DJ Sasha:
Crossfade into the Digital Domain



By Tilmann Schaal

Club DJs are part magician, part travel agent. It’s their job to create an atmosphere, to keep the night and the mood flowing, to take the audience on a journey from one hour to the next. And it must be done seamlessly, for if the audience can tell when one track ends and other begins, the DJ isn’t doing his job properly.

DJ Sasha is a master of the seamless journey.

Reinvention
When Sasha (a.k.a. Alexander Coe) first started out in his native England, his instrument was a box of vinyl and a couple of decks. The club audiences were small but enthusiastic. These days he shows up at clubs with his Mac rather than with a stack of records, often drawing audiences numbering in the tens of thousands.

He’s also expanded his musical horizons, not only spinning records, but releasing them as well. He has created best-selling CDs that blend house, trance, progressive breaks, and world music influences — guaranteed floor-fillers. And he’s a highly sought-after producer, having remixed tracks for artists as varied as Madonna, Pet Shop Boys, and Simply Red.

Sasha’s evolution from small club DJ to solo artist to DJ icon in many ways reflects the evolution of house music itself. What began as an underground evolution of disco in the early ’80s quickly morphed into a global showcase for electronic music grounded in hard beats and sly, hip grooves flavored with everything from hardcore hip-hop riffs to Indian ragas. This art form has continued to reinvent itself ever since. It’s DJs like Sasha who drive the change.

The Future
Sasha’s typical setup includes an iMac G5 and Ableton Live software. This combination gives him tremendous freedom to manipulate music on the fly, creating unique performances for each show. But his first public performance with a computer as his instrument wasn’t exactly by choice.

In 2004, while putting the finishing touches on his acclaimed CD, “Involver,” Sasha was asked by his label to perform cuts from the unfinished work at a crucial PR event. Understandably reluctant to have the media hear a work in progress, he proposed to play live at the event, presenting his music on a PowerBook running Ableton Live.
“I sequenced the album but with all these kinds of rough mixes,” Sasha recalls. “I basically DJed off the computer and it was like, ‘Ding! This is incredible. This is amazing. This is the future.’” It was more than the future for Sasha — it was an epiphany.

Remixing on the Fly
With a little help from some friends who helped him create a custom controller for Ableton on the Mac, Sasha found new freedom to DJ in a completely new way. “It allows you to make real edits spontaneously,” he says. “To do very seamless two-track mixes. That style of mixing has always been something I’ve been associated with, and this allows you to that brilliantly. And you can throw in extra stuff. You can extend, break down, chop up intros, throw in effects. It turns it into a really hands-on experience.”


Sasha’s custom-designed controller allows him to control Ableton Live on his Mac.

This spontaneity lets him create a completely new sound that fits with the peak of a DJ set. “And it sounds like a remix,” Sasha says. “That’s definitely a fun part of it. When you can do stuff like that, it’s very powerful.” What makes it even better is that it’s a true original for that one event, that particular night. “That’s the great thing,” he says. “They’re not gonna hear that remix anywhere else. Sometimes in online forums they’ll talk about remixes of songs I’m playing. But they’re not remixes — just chopped up versions. Anything that kind of confuses people, I’m really into.”



He’s also into giving people what they want. “The great thing about the computer is that you can really tailor-make sets for specific venues,” he says. “If I’m playing a festival on a Saturday night with 10,000 people, I’ve got to have a specific kind of set. You can throw in extra drum rolls and sound effects over the top to make breakdowns longer, bigger, and wider. But if you play a set in a 500-person club, you can also space out, really dub records out, and extend things. The fact that you can sit down and prepare two very different kinds of sets is amazing.”

Spastic Beginnings
Although Sasha is now comfortable with the versatility that technology has given him to expand his art, his first attempts were less than stellar. Initially the very freedom that he used to make his music unique conspired to make it disjointed. “My first DJ mixes were all over the place,” he says. “The fact that I could mix from 110 to 140 using effects, beat repeaters, that sort of stuff — well, just because you can do it doesn’t mean you should. My first few sets were spastic. It was almost like I had to teach myself how to build DJ sets again. I mean it was fun, but it didn’t sound like me.”

Another challenge was handling his huge music library. Sasha found that technology allowed him to refine his sound. “I can now load up my screen with what may be my first two or three hours of music,” he says. He sees a set as a complete picture instead of building it up as he goes. “I find myself doing a lot more preparation for my sets and I really work things out in advance, but that’s good. In order to stay on top, I have to be prepared. The more prepared you are, that’s when the magic moments happen. I seem to take DJing much more seriously.”

Reinvigorated
Digital music has also played a role in how a Sasha set gets created. Previously he’d hunt through records stores on his travels, loading up and adding to his sound as the tour progressed. Now the music comes to him.
“Every week I’m getting 50, 60 new tracks uploaded to my server, of which maybe 50 percent is good,” he says. “So there are 20 to 30 new tracks every weekend. The record shop is now a server.” And instead of having to set up turntables in his hotel room to preview the new music, all he has to do is fire up his PowerBook to check out his new arsenal of music.



But for all the creative freedom that technology has given him, Sasha’s main appreciation for the Mac is its stability. He can’t afford to have his computer crash in front of a capacity crowd. The first performance of his custom controller in combination with his Mac and Ableton Live was at his house. “I just didn’t want to test it out in front of 3,000 people,” he recalls. “Using the computer to do a DJ setup can be fragile. But Ableton on the Mac is definitely very solid. I mean I put my career on it.”

The technology hasn’t let him down and has, in fact, infused not only his music but also his muse with new vitality. “I’m so excited to play out again,” he says. “For me it’s great being a DJ. I had a quiet 2002 and 2003. I’d been touring for almost 15 years and it was like I was asking myself, ‘What’s next?’ I was bored. Now I definitely like where this is going."

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