DJ stardom a click away

New culture: turntable and iPod at noWax:

11 April 2012

If you've been anywhere near anyone who owns an iPod, chances are you have been ranted at in an evangelical fashion about how wonderful a pocket-sized, digital music player it is.

So wonderful are the latest iPods, MP3 players and MP3-friendly MiniDiscs and CD Walkmans that this new-fangled technology has been infiltrating the domain of the vinyl-obsessive, DJ-ing.

It's a phenomenon that's gradually filtering into London's nightlife. Since July, Shoreditch's Dreambagsjaguarshoes has been hosting the monthly noWax, which invites iPod and MP3'Js to turn up and play; Statik is a weekly laptop-powered night at the Garage in Islington.

There's something of a consensus on the benefits of introducing this technology into the once-sacrosanct DJ set-up of two turntables and mixer.

Jeff 'Automatic', a DJ with residencies at Kill All Hippies at the Fortress and International Hi-Fi at the Garage, helped launch Statik in February.

He began experimenting with laptop DJ-ing in 2001. 'I'm a vinyl DJ but I was looking for DJ software and downloaded some tracks,' he says. 'I started incorporating downloaded music into my sets and, after a few months, I was doing eclectic sets, where I'd play a bit of everything. Plus, my laptop was a lot easier to carry than a bag of records. I'd have thousands of tunes available and be able to adapt to any situation.

'When I DJ-ed abroad, I used to go out laden with records, worrying about them going through customs, whether what I had taken was OK,' says Jeff. 'Suddenly, I could go abroad to DJ with my laptop and iPod as hand luggage - and that was it. No worries, just off you go.'

Then there's the advantage of being able to source - legally and illegally - hard-to-find records or even deleted music.

'If you search for an obscure track online, nine times out of ten, it'll come up,' says Charlie Gower, co-promoter of noWax.
'I've got a few things that I couldn't find on vinyl for love nor money.'

'Absolutely,' says Jeff. 'At the risk of giving the British Phonographic Institute an excuse to come and have me, there's an awful lot of things that I would never have found in a record shop.'

Charlie is keen that noWax develops into a forum for budding producers to test the water with their latest material.

'We had a couple of guys who wanted to play their new tunes to see what they sounded like in a club or bar,' he says. 'I'm hoping to get people who make bootlegs or white-labels to try out tunes that people have never heard before; it would be nice to see the reaction.'

Home computers' ubiquity and the accessibility of downloadable music and software means both DJ-ing and producing are no longer prohibitively expensive or the preserve of a select few. Is this the democratisation of both the DJ and production process?

'Our night has given all these people, a lot of whom aren't DJs, the chance to play,' says Charlie.

Jeff has found technology has given bedroom producers a chance to air their work and also provided him with exclusive new music. 'I know a lot of bootleg producers who don't have the resources to press up their tracks on vinyl, so instead they send me an MP3 which I can play in a club,' he says.

The new technology may even help redress the glaring gender imbalance in the world of DJ-ing. 'We've had a few women come down and play - something we'd definitely like more of,' says Charlie.

Neither Jeff or Charlie believe the advent of the digital signals the end of vinyl, the set-up that spawned the cult of the superstar DJ, or the art of turntablism.

This technology is here to stay, ready to take its place alongside vinyl, CD-Rs and CD decks, as part of the expanding repertoire of formats a DJ can draw on.

'Everyone said CDs would kill vinyl but they didn't, even though now DJs do mix with CDs,' says Jeff. 'I think vinyl's death is regularly announced, but I would always like to DJ with vinyl, alongside my iPod and laptop.'

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