Le DJ et le sacré
Aug. 19th, 2004 11:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusDigiki arrives from Paris and we play a DJ show at Club Stomp, Osaka.
My recent rantings about Christianity and embodiment might lead some to believe that I'm a sworn enemy to the sacred and a firm friend of the discotheque, where bodies can fling themselves eurhythmically about in complete abandon. But in some ways this scenario is a vision of hell for me.
Let me outline a DJ's typical evening. Arrive 6ish for a soundcheck at a cramped, damp and dingy cellar. Depressing sight of the place under functional strip lighting. Smalltalk with promoter, soundman, barstaff. Cleaners mop beer off the floor and clean the broken toilets. A three hour wait until the public arrives. Go out to eat. Back to hell, a scattering of public now in evidence. Some chatter in pairs, others lurk alone, looking desperately alienated and remote. Loud music now plays, the first DJ attempts to motivate us with the music he loves. Some of it is also the music we love, but hearing it distorted on a tinny sound system in this cellar is not very elevating.
The shift over, the second DJ arrives. We're happy to see that he's trying a different approach. Instead of playing the music we love, he's playing awful tacky comedy rubbish and holding up comedy signs. As his set progresses the volume creeps up and he starts punching the air and kicking the DJ booth to bits as he plays jerky punk hits. It's an ironic comment on take-no-prisoners rockism, a comedy take on 'destroy'. He over-runs his time slot and makes you hold up his comedy signs for him as you await your turn in the booth (or what's left of it). The most depressing thing is that it does seem to be motivating the crowd, some of whom are doing ironic pogoing.
You decide that what's missing here is bodily uptightness and the sacred. The very disembodiment and inhibition you rail against in daily working life -- where they're the norm -- you advocate here in the disco dungeon, where embodiment and disinhibition are orthodoxies. So you play a long, quiet and 'difficult' electroacoustic folk set. You clamp the audience in cerebrotonic body armour, then caress them with the gentle, repressed, disturbing sounds of Comus, Momus and Anne Laplantine, the Wicker Man soundtrack, Pauline Oliveros, The York Waits, Holger Hiller, Black Dice and Animal Collective, with the nursery rhyme songs of Dr Seuss thrown in for strategic confusion. The hour passes quickly -- for you, at least. Digiki takes over, capturing the delicate dying phrases of Sakamoto's 'Thatness and Thereness' in his glowing purple DJ sampler and splicing them into his tasty Digiki soup, the kind he cooks daily in his digital kitchen.
You leave the DJ booth wishing you'd played even more quietly, and been able to evoke in the hellish cellar the quality of attention expected of theatre or cinema audiences, the expectant sense that, rather than providing vague blankets of roaring, thudding sound against which people try to conduct shouty conversations, the DJ might somehow be expected to surprise with his every gesture, to usher in magic and transformation, to be fully worthy of the delicious stillness and inhibition represented by the audience's most sacred attention.
My recent rantings about Christianity and embodiment might lead some to believe that I'm a sworn enemy to the sacred and a firm friend of the discotheque, where bodies can fling themselves eurhythmically about in complete abandon. But in some ways this scenario is a vision of hell for me.
Let me outline a DJ's typical evening. Arrive 6ish for a soundcheck at a cramped, damp and dingy cellar. Depressing sight of the place under functional strip lighting. Smalltalk with promoter, soundman, barstaff. Cleaners mop beer off the floor and clean the broken toilets. A three hour wait until the public arrives. Go out to eat. Back to hell, a scattering of public now in evidence. Some chatter in pairs, others lurk alone, looking desperately alienated and remote. Loud music now plays, the first DJ attempts to motivate us with the music he loves. Some of it is also the music we love, but hearing it distorted on a tinny sound system in this cellar is not very elevating.
The shift over, the second DJ arrives. We're happy to see that he's trying a different approach. Instead of playing the music we love, he's playing awful tacky comedy rubbish and holding up comedy signs. As his set progresses the volume creeps up and he starts punching the air and kicking the DJ booth to bits as he plays jerky punk hits. It's an ironic comment on take-no-prisoners rockism, a comedy take on 'destroy'. He over-runs his time slot and makes you hold up his comedy signs for him as you await your turn in the booth (or what's left of it). The most depressing thing is that it does seem to be motivating the crowd, some of whom are doing ironic pogoing.
You decide that what's missing here is bodily uptightness and the sacred. The very disembodiment and inhibition you rail against in daily working life -- where they're the norm -- you advocate here in the disco dungeon, where embodiment and disinhibition are orthodoxies. So you play a long, quiet and 'difficult' electroacoustic folk set. You clamp the audience in cerebrotonic body armour, then caress them with the gentle, repressed, disturbing sounds of Comus, Momus and Anne Laplantine, the Wicker Man soundtrack, Pauline Oliveros, The York Waits, Holger Hiller, Black Dice and Animal Collective, with the nursery rhyme songs of Dr Seuss thrown in for strategic confusion. The hour passes quickly -- for you, at least. Digiki takes over, capturing the delicate dying phrases of Sakamoto's 'Thatness and Thereness' in his glowing purple DJ sampler and splicing them into his tasty Digiki soup, the kind he cooks daily in his digital kitchen.
You leave the DJ booth wishing you'd played even more quietly, and been able to evoke in the hellish cellar the quality of attention expected of theatre or cinema audiences, the expectant sense that, rather than providing vague blankets of roaring, thudding sound against which people try to conduct shouty conversations, the DJ might somehow be expected to surprise with his every gesture, to usher in magic and transformation, to be fully worthy of the delicious stillness and inhibition represented by the audience's most sacred attention.
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(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-18 08:57 pm (UTC)The DJ as recitalist is a notion whose time has come; compulsory outrageousness has always been a bore and a nuisance.
Animal Collective's recent album is one of the year's finest, in my humble opinion. I'd have liked to have seen them play in New York this past Sunday with Black Dice--but declined to go for the similar reasons cited in your post. Some things are best left residing in one's head.
Now, a DJ recital in the Met's 18th century furniture and crafts exhibition halls might be a fine thing.
W
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-18 09:24 pm (UTC)It seems to me that even when they do let go, people do it in a prescribed, circumscribed, protected way. They wrap their disinhibition in irony and drugs, and claim the next day to have total amnesia about it. It's as if they want to deny their disinhibition the attention it deserves, and fear the life-changing implications that clear-headed attention to their disinhibition might bring.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-18 09:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-18 09:41 pm (UTC)Ball of diffusion
Date: 2004-08-18 10:08 pm (UTC)Organic
The negated object
Economy of form
Delicate Ornateness
Lightness
Quiet
Subtle
Reserved
Playful
Intricate
Nuanced/Refined
Poetics completing the meaning of an object
Metaphorical/symbolic
Seeks out harmony, either directly (baroque) or paradoxically (black dice)
In a word: Gossamerism (more on this later).
Having a going concern of one's own changes one's view, to be sure. When one steps out of the employee/drone mode of living and the hours of any given day are your own to dispense with as you see fit, you begin to lose the sense of desperation with regards to free time. Work and life intermingle into a seamless whole, as it should be.
W
Re: Ball of diffusion
Date: 2004-08-18 10:32 pm (UTC)Re: Ball of diffusion
Date: 2004-08-19 01:34 pm (UTC)Re: Ball of diffusion
Date: 2004-08-19 02:00 pm (UTC)W
Digiki Sux!
Date: 2004-08-19 06:37 am (UTC)Re: Digiki Sux!
Date: 2004-08-19 07:15 am (UTC)A.