playing smaller venues

[zhao]

The general gist seemed to be that you'll have more fun and be more successful if you keep bar sets spontaneous.

i'm all for spontaneity: the set that i have built for these occasions is big and varied enough (to understate it a bit) that, trust me, there is plenty of spontaneity.

but at the same time i'm approaching this with an agenda: to delight AND challenge simultaneously, and decidedly NOT going anywhere near lowest common denominators.

you started this thread with the intention of receiving some advice along those lines.

mostly i wanted to see what people come up with that they think fits this agenda. what sort of music can work with a general audience, as well as "satisfy the dj's own sense of adventure"

Instead it all went peculiar and you got defensive whenever someone suggested an approach that didn't fit in with what you'd already decided to do.

that's not what happened. people said my approach and selection would not work. and i wanted to make the point that it DOES work. and the point when it got a bit peculiar was when i thought one of the nuum tracks someone posted was terrible, and pointed it out, albeit in a rather harsh, almost fascist fashion (hey i was hung over ), and a bunch of nuum nerds got defensive about early hardcore being the greatest music of all time.

I suggested you don't bother planning it because to be honest, if you don't, people will still dance.

what do you mean by "don't bother planning"? are you taking your ENTIRE music collection down to the pub every time? like i said early on, there is always some kind of planning isn't there.

and no, in a lot of places you see djs wiping sweat from forehead playing dance music to a room full of people either sitting down or talking in groups with their backs turned to him, no one even nodding their heads. i don't know about you but i see this all the time.

to suggest you can only play a genre if it can be skillfully contextualised into your set is a touch pretentious don't you think?

how is that "pretentious". if i want to play Neu! - Hallo Gallo i'm not going to just bang people over the head with it out of the blue. i'm going to play some uptempo boisterous energetic shit before, so that not only the rhythm carries through when Hallo Gallo does drop, but the monotony will be a welcome relief from all the hollering that came before. in fact a track like that can ONLY work within a proper context.

a part of what i'm trying to do is *get away with* as much crazy shit as possible, and have people actually enjoy it, people who would otherwise throw bottles or walk out.

 

[swears]

Me and my mate laptop-DJ'ed at his younger sister's birthday party a while back, we didn't really have anything all her indie-ish friends wanted, so we just put the corny Topshop internet radio stream on as a joke, but they were well into it, haha.

I guess Spotify could be useful for this sort of thing if you had an account without all the ads.

Robin S - Show me love, for all time handbag orbit action

Every bar in Liverpool is legally required to play this at least eight times a night, I still love it though.

 

[hint]

i'm all for spontaneity: the set that i have built for these occasions is big and varied enough (to understate it a bit) that, trust me, there is plenty of spontaneity.

but at the same time i'm approaching this with an agenda: to delight AND challenge simultaneously, and decidedly NOT going anywhere near lowest common denominators.

This is 101 stuff though. I think perhaps you've misunderstood if you believe that most posters in this thread "don't get it". I'm also not sure that anyone flat out said your approach would not work. It was more your reasoning (the idea that German crowds should "know their history", for example) that seemed a little out of touch with the reality of playing a bar gig to a casual walk-in crowd.

I'd be interested to know what you consider "lowest common denominator" though. You've listed stuff in this thread that I would personally consider fish-in-a-barrell tracks and wouldn't play. Similarly I know that you would hate a lot of stuff I would play in a similar environment. That's what DJing is all about, after all.

Just because no-one in the room knows a track, artist or genre by name, doesn't mean it's challenging. Your reaction to the Hardcore posted would perhaps indicate that such records would be much more challenging than anything you played.

Once upon a time, I played "I Can't Go For That" by Hall & Oates in a bar. 2 different people in their early 20s came up and asked what it was. So what is the "lowest common denominator"? ABBA? Are Hall & Oates challenging?

 

[droid]

Once upon a time, I played "I Can't Go For That" by Hall & Oates in a bar. 2 different people in their early 20s came up and asked what it was. So what is the "lowest common denominator"? ABBA? Are Hall & Oates challenging?

Ha.. I was thinking something similar. There's no such thing as a 'universal' for bar music., there's just too many variables. In Europe the only thing that would come close is chart music, Abba, The Jacksons etc...

In my experience, classic dance music, hip hop, ardcore, reggae, R+B/funk all work in bars, but most of the bars Ive played in have been side rooms of bigger gigs. In general though, your need to go for anthemic type stuff with strong rhythm or melody - 'deep' tunes tend not to work so well due to lower volume, shitter soundsystems, chatting crowds, excessive drunkeness...

BTW - if you're playing in a venue that has a space for more than a handful of people to dance in, then you're not really playing in a 'bar' as I understand the term...

 

[IdleRich]

"In general though, your need to go for anthemic type stuff with strong rhythm or melody - 'deep' tunes tend not to work so well due to lower volume, shitter soundsystems, chatting crowds, excessive drunkeness..."

Yeah totally agree with this. Pretty much whenever I dj it's in somewhere with a shite soundsystem and I've reluctantly realised that some of the records I would otherwise choose to play just won't work because the intricacies and subtleties are lost. Same goes for quiet records (I mean ones that just aren't pressed as loud).

 

[BareBones]

Robin S - Show me love, for all time handbag orbit action

yeah, classic
i downloaded this mashup that has the music of show me love with a vybz cartel vocal over the top, it's kinda stupid but really awesome at the same time. haven't had the chance to see how it goes down in a party atmosphere though.

Me and my mate laptop-DJ'ed at his younger sister's birthday party a while back, we didn't really have anything all her indie-ish friends wanted, so we just put the corny Topshop internet radio stream on as a joke, but they were well into it, haha.

lol, brilliant

 

[zhao]

In general though, your need to go for anthemic type stuff with strong rhythm or melody - 'deep' tunes tend not to work so well due to lower volume, shitter soundsystems, chatting crowds, excessive drunkeness...

yes. and as someone else said earlier, with strong midrange. everything in this set is like this, whatever genre.

BTW - if you're playing in a venue that has a space for more than a handful of people to dance in, then you're not really playing in a 'bar' as I understand the term....

well... some girls are bigger than others...

know what i'm just going to record one of my bar sets and post it up for critique...

 

[zhao]

It was more your reasoning (the idea that German crowds should "know their history", for example) that seemed a little out of touch with the reality of playing a bar gig to a casual walk-in crowd.

oh come now. that was a joke. and it's true that most Germans i've talked to don't know the music of Faust or Can.

So what is the "lowest common denominator"?

eye of the tiger, Grease soundtrack, More Bounce to the Ounce. etc.

 

[Sick Boy]

eye of the tiger, Grease soundtrack.

When was the last time you went to a bar? Have you ever been to a bar? Are you an alien?

 

[zhao]

When was the last time you went to a bar? Have you ever been to a bar? Are you an alien?

haha i guess i haven't heard those out recently. but also just most top 40 stuff would be "lowest common denominator" to me.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

and the point when it got a bit peculiar was when i thought one of the nuum tracks someone posted was terrible, and pointed it out, albeit in a rather harsh, almost fascist fashion (hey i was hung over ), and a bunch of nuum nerds got defensive about early hardcore being the greatest music of all time.

oh come off it off Zhao for crissakes. this is not at all what happened. no one said that early hardcore was the greatest music ever. what happened was you said a tune was crap (which is fine) that I should stick with my adolescent rave business & teenagers on bad speed (which is high-handed bollocks, but fine) & that you were beyond all that b/c of your true understanding of FUNK & GROOVE & CELEBRATION & so on (that part I see you've deleted, no doubt aware of how ridiculous it sounded), which was irritating but also rather hilarious in that it was so over the top. then you got into some vaguery about "universal" music, as defined by you of course, and started calling the rest of us myopic & small-minded.

this is very much not about anyone defending early hardcore. it is about your repeated assertions that you, unlike the rest of us poor deluded souls, are the only one to have seen the light; so that we can't possibly be questioning you based on the merit, or lack thereof, of your ideas - oh no, it has to be that we're all a bunch of "nuum nerds" who just can't handle the awesome power of your sweeping musical vision. what the f**k ever.

it all reminds me of the time you said that anyone who didn't agree with your theories on African music had to be a closet racist:

(hidden somewhere in this dismissal is "from people that live in mud huts!?")

right. of course it's not cause you post absurd nonsense & then get all huffy about it when people call "a spade a spade" to use your term. it's cause everyone else is a bigot.

This is 101 stuff though. I think perhaps you've misunderstood if you believe that most posters in this thread "don't get it"...
Your reaction to the Hardcore posted would perhaps indicate that such records would be much more challenging than anything you played.

the former I agree with wholeheartedly - everyone "gets it" - tho obv it's a convenient argument to say that the reason people challenge you is cos they don't. the latter I wouldn't say I agree with either way but I do find it quite amusing.

I think your approach with its desperate eclecticism rather epitomizes "tasteful". which it to me is definitely not a compliment tho of course it would be to many other people. either way - I hope it goes w/o saying - I of course wish you nothing but success w/your DJ-ing etc whether or not I agree w/anything you say.

 

[hint]

oh come now. that was a joke. and it's true that most Germans i've talked to don't know the music of Faust or Can..

OK... my mistake. Sorry. Can be hard to tell sometimes.

 

[zhao]

padraig: i haven't deleted anything. and what you see as condescension comes from a bit of exasperation that a thread looking for ways to make magic happen on common ground elicits pages of Hardcore Continuum posts. i mean really, early rave gets discussed in almost every other thread, and i couldn't help but

droid: surely there is no "universal" bar music. but there are some more commonly accepted and some less. so it's all about degrees of accessibility for a general audience. and i'm after music that is widely accepted, and at the same time out of the ordinary.

JB is more commonly accepted, and Merzbow, less. the former would work in most bars around the world, and the later, very, very few. does anyone disagree?

perhaps terms like "universality" and "lowest common denominator" are too loaded, and i should instead say "more" or "less" accessible, and "banality"...

 

[Tentative Andy]

Keep forgetting to mention this - Last Friday I was in a pub that I hadn't frequented for a while, and there was a DJ up the back spinning what with my not-fully-trained ears I would describe as Afro-funk. So not sure if that means Mr Zhao 'wins' or not, but it did make me think of him + this thread.

 

[zhao]

need more african disco re-edits...

 

[zhao]

stream and single file download: fairtilizer.
separate tracks version download: mediafire, megaupload, rapidshare

 

[Lichen]

ColOmbia

 

[zhao]

oh shit. thanks lichen!

 

[Damien]

I find stadium rock classics go down well in the bars around my area, which suits me fine because obvious stadium rock songs are my forte

Non-obscure selections are the new obscure selections

 

[bobbin]

bloody hell zhao, you really are an alien aren't you

where i come from (not london though admittedly SE england) there is a very simple answer to the question, which is: hardcore and uk garage.

i am merely here with the information that on our planet, everybody (except the renegade, peterson) has had his or her brain rewired. now only cybernetically enhanced bad warpspeed jump up music will fully compute.

there are also three house records which are acceptable, 'show me love' as someone said, 'push the feeling on' by nightcrawlers and 'you've got the love' by candi staton.

noone likes rare african bollocks, or would like it if they heard it.

hope the extra perspective is handy if you ever end up playing round here!

ps hello, hi, for some reason today i decided to start posting on dissensus, after years of being a member but insisting i don't get involved with this sort of thing. sorry in advance.