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Well I've always been a fan of Stasis's reviews of clubnights so I just wanted to post this for TA what he posted on Electrophobic.com
"It's been said that Sasha can create a vibe out of nowhere -that he can make you feel like you're at the coolest party on Earth. If that's the case, then John Digweed makes you feel like you're at the coolest party on the moon. On a recent Thursday night in Boston's Axis, John Digweed fused hints of his subterranean progressive days to some of the best aspects of the outrageously popular minimal movement currently covering the world's dance floors to create something uniquely his own.
Before diving into the heart of the review, it's important to reflect on John Digweed's company in the world of electronic dance music. You see, the best electronic music can make you feel like you're being let in on a sneak-peak of the future, and each of the major DJ's has a different vision for it. James Zabiela's future, for example, is the stuff of geeky dreams -sounds teleport in and out of their original tracks, quaint tricks of the past like "scratching" are defrosted from carbonite and ripped apart into all new up digital scrambles, and robotic beats form the drum machine rhythm of the masses. Sasha's vision of the future, on the other hand, is more concerned with echoes of the past. In between its ping-ponging echo effects, Sasha's future combines twisting a past most of us weren't old enough to really remember -the electro 80's- and his own trancy 90's past to forge a vision of the future that is altogether more positive and optimistic. John Digweed's vision of the future, however, is a little more open ended. Like the closing sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey, John's musical future can be both awe-inducing and unnerving.
On this particular Thursday night in June, John's music was awe-inducing in its programming, technical execution, and brief moments of beauty, but always slightly unnerving in its pervasive mood of just left-of-center near-familiarity. Arriving sometime after 11PM, I only had the chance to see John's opening act, London's Chloe, play 3 or 4 tracks before John himself took over shortly before 11:30. The dance floor was well-filled, and she was playing some solid progressive house tracks, complete with deep, chunky beats, syncopated cowbells, and even a medium-sized breakdown -just the sort of stuff that induces the feet-shuffling and head-nodding that a good opening DJ should aim for. Taking to the decks at 11:30PM, John had two-and-a-half hours to play with in front of him, and for the first thirty minutes, John played as if he were hoping that nobody had noticed the opening DJ was gone. He kept things mellow and minimal, occasionally sprucing up the crowd with somewhat well-known tracks like Booka Shade's "In White Rooms." At midnight, however, "headline DJ" Digweed took over for "opening DJ" Digweed and things really began to pick up.
For those next two hours, I was reminded of a DJing concept I had almost forgotten about entirely -tension. Sure, I had read about DJ's building tension in books and online essays, but in my limited, post-1999 clubbing experience, I don't really think I had ever really experienced it. In my early trance-loving days, tension meant going more than five minutes without a breakdown, and ever since then, the majority of DJ's I've seen have been more interested in trying to play a succession of big tracks that each top the last in their inevitable ramp-up to a 1AM Boston peak-time. Even when I had seen John at Axis and Avalon before, he seemed content to maintain a fairly steady-monotone pace for the first hour while banging it out for the second. This time, however, he seemed genuinely interested in mixing things up. As far as John illustrated that Thursday, tension-building relied on the old concept of the "carrot" and the "stick." The carrots, in this case, were familiar tracks; big tracks; feel-good tracks. The sticks, on the other hand, were those weirder, dissonant and quirky songs that made you feel like you were listening to music made on the surface of the moon. Play too many carrots (as most DJ's understandably do) and the dance floor is left with no tension -everyone knows what to expect with each upcoming mix, and the DJ trades in good-hearted fun for predictability. Play too many sticks (like many 'experimental' or even minimal DJ's do) and the dance floor is flooded with tension ("Where's our f'ing release?!") and the DJ has sacrificed fun for the respect of a few pretentious chinstrokers (like me).
John found the perfect balance of the two on that Thursday night, though. Starting immediately after midnight, John got right to work establishing a rapport with his audience. At first, for every stick, there was a reassuring carrot that followed. Everytime you found yourself starting to think, "This is getting kinda weird" the next track would come flawlessly mixed in, and it would be a real corker that made you forget everything else on your mind. But as soon as you realized the predictable pattern of stick-carrot-stick-carrot, John was already ahead of you, toying with your expectations, stretching out the period in between carrots, which only made them all that more rewarding each time they dropped in. For the next two hours, there was a real, palpable sense of tension on the dance floor, as every dancer on the floor grew more and more anxious knowing that a banging, crazy track was lurking somewhere in the craters of the surface Digweed was lunar-rovering us around on. The rewards would always come, thankfully. John Digweed didn't become one of the world's top DJ's by not being a crowd-pleaser. The highpoints of the nights were great tracks I had never heard, but felt instantly comfortable with. However, there is the challenge in implementing the carrot-stick strategy: you can sit around philosophizing about it like I've done, but at the end of the day, you need the tracks to back it up. Your carrots better be genuine rewards, and your sticks have to be interesting at the very least. Luckily, Digweed brought the goods to back up the ideas.
I left Thursday night with a sense that I'd witnessed something that was simultaneously a sneak-peak at the future while also being something of a history lesson. Returning to 2001: A Space Odyssey, I had stood puzzled and intrigued by the black monolith and had danced awe-struck at the sight of the star child. Digweed's musical future, as revealed last Thursday, isn't as geekily-cool as Zabiela's, or as optimistically self-assured as Sasha's, but in its portrayal of the best moonbase party around, it showed Boston that as long as Digweed is at the helm, the future is in good hands."
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