I've been the worst culprit of this before - banging out fast and furious tunes when the situation demands something a bit more restrained. It's an easy trap to fall into: Dubai crowds can be a bit slow to catch fire sometimes, so throwing down some heavy-duty ammunition can be the easiest way to light the touch paper. That and a relatively early 3am finish added to the fact most clubbers don't show until 12am at the earliest, means that you've got a few hours to show them a good time. And invariably that means cranking up the speed. But, pop quiz hot shot - where does that leave the night to progress to? And it's not going to impress the headliner who's now stuck at lightspeed, and any decrease will risk losing the momentum you've so carefully blown up.
In my defence, it's something that I've tried pretty hard to rectify in recent years, and I now take a lot of care in my warm ups, making sure the music, tempo and energy of the tracks fit the venue, the crowd, the time of the night. To me, a warm up now means starting at 95BPM at 10pm and finishing on around 120BPM at 1am when the headliner comes on. And that suits me perfectly, as I've genuinely fallen in love with music at around 110BPM in speed (hence the name of the blog, see).
It first started when I got into disco (as I think most DJs do at one point or another, it being the creation point of all dance music, after all), and I realised the energy a 100BPM banger could have, the propulsive momentum created by big, scudding beats and skittery hi notes to push it forward. And then there's my other new love, Ghetto funk, which is another slow but energetic genre that is essentially breakbeat slowed down to a hip hop speed, but with added dubstep bassline wobble and seismic beats. It's a genuinely exciting new type of music, and one that I've started incorporating into my edits and mashups.
It seems the 'slow is the new fast' school of thought is spreading around the world. House, once in love with minimal house (which to my ear sounded like a particularly annoying bat fight) has now added melody to the music, and stripped back the speed so much that 125BPM is now considered speeding. And even dirty Dutch house, the most virulent strain of electro, has taken a raincheck on its speeds, and has transmogrified itself and is now called Moobahton, with 110BPM tracks doing the same damage on the dancefloor as pitched up 130BPM anthems.
What does it all mean, then? To my mind, it's simply a re-adjustment to the previous few years, where dubstep and its halting, punctuated 140BPM scatter-gun breaks and nu-disco and its big-room melodies over beefed up beats have made a huge impact on the musical climate. Music needn't be Lighting Bolt fast to make an impact, and warm up DJs and headliners have brought the speeds down and with it raised the club's ceilings. Whether crowds in Dubai appreciate this slow-down is another matter, but with nights like Turn Me Loose, iLL Communications, audio tonic and the Electric Boutique at Trilogy flying the slow and funky flag, there's a lot of hope yet.
And if you've made it this far, here's my latest mix which works its way from 100BPM to 120BPM over an hour, with plenty of acid-fried disco flavours along the way.
http://soundcloud.com/da-funct-synf/da-functs-nu-disco-acid-wiggle
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