Rave Special
DARL 00X
A regular at Rezerection, Carl Cox is one of the most sought after DJs in the country: whatever style of music he's playing he certainly knows how to mix it in. Although his background is house, he made a huge name for himself as a rave DJ in the heady days when an illegal party took place every weekend. Now he is renowned down South as a brcakbeat maestro although up-front. happy techno has been his forte in Scodand.
’l‘ve always had a kind of mutual love and respect for the Scottish crowd.‘ he says. ‘They really get into it and appreciate what you‘re trying to do as a DJ. My only gripe about it is that I normally only get an
hour. and you can’t really express yourself. So I end up playing a lot of the big Scottish anthem records, but also playing a few records that have influenced me and are trying to push the scene forward.‘
Cox is known for being the first DJ to make full use of three decks. Normally a DJ will use two decks to mix one track into the next. while perhaps utilising a third to lift samples from. ‘In 1989 l did a party in Oxford,‘ remembers Cox. ‘There were 15,000 people in the open air, the sun was shining and I went on at 10.30am when the crowd had seen and heard it all. But there were three decks set up and I had two copies of Little Louis’ ‘French Kiss’, and Doug Lazy‘s ‘Let It Roll.‘ I had one copy of French Kiss playing, the other going one beat behind it and on the third deck the complete vocal a cappella of ‘Let It Roll‘. Nobody had heard this kind ofstyle or injection ofenthusiasm in DJing before. For me it was a bit ofa surprise as well. I knew I could do it. but I didn‘t think I'd be doing it in front of 15,000 people!‘ (TD)
LENNY DEE
In the world of mutant techno, Lenny Dee is regarded as one of the hardest. fastest and maddest proponents of gabba there is. ()n the phone from his recording studio in Brooklyn, New York, he has just finished mixing down another manic track for Industrial Strength Records and he‘s still high from the thrill of it.
Like many of the big names on the DJ circuit, Dee is more than just a DJ, also turning his hand to recording, producing and mixing. However, he‘s not at all perturbed at having only an hour for his set at The Event. ‘An hour for me is cool,‘ he says. ‘I can play all the best things that 1 want to in a short spat, which makes it sound hectic and rough.‘
Dee has played Scotland before and claims to have
LAURENT GARNIER
Arguably the surprise of The Event line-up is Laurent Garnier. Your thinking-dancer’s ideal DJ, he melds so many different styles of music into one mix that he is nigh-on impossible to categorise. Watching him DJ at Pure in Edinburgh recently, he had a massive grin across his face as he teased the crowd with house, garage, trance and hip-hop while mixing in Iashings of weird samples, ranging from ranting, old-testament bible-thumpers to gasps of sexual passion.
a feeling for ‘what the kids are into’. At The Event, ‘l'm going to be playing a bit more party records,
just uplifting but still very hard,‘ he says. ‘l’m going
to bring aggressive records as well, but I don't know if that crowd will be up for that yet. There is gabba and there is hard stuff and then there‘s like hostility. Where I'm playing tomorrow in Austria. its f***ing hostile man! Slow tracks are like 180 and everything is like 200 plus l6. Weaugh! You just stand there and get caned! But the kids take it, they dance to it, theyfleeek, they jump around and go crazy.‘
Besides Dee. gabba DJs Paul Elstak and Dark Raver will be making their mark. ‘When we're all on together like forget it.‘ says Dee. ‘Just lash it down, because we can give a good vibe to the crowd and keep it hard but danceable. Some DJs play it too hard: they don’t really look at the kids so l’m going to try and do both, I’m gonna play hard and look at them.’ (TD)
With two hours, the French DJ has the longest set of the night, but even that is not enough for him. ‘I must tell you, if I do two hours I feel lrustrated,’ he says with a passion. ‘If I do five hours, I'm happy. The longest I’ve done is ten. That was brilliant because we went right down and then we Just came right up again. It really gave me enough time to tell a story.’
Telling a story is what Garnier is best at, whether he’s DJing for ten thousand kids in a tunnel at Love Nation or 150 at a cave near Rennes in Britanny. ‘I loved them both,’ he claims, ‘I have as good a time with 7,000 as I do with 150. But with 150 people, I went really underground and they all went like
this . . .’ He presses his fingers to his forehead in a gallic expression of mania and another big grin stretches across his face. ‘I love doing big events and I love doing small ones, but whatever i do, I love to please the crowd.’ (T0)
/
The HIP,
the HOP and
the HANDBAG.
A BLUFFER’S GUIDE TO DANCE FLOOR TERMINDLDGV
musrc srvuss
Various types include:
rhythms;
I Techno Generically: any music generated by electronic technology based on a four-four beat from the kick drum. Faster than house music, with more high-hat and cymbal rhythms over the bass beat and no definite song structure.
Commercial Lots of vocals, piano samples and uplifting sounds; Trance Fewer vocals, more emphasis on the beat with long,
3 spacey atmospheric sounds and samples floating through the
Hardcore Harder, harsher and faster § (more than 160bpm)with minimal § samples and a dense minimal beat;
Gabba Excessively fast (180 bpm
and rising!) and hard;
i Cartoon As gabba but with speeded-up Chipmonk-type vocals;
I Hosebleed Yup, it means what it
says — so fast and loud it makes
your nose bleed.
i I House The disco music of the
1 80s with tunes, vocals, ‘proper’
, song structures and room for plenty
of screaming Divas over that all-
: important four-four beat, although
the term has as many interpreta-
tions as ‘techno'.
I Garage Just as house comes from
disco music, garage is derived from
i soul: more tune, more piano lines,
more song and hey, those Divas
positively wail!
12 The List 29 July-ll August 1994