Rekordboxxing

Starting this as a means to an end. The need to erecet some arbitrary scaffolding around my own inaction is too great right now! I have so many ideas and a real lack of means to out-pout out-side out-let them because the brain //// computer interface is f u u u u c k e d. So - a blog or an outwardly visible record of my rekord(box) ((((haha)))) struggles to try and document this because it's such a fundamental part of performing music live in a lot of ways. Obviously very skewed towards trad "djing" but also just because as Max Alper has talked about before they're just big samplers with specific functionalities and for this i love them most dearly. There are few bits of electronic music tech that feel as intuitive, maybe that's a lack of experience/finances/access speaking but i really believe it too. The tactility is kinda unparalleled probably because your main means of interaction with the thing you're hearing isn't a fucking button press hehe. Maybe it's a skeumorphism now i mean especially when you see some brazilian 12yrold going buck nutty on a huge ipad [1] (obviously played the fuck up in a theatrical way so people on instagram at goldsmiths can cream themselves over the wild ingenuity and exceptionalism of the global south when really baile funk like every other musical subgenre has been reified frozen and rinsed to death by every model-cum-influence you've ever seen by now like raptor house gqom etc etc fuck social media and fuck the dislocation of music anyway).

Anyway buttons yes. The jogwheel oh the jogwheel so warm and comforting, what you do with your hand produces (settings dependent) almost exactly what you think it'll do probaby because it's so innate, it's the same set of paramters you get playing with a hotwheels car or riding a bicycle or slapping someone or shaking hands or grinding your teeth. Aka friction. Aka you just understand how it works it's why people I think are more content to stay slack jawed and braindead staring at a DJ than some ambient gimp in cafe oto peering into the depths of a laptop. NOt that the music output is necessarily less valid but performatively it's much easier to parse how the performer is generating the sounds that they are. A spinback makes sense in your brain, whereas zora jones wiggling her arms in the air with a mid-00s callcentre headset playing the same 8 sounds forever doesn't as much for all the effort they've put into making the performance legible. They're too far lost in the max4live patches. A a a a a a a a nyway :)

So yeah I think the CDJ / XDJ / whatever pioneer (hellish monopoly it must be said) is a great tool. More than that it's an instrument in it's own right and maybe needs to be treated as such, at least for me it's a special instrument responsible for a bunch of my most intense musical experiences. It's pretty unique but you know that. So yes I like it and here's the rub, it's a fucking bitch to actually get to a point where it feels functional and as direct an interface with your feelings as it has the potential to be. In that way it's as bogged down in tech fluff as every other piece of dumbasss hardware with 8 trillion functions. How shit would a guitar be if the """inventors""" of the guitar were like "no let's add more functionality it needs more ever growing functionality to justify the continual price increases it will need to sustain a rise in shareholder value and achieve our Q3 profits forecast." But no a guitar wasn't invented or owned by a single company because thankfully some creative developments happened before the "utopia" of like 124 fuckwits on the west coast of america decided they were anarchists and the way to further humanity was the encompassing everything under a giant shitty distriubtive net built on miltech. That is, cultural (m)onopolization and ownerhsip and homogenisation go hand in hand.

Ok and i resent the hoops you have to jumpt through to make this work but it's obviously part of the creative practice. But i should say the creative labour because it's a laboru process and it took an essay by Terry Eagleton in the latest edition of the LRB for me to clock that oh yeah the reason this isn't inspiring is because labour isn't often very inspiring but almost everyone you ever see DJing is so wrapped up in their own inanity and/or desire to elide the labour zone that no one talks about it in the same way that no one talks about how shit so much electronic music is [2]

On Beginnings