Part 2

Do you engage with audiences/dancers - and how? Taking one of your online DJ mixes as an example, how does the experience and the way you deejay change when you subtract the audience?

I do - and love it when that happens. I probably don’t do it as much as I’d like, I can definitely be guilty of getting too caught up in playing and having my head down too much but it’s something I’ve tried to work on over the past few years both to give me a better sense of what’s happening in the room but also just to enjoy it more.

Little smiles or looks from people, or just seeing people enjoying themselves in the moment is often the main thing I carry away from a set. I can recall so many great memories of playing parties with friends in the crowd, having a great time. I can still picture all those moments very vividly.

Without an audience it’s a very different experience. I’ve typically treated the two as very distinct, with recorded mixes, I’ve tended to plan a lot more and try to craft something more intricate and more “perfect” than I would be able to in a live situation.

Recently I found myself getting a bit bored with this approach and felt like it was strangling the life out of the mixes a bit so for my most recent mix for Bassiani I decided to approach it in the same way I would playing in a club. Just created a bunch of different playlists, hit record, and see where I end up.

It’s not a perfect replication of the live experience and without a crowd’s changing energy it falls to you to decide where to take the mix but I found it a much more fun way to record a mix and the end result felt more alive to me.

Collaboration is a key part of almost every aspect of music making, but it is still rare in DJing. Tell me about your own views on back-to-back DJing, interactions with live musicians or other forms of turning DJing into a more collective process.

Controversial opinion, it would seem, but generally I’m not a massive fan of B2Bs. I’ve just grown up DJing on my own and I really enjoy doing it that way.

I don’t necessarily think it’s a creative form that benefits much from having more people involved. Sure, it can be fun to play with close friends, and pretty much all of the B2Bs I’ve played have been with people that I know outside of the DJ booth. It can be fun to have to respond to someone else’s selections in real-time and that can lead to some interesting places that perhaps you wouldn’t have gone on your own and it can also be cool just to share the experience of playing a particular great party with a good friend.

The idea of rocking up to a club and playing with someone I’ve just met though holds absolutely no appeal to me, and usually results in an inferior output compared to any one of those two people playing on their own.

Of course, from a marketing, promotion perspective it works very well so I’ve no doubt we’ll continue to see a glut of it at every big club and festival, B2B, F2F, B3B bla bla bla.

How important is dancing for our wellbeing on a personal and even on a societal level?

I’m not sure about dancing specifically, but I think the act of gathering in communal spaces that nightclubs provide is vital for us as a society.

Throughout history, humans have always gathered communally and it’s something that’s benefited my own life immeasurably in terms of the people I’ve met and the breadth of experiences I’ve been able to witness over the years. I’ve made some of my best friends standing next to them in a dingy club at 3am.

I think it’s vital in getting better at understanding each other and communicating with each other. It’s not a surprise to me that as these increasingly moved online over the past 20 years that our society has become more fragmented and increasingly divided.

Especially in the light of advances in AI, where do you see the role of humans in DJing versus that of technology? Can AI act as a collaborator or creative stimulus?

For me, any creative act, whether it be DJing or painting or whatever, the real meaning and value comes from the act of doing rather than the end product. So in that regard having someone or something else create for you entirely misses the point.

Unfortunately, for a large number of people these days it seems the end result, or more specifically the money or fame you might get from it is far more important and so if you view things through that lens then AI is a great help as it allows them to skip the annoying, time consuming difficult part of creation. But that’s always been a thing whether it’s ghost producers or whatever, some people will always look to find a shortcut out of doing the work.

That’s not to say I’m totally anti-AI, I think like most new technological developments, it’s a tool, and it really depends on how you use it. It’s going to be interesting to see how things develop in this area and I’m sure it will have a big disrupting effect on a lot of the creative industries over the coming years.

That said, I remain fairly positive that human art will retain its unique value. AI might get to the point where it’s able to do an incredible impersonation of a great DJ but I'm not sure it would mean anything to me. Part of what I love about a great DJ set is knowing there's someone up there choosing those tracks, for that room, in that moment. If you take the person out of the equation it’s no longer the same thing.

Tinnitus and developing hyperacusis are very real risks for anyone working with sound. Do you take precautions in this regard and if you're suffering from these or similar issues – how do you cope with them?

I don’t suffer from tinnitus specifically but I do have pretty bad hearing, and get pain in my ears in loud environments after years of abusing them DJing and partying.

These days I religiously wear earplugs whenever I’m in a club, including when I DJ. It’s one thing I always keep on at my friends about, it’s not that expensive for a half-decent set of earplugs and they last years.

There’s currently nothing you can do for your hearing if you do damage it so it’s really not worth the risk. To paraphrase Baz Luhrmann, “If I could offer you only one tip for the future, earplugs would be it”.

Do you feel as though DJing is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?

Ooooh good question. Yes and No.

I tend to view DJing as more of a craft than an art. It’s something you can just work at forever and get incrementally better at without ever being able to master it. The same can probably be said about being a barista pursuing the ultimate cup of coffee. You’re never going to achieve it, but it’s still something you could spend a lifetime chasing, getting incrementally better results along the way.

That said, I think music is far more potent than coffee and delivering a great DJ set is going to have a much larger cultural and societal impact than making a great cup of coffee. To me at least, the music you like is of far more interest to me than whether you prefer Kenyan or Colombian coffee but to someone else it may not be.

DJing allows me to display my taste, the music I love, a level of practiced technical ability and can also represent things like your views on culture or politics. I guess you could try to make the same argument for making coffee but I feel like you’d be stretching the point a lot more there.

Let's imagine you lost all your music for one night and all there is left at the venue is a crate of records containing a random selection of music. How would you approach this set?

I’ve done similar to this a few times at afterparties at various friends’ houses and always enjoyed it. It’s quite freeing as it forces you to drop any expectations for how the set might go and just work with whatever’s there.

I’ve always ended up being reminded of some records I knew but had forgotten about, and discovering some new things. It also means you don't have to worry about presenting your own taste so much and can just enjoy discovering someone else's collection.

Look for the stuff you know, try to put it in some sort of vaguely coherent order, and enjoy the ride.