No, no, because you can’t, no, you just can’t. You can’t plan it. You can only plan the first … I mean, logically, a good DJ only plans the first maybe ten minutes. I mean, after that you get all your cues and all your directions from the audience. So if you’re a DJ that has a set and you’re going to play this one then I think you’re not a very good DJ because you’re not taking into consideration the atmosphere and the audience and things like that.
Because, I mean, you change records at a considerable rate …
Well, well, I mean, with DJing at a much higher level, you know how to manipulate the situation, and, you know, I have three turntables, I have two CD players … We have a much more advanced way of playing. At times I don’t play the records as records. I play them as just, umm, sound tools. So I’m not grabbing the record because of the song structure, I’m grabbing the record because of frequencies this record has, and because I’m using three turntables mixing them all together to create one track. So it’s a much higher level of DJing. And that level unfortunately in most cases is not possible to have just with one record. You need three turntables to create this force, this thing …
Anzeige
The beat.
Yeah, this layering.
What do you think of European techno? And what are the differences between American techno and European techno? I mean, because you’ve been around since the beginning.
I mean, it takes on the influences of the people it’s made for. Umm, in America, when I do parties in America, I have to assume that the people I’m playing for, they have a lot of influences, just in general. Whether they like it or not, you hear hip hop, and you hear country, and you hear jazz, because this is the country that actually created it. So they have, I think Americans have a wider palate of influence. Their parents, how they grew up, where they get their influences from, has an important role as well, so I know that their parents probably used to go to discotheques, they probably were into jazz, maybe at college, when they were young, or their parents were musicians. On the other side, when I come to Europe, I know that it’s not as adept, and that music for a lot of people started at a particular time.
Do you mean dance music, or music in general?
Especially dance music. Yeah. It started at a certain level, so their influences don’t go as far back, or it’s not as wide.
Do you mean it’s not as sort of integrated into the general music culture?
Anzeige
Right, right. I mean, when I first went to Germany, back in 1990, we were asking the people we met: Where are the older DJs in Germany? Because in America, we were taught by older DJs. We were young, 17 years old, and this is the crowd and they’re your records and this is what you have to do. So when we went to Germany we were asking questions about where are the older DJs, we wanted to listen to older DJs, and they were like, there aren’t any.
That’s because they were all rock musicians.
Yeah. Yeah, and then DJ culture came and up came a lot of names like Westbam and Paul Van Dyke and all those DJs they started from a definite point.
There was a definite explosion.
So I think, I mean, I don’t want to say Americans have a larger capacity, but they have more history. So if I’m playing in New York, you’re never quite sure who’s going to walk through the door. It could be someone that used to party regularly at Studio 54 or at the Paradise Garage, that know the history of dance music as well as or maybe better than the DJ. So you really have to prepare for when you play in America.
So are you saying it’s harder to play in the US than in Europe? Or that you’re more free?
I don’t think that it’s harder but you should … In the times that I’ve played, you could play a much wider range of music. You could stop and play some Stevie Wonder and there will be a certain amount of people there who know
why
you’ve played it. Here, I think, it would be the opposite, I think a lot of people would figure he’s done something wrong here, that maybe he’s going to fit it back together or something, bring it in or something, you know, how did that record get in there?
(laughs)
And I’m not saying that one is better than the other, but here it’s just so embedded in the culture that people will allow you to go forward very slowly.
Anzeige
They want it very pure.
Yeah, they want it pure, which is great, which I think has saved dance music actually, if it weren’t for Europe, dance music would have died away, because in the American scene it was sort of, they let it …
Beginning to dissipate into…
It was being chipped away.
People can be very concentrated in a way. We have people here who’ll go to break beat nights and go, this is funky house, I’m not listening to this. Even in England a lot of the people I know are musical fascists, they’ll be like "I want it in a certain beat per minute range".
Right, so in a lot of ways it’s helped the progression of that particular style because now you have people that support it. Whereas in America we’ve got MTV and things like that and popular culture and it’s not so happening.
