based on a true story

I remember the first time that I saw him was at this club in the Theater district, many, many years ago. It was long enough ago that the idea of crossover between goth clubs and electronic music was still novel and new, and so the sight of this Asian kid in a black button up shirt and skirt, dancing with the raver step to industrial music, still caught and drew the eye. We ran into each other again, a few months later at a party, and I remember making some remark about dancing that he latched on to; because we'd seen each other around and had that glimmer of recognition. Yeah. You get this.

We've never spoken much together. Our friendship was not the sort where we felt like confiding secrets and sharing past histories. And, yet, we'd find each other at those parties of which secrets are made, where the illicit and the intimate overlap, where you'd go home wearing clothes that didn't belong to you, the scent of a stranger's perfume in your hair, and memories that are not to be spoken of, just acknowledged a few months later with a shared glance and a smile.

We never told each other our secrets. Rather, we shared experiences of which secrets are made.

Then there's another night a week ago, in another club, a decade or more since we first met, and I don't know or remember the name of the song. I just recall that it had a good beat, fast tempo, and an urge to step rather than sway. And there he was, dancing next to me, and I step into his orbit. We dance around each other, feet stepping into a space that he steps out of. Spinning and swirling with the beat, the rhythm and the flow. His hands are liquid, flowing and twining, tracing patterns and lattices, while my arms pop and lock, taking the smooth grace and channeling it back as a phrase of discrete movement; two different interpretations of the same music. His feet and steps are compact, focused, dense; as is his body. I am taller, with more mass, and my movements are bigger and wider, but we still hit the same beats. Synced into the same time, and we inhale as we step in, exhale as we step away, and for a moment it's the same breath, same motion and same moment.

And then the beat fades, and we hear the DJ slide in another track, and it breaks us out of our reverie. We stop, look at each other and start laughing. There's time later to talk, admit to the moment, and say how much we missed dancing next to each other. But, at least for now, there's no need for anything to be said.

It's one in the morning, and I have headphones on, backtracking through the last thirty seconds of Depeche Mode's "Personal Jesus", where it's just Martin Gore repeating the chorus, and trying out different layers of transitions: the first 10 seconds of AWOLNATION's "Sail" where it's all just keyboards and before the bass comes in, a loop of guitar vamps from somewhere in the middle of "Lovely 2 C U" before kicking back to the original, the percussive intro to a Florence + The Machine's "Drumming Song". I should go to bed. I have to work in the morning. But this is fun and it isn't work.

( on DJing with real gear and the way we leave and come back to things that we love )
I try not to go into any given night with an agenda, but the other night I found a way of pairing this song with an old scene standby that I think will work out awesome.

When asked about DJ'ing weddings, I have a list of reasons for politely declining. I don't like being stuck behind a pair of decks while my friends have fun and there are some other DJ's who are far, far better at soundtracking weddings than I. I'm also honest enough to say that I've DJ'ed events outside of my scene comfort zone and have done a mediocre to terrible job at it. I just don't have the catalog of pop music that people need or want to hear. So, when theamazingjb asked me to DJ her wedding, I split the difference and just said that I was willing to curate her iPod and set up some playlists, but I wasn't going to do much more than that.

( at least, that's what I said, initially. )

oh and this was all a really elaborate way to say that I'll be DJ'ing again at Ceremony for Down With Tempo next Monday. You should swing by if you're in town.

Saturday night -- Crowd wasn't biting on much of the music that the early DJs were playing. You could excuse it as it still being early. Arlington venues are problematic because of town bylaws that dictate a midnight closing time; so you need to get your party started early but everyone likes arriving fashionably late. So, 9:30 rolls around and it's a decent crowd, but they're still getting drinks, still talking, not dancing. It's understandable, but it makes it a little challenging to gauge the vibe and figure out what the crowd's into.

A friend of mine asked what I was planning on playing and I replied, "depends on who shows up."

There are times, when I'm trying to find my focus, that I look out at a dancefloor, lock in on a friend, and I try to figure out how to keep them going. They are proxies for my crowd and if I play to them, then I figure that others will follow. So, after getting the floor started with Stromkern and Covenant, I took a look around and noted, "well, there's badriyaz, nepethe01 and dancer. I guess we're going belly-dancing." Natacha Atlas went on soon afterwards, followed by Dead Can Dance, an old Juno Reactor chestnut and an excerpt of a This Morn' Omina track that I thought would work but was probably overreaching that night. Crowd was looking for comfort food, and they fled from anything unfamiliar.

I'm typing up playlist notes to e-mail to deftlyd and the other two DJs from the night, trying to parse out our chicken scratch. I'm looking at mine and realizing that, given the amount of old hits I have on there, it's nothing special to me. But to the folks who were out last night, and keeping that floor going from 10 to close it was probably pretty memorable. Or so I'd think.

I spin again tonight at Ceremony for the return of Singularity. Will be doing both an early set and a late set, with fugbug and brigid. Don't come fashionably late if you can help it. You'll miss some of this Berlin techno that I've been itching to play.

Techno and beats tonight, goth and swirl last Saturday. Yeah, re-arranging my music between shows has been fun.

For anyone planning on going to the Ulrich Schnauss/M83 show at the Paradise next Tuesday -- Singularity's doing a "show up with your ticket and a flyer and get in for free" deal. Find me at the show and I will, as they say, hook you up.

That's two weeks from now, in that swank little club in Union Square with the lush banquettes, and cozy lighting. If you haven't been there before you really should go. If you have been there, you know that you want to go back.

oh, yeah, I had a minor concussion over the weekend from skiing. More details in a subsequent post. Save for some lingering minor headaches, I'm fine. Thanks for all the well wishes, though. It means a lot.

LittleSister is rolling into town on a bit of an East Coast filial tour (she's been spending the last few days in New York with OlderSister). Schedule tonight is to pick her up at 6pm, get haircuts at Liquid at 7, then go over to River Gods at 9 and where she'll spin a guest DJ set with her old WZBC cronies at Ointment. If you've got a free evening and feel like rocking out with the indie kids, do come on by.

I'll also be spinning with DJ Arcanus and the venerable Dr. Yarm at Ceremony on the 28th. None of us know the intent behind "The mysteries of antebellum Canada" but if that somehow entails my dressing up in some pre-War of 1812 coureur du bois outfit, then I'm totally renegotiating my contract.

Finally, as fugbug has alluded to in his journal -- there is a new night in the offing for those of us looking to get a bit outside of our typecasting. New music is good, no? And we've been doing this slow, slow, fast evolution of your Monday musical diets for a while now, so it will be new but not strange -- novel but not foreign.

Come along, it'll be fun.

Last night, I took a break from soundtrack work to get up and kill off the remaining bottle of merlot that had been sitting in our kitchen. Home stretch -- ten minutes of film left to work on, and I figured that I could tempt tipsiness. I walked back to the living room and saw the laptop surrounded by stacks of CDs, the scattered paper notes, and the pen balanced on a coffee cup. Still life of an all-nighter. Not that I was pulling one, mind you, but swap out CDs for reference books and the pen for a cigarette, and you'd come pretty close to the image of one of my college desks in the midst of term paper writing. Except of course, there's no safety razor, no crushed gram of Vivarin and no rolled up dollar bill.

Anyway, this is a final reminder to come out to An Tua Nua tonight and watch me spin some music to FW Murnau's black-and-white classic, Faust. Starts at 9, goes to 11, with the dancing and the d00f-d00f to follow. I'll appreciate seeing you, assuming I don't pass out after finishing the set.

oh yeah, I was totally joking about the last line in the first paragraph. There never was a safety razor.

(13 years ago...)

"I don't know if we should do this, Chino."
"Don't worry, LittleBrother, I just want to see if this will work."
"won't Papa get mad? He always gets mad if you mess up his stuff"
"He will if he finds out, but I remember where all the cables go. So, we can put it back afterwards. It's just a matter of remembering what colors go where."
"But what's the point?"
"Of what? Hooking up a CD player to the VCR? Haven't you ever wanted to make a music video?"
"How's that supposed to work?"
"Give me a tape and a CD, and I'll show you."

LittleBrother hands me the much faded, quite crappy fansub of Akira and his current favorite album, Duran Duran's Liberty. I slip the tape in, fast forward to the opening sequence of the fight with the Clowns, and hit play on the CD deck. It was just supposed to be an example, a little "ain't-it-cool" experiment, but, as we watch, motorcycles are careening through Neo Tokyo in perfect syncopation with Roger Taylor's backbeat. A gangster's head hits the pavement at the same moment that Simon LeBon goes into another verse. It's so perfectly timed, that my brother and I had to replay that tape six or seven times to erase our disbelief in coincidence.

I sort of felt like that on Monday night, sitting cross legged in the futon in our living room, laptop in front of me, taking a last run-through on the Caligari performance and swapping songs in and out of the sequence, taking notes on when I should mix stuff in and out, then taking brief moments to just stop and appreciate the synchronicities I was creating.

The crowd on Monday loved it too, apparently. I've never had that big of an ovation for any of my regular dance sets, and I was more than a little overwhelmed with the number of people who came to me afterwards and said, yes, I certainly must do another one again¹. Mr.DevilsAdvocate came up to me afterwards, asking me how long it took and I said, "eight hours or so."

"That's it? I thought you'd take days to work some of that stuff out."

and I just shrugged and said, "just lucky, I guess."

( playlist - not in order since stuff was cut in and out of the set )

¹ - among the requests are re-scoring Metropolis, Les Vampires and Faust, but if anyone's got any suggestions, I'm taking them now.

A few years ago, at another job, I worked with this network security guy who used to be a bouncer at The Rat. He liked to joke about how his job never changed, except for the fact that he missed throwing people down flights of stairs and intercepting viruses didn't impart quite the same rush. When he found out that I had this DJ'ing sideline, he asked me if I could make a tape for a friend of his who was a "dancer", and I swear that he came this close to doing the finger quotes-y thing and if he did I probably would've turned him down, but he didn't so I just played along and asked, "I take it she doesn't want a tape of Swan Lake, then."

"No, 'course not. She just needs something new for her routine. Dancers, man, they go through tapes like crazy if they want to stay fresh. It can be steady work, if you're interested."
"Well, I'm not really interested in the steady angle <because frankly you get sketchier with every sentence that you pronounce> but I'll make you a tape as a favor."
"Awesome! Do you want any advice on songs and stuff?"
"I was thinking of maybe some Garbage and some Nine Inch Nails, and maybe I'll throw in a few surprises."
"You've done this before?"

and in the back of my mind, I was running through images of bodies clad in patent leather, swaying and moving to a midtempo Xorcist track, to the memory of a girl who was stripping to pay her way through Harvard Extension and the way she'd dance to Marilyn Manson, and I said, "no, not for strippers per se, but I've got a pretty good idea of what you're looking for."

I was thinking of that as I cued Nine Inch Nails on the decks last night, and watched the crowd be sexy for five minutes. That's what the song is -- basically an open invitation to the dancefloor to just "be sexy" and I'll totally own up to playing that track solely to see what sort of eye candy evolves. However, it was just one selection in a set that seemed to be building itself as the night wore on. The good nights behind the booth are when your instincts lead your fingers, and you know exactly what track you want to play without any second-guessing or doubt; when everything just fits and you can throw on odd requests and still have people on the floor. It's when you look up and you see someone giving you the finger with a big smile on their face because they've been dancing to your set all night long and they're tired and they want a break, but you just threw on another one of their favorite songs, you bastard. It's when friends pull you aside at the end of your set, and say, "waking up in the morning is going to suck,but thank you for making my morning horrible." It's when you realize that you keep some amazing company and it's a privilege to give them a good night out.

Last night was one of those nights.

( setlist: ceremony 10 Nov 2003 )