My most comfortable place is in the mix.
I love it, and I love creating things, and
I love making tunes sound different, and that
live mixing, for me, I don’t like tricks…
Really what came out of drum & bass, I think,
in the beginning, was mixing and blending.
The cross-fader wasn’t used too much before
drum & bass DJs came along, and we really
took the live mixing of two tunes to another
level.
And I think if you’re going to do that,
then mess around with it and have fun with
it, and kind of create something so that you
might be going along really calmly in your
set, and then you just flip it, and it produces
a “Whoa!”
I don’t want to be easy on the crowd.
I want to make you dance, of course – that’s
the bottom line – but I want us to go on
a little bit of a journey together
I like the idea of thinking about musical
progression in terms of a multidimensional
space where you’re always moving forward
in time, but there’s a lot of different
axes or variables that you can traverse in
trying to illustrate a musical point, whether
that’s how hard the music is, or how sparse
or dense it is, or what kind of emotional
color the music might have, whether you’re
trying to intensify the experience or give
people a break, whether you’re going up
or down or left or right.
And this is something which applies, I think,
equally to DJing, but also to sequencing an
album, or even the progression across a single
track.
Some people look at this as a competitive
sport.
It’s not a competitive sport.
Every DJ has his own audience and you’re
lucky if you have your own audience.
No matter how great or how small, the people
that follow you and believe in you are all
the people in the world.
Or should be all the people in the world.
All you need is believers and people that
understand what you’re trying to do and
that’s enough.
If you take DJing seriously as an art form,
or whatever you want to call it, then you
still need to invest time in it.
I think a lot of talks about it are very clichéd.
You read a crowd, how do you read a crowd?
But you just learn how certain moods work
with certain records.
And you do that over time.
You can learn the basics in your bedroom,
which was another term from the ’90s, the
bedroom DJ.
To actually really, really, learn it, you
have to do it in front of people.
You have to play music to people to see and
learn how they react to it.
I think that’s always what I’ve been interested
in about DJing, is how certain DJs can make
you feel very particular things that you might
not have felt before about certain tunes that
you might be familiar with already.
I’m fascinated by the sort of construction
element of DJing and of dance music and the
fact that it’s like Lego.
You take different elements and put them together
to create something new.
That very... it’s a very important thing
for me.
That’s how I channel my creation now.
The process of learning how to mix soul, and
disco and unsequenced records is something
that you can spend your whole life doing.
It makes regular normal DJing with house and
techno, that's like training wheels compared
to playing those kind of records artfully
on a technical level.
