are open to the unfamiliar as part of a communal experience, with that attitude built into the kind of feedback loop luka talked about. DJing/clubs create that dynamic in a more approachable, populist way than live music can generally. and in electronic music when it's presented in more of a live music format and becomes about an audience going to see a big act play their big tune i become less interested, that band-style 'DJ show' thing.
luka said:
"Another thing to think about is to what degree is our individual experience (I hate the word subjectivity) communicable, shareable?
How is this shared? (If it is shared)"
i think in a rave setting you need a section of the crowd with some pre-existing relationship to the DJ and some sort of shared musical framework. given the right conditions then the section of the crowd who come in without any frame of reference can tap into it as well. the club resident thing was probably good at producing this kind of situation back in the day. a group of friends at a small party hearing one of their mates play can also be brilliant obviously but there's something special about being in a bigger crowd of mostly strangers who are all locked into something.
i still cling on to radio because it helps build relationships with listeners and producers/other DJs. focusing on new music and working with people who are active now also seems like a better way of encouraging a positive dynamic than a 'DJ as historian/collector/expert' approach.
good sound is important. on a shit rig people will lean on the anthems and familiar classics, and get a response through evoking good memories/nostalgia. unfamiliar music on a good system can produce instinctive collective responses that i think can be more powerful.
shitty experiences with security can get in the way of all this, aggressive people in the crowd, all the usual stuff.. a lot of the usual london stuff can make it difficult.
definitely think simon is right that big stages and the performative 'rock show' DJ experience is incompatible with the 'mystical feedback loop'. you could argue that at some of those really big shows, there's more of a connection between the crowd and the production designers/lighting engineers. people can have amazing experiences in those environments but the role of the DJ is more about soundtracking the spectacle, it's less possible to really interact with it. there are exceptions but mostly it's all been designed in advance. most extreme version of this is those crazy EDM shows where big sections of the headliners sets have to be pre-recorded so that they can be synced to visual cues, lights, pyrotechnics, flashing lyrics on big screens during choruses..
droid said:
[production and DJing are] a different set of skills
maybe they require slightly different mentalities too. DJing can be zoomed in or out - drawing connections between things or focusing in on particular details - but it's necessarily outward looking in a way that production isn't.
it's the social and performative aspect of DJing that results in the DJ as icon thing, and that dynamic existed in 1993 as well, whether the music had been fully streamlined for DJing with or not. personally i think all those 'mistakes' in early rave tapes will have had as much to do with the setups - poor or non-existant monitoring, giant rigs dumped in untreated, boomy spaces etc. things just hadn't become as professionalised.
