Some of My DJing Tendencies

Fall of 2017 marked twenty years since I first purchased turntables, and sometime earlier in the year, twenty years of buying dance records. This year will be two decades since my first gigs playing records in front of the general public. Thanks to starting a LONG overdue organization of my records (they have never been organized in any way before), I’ve been going through the collection to separate styles and pull out joints to sell off and it has given me an interesting look at some of my general DJing and music buying tendencies that surprisingly haven’t changed too much over the years.

The first thing I noticed is that overall, my buying has mostly stood up well to the test of time. I was regularly rediscovering records I purchased early in my DJing days that I had totally forgotten about and they were quite dope. And very few records over the years that I purchased as new records are getting moved to the “sell” pile for musical reasons (most of that pile is for used thrift store records I couldn’t listen to beforehand that were $0.25 so worth a risk). But the specifics were even more interesting.

In a general sense, my favorite kind of music has a balance between funky and soulful elements and more experimental and textural elements. My love for Theo Parrish, hiphop, Anthony Shakir, and jazz music are obvious examples that illustrate this perfectly. Not every record I like will walk that line, and it seems that there’s a clear limit in terms of how much my record buying deviates from that line. My taste seems to consistently prefer something soulful or funky over something more strictly experimental by a large margin. For every ambient album I have, I probably own one hundred soul albums or more. When thinking about my listening habits, this seems to fit right in. This brings me to techno.

I have long considered myself a fan of techno music, and it seemed to me like it was for a good reason: I like techno. But having looked through almost all of my records, I can now see that this is not really true in the sense of how most people think about techno and house. I own basically zero looped up drums techno bangers. The closest thing to minimal techno in the strict sense are records by DBX, Robert Hood, and Basic Channel, all of whom tend to be amongst the funkiest sounding minimal techno. The rest of it is heavily melodic Detroit and Chicago techno, along with some of Laurent Garnier’s hits (Man With The Red Face, Acid Eiffel, etc). And it tends to be slow enough that it fits in with house tempo, which is realistically how I play as a DJ.

If I consider this techno to be more of an offshoot of house music, it makes a lot more sense. I don’t buy one slim subgenre of house, I buy across a range of years and styles that cover much ground. Some of the extremes might not even sound similar at all (Robert Hood vs Osunlade? lol) but I can easily draw a line between them and across a number of other records so that they wouldn’t sound odd in the same set. Now this dot connecting is an idea in my DJing that I have been conscious of for a long time, but it also allows for another tendency of mine that I’ve become more aware of recently and I can now see has also been present basically the entire time I’ve been playing records for people.

Due to having so many different possibilities within my usual DJing style, I tend to try to find equilibrium with what’s going on in dance music on both a micro and macro level. Let me explain. If I am DJing a night with other “house” type DJs, my natural instinct is to give the dancers something they aren’t already getting from the other DJs. If they are playing lots of drum machine and synthesizer music, I will play more live instruments and unquantized drums. If they are playing fast, I will play slower. If they are only playing four on the floor with a heavy foot, I will play off kilter rhythms. I would say that so far, taking this approach is consistently rewarded. I’m always going to play a variety of sounds, but it’s more interesting to give people some of what they don’t already know they want. This is what I would call a micro level, within one event.

On a macro level, my awareness of what trends are happening and what kind of music is popular in specific places makes me want to give people something different than what they’re already hearing. When I am playing a club known for a style, you can pretty much guarantee that I’m going to push away from that style a lot. Like I’m not going to drop modern Brooklyn techno at Bossa Nova Civic Club. I’m gonna play Brazilian music and gospel house. And this is something I’ve done going all the way back to some of my earliest gigs. I remember playing at Steel City Jungle in late 1998 at a time when Ed Rush and Optical and music like that was huge. I played jazzy and funky jungle instead.

Successful DJing for me has always looked a certain way, and that can be described as balanced and timeless. I’m never going to play a set of all one subgenre. Acid seems to be quite popular for this, but for me acid is a spice to be used sparingly mixed in with other sounds. Juxtaposition between light and dark sounds, drum machines and live percussion, vocals and instrumentals, fast and slow, old and new, four on the floor and broken beats, known and unknown, etc. is way more important to me than a smooth transition between records that sound similar to each other. I’ve been playing music in this way since I started, and it is the one constant. Listening back to my old recorded sets, the only thing that can date them is the presence of whatever the newest record on them is, not of their general sound or relying on a subgenre which was only popular for a short period of time.

So I supposed I can say I’ve been successful in my aims, and that is totally reflected in how my record collection looks. And the artists and labels who are most heavily represented in my collection are the ones who have a large amount of variety within their catalogs.

I’m looking forward to cutting out some of the collection that isn’t carrying its weight, and that’s something that probably should be done to any collection every couple years at most. But I don’t foresee any difference in my approach as this one has achieved results I am quite happy with in terms of music to listen to and music to DJ with.