No. 10: PITCHED DOWN: THE ART AND AROUSAL OF DOWN TEMPO JAMS
Is a dance floor a dance floor when no one's dancing?
That's irrelevant to most late-night revelers because they've never seen such a sight.
But for the Opening DJ, it can be a nightly occurrence.
For some, it's a nightmare. You get up there. Plug in. Fumble around with the EQs trying to familiarize yourself with a foreign set up before getting something cued in the headphones before starting to timidly play out over the system.
Many suffer from the pre-beer-number-two-jitters at this point — your hands are still a little bit sweaty and every transition feels like jamming a pick axe into a recalcitrant ice sheet.
Yet for all its terror, all its blank canvas of infinite possibility staring you down, the opening few songs of the night are where many among us find solace — a golden opportunity to play some of the slower and some of the weirder stuff.
It's in this liminal zone, when things are just filling up, that the genre-agnostic experimentation can truly happen.
Could you mix Dizzy Gillespie into Can?
