Bunker Sessions

Wasily

I recall Sasha saying that pre digital music, he had such a massive advantage because the music sent to him was so far in advance. I remember stuff that he and Diggers played was ridiculously far ahead – 3 to 6 months sometimes. Plus, it was so difficult to ID tracks in those days. You had to be a detective to ID some tracks and work it out let alone where you could get it from.

He said however, that when music became digitally available, it hit him like a sledgehammer because he no longer had that advantage, or at least it was diminished significantly. He said it forced him to choose his music so that he retained that edge and would play tracks that maybe weren’t ‘big’ but would help to differentiate what he is playing and grow the profile of what he was playing so he had his own unique sound.

I think these days, so many of them have to treat it like a business, and it is pretty far away from the original party ethos that many of them started out with. it is what you have to do though to keep what you do unique.

In the same way that some actors, celebrities etc don’t want to become too over-exposed by being int he media all the time (unless they are specifically promoting something), DJs have also been forced to adopt this mentality and letting everyone know everything they play just takes away from their profile.

Someone like Hernan Cattaneo, for example, will do his weekly radio slots that are tracklisted. He also used to put up his charts on his site, but when he plays out, he uses different tracks so that he keeps the uniqueness of what he plays., which is pretty smart when you think about it.

Same goes for the Beatport charts that DJs provide. If they are choosing them without being guided by Beatport, they are consciously choosing records that are quite different to what they might be playing out at a given time, which is all again to keep the sense of mystique.

Definitely agree with whoever said that if you publish the tracklists it has a lot of commercial benefits – more people buy the music, etc. I think partly though, a lot of DJs hold back from this for the reasons mentioned above but also because a lot of them come from the days when the attitude was that “I want to play the tunes that no one else is playing” and that is what matters more than commercial angles. I used to work in record shops back in the day and that was why you used to get people coming in religiously waiting for the latest tracks, so that they could play before anyone else – even if they were just bedroom DJs.

Digger’s Mrs totally telling him to sort ‘that bloody records room’ out so they can get a dining table and chairs combo set in there now he’s around the house a bit more too.