This week, we went "what a week, huh?" on Monday morning, and on Wednesday we did not even have time to realize which day of the week it was. Silly me, thinking weeks could not possibly speed up more. On the plus side, by late last night I started to actually feel caught up with what I wanted to have done. The system works! Or I work the system. Something like that.
Music!
For reasons already lost to me, I watched two Fatboy slim DJ sets in the past two days. The first one was from 2022, modern in every way. Sounded great, a fascinating flow of sounds and visuals, Cook bursting with energy behind the turntables. Beautifully recorded in 4K as well, I intended to have it as background while I worked but ended up making it full screen on the main monitor and confining my actual work to the laptop screen so I could take more of it in.
(I do not want to help it, I still want better image quality and resolution in everything I can get. Bring me 8K, more nits of light, micro OLED or what have you, I am here for it.)
The second one was from 2002, and a surprisingly different beast. And not just because Cook looked like a giddy schoolboy rather than an actual adult. Not just because he was smoking a cigarette while DJ:ing, either. No, because there were actual records in use. Lots of them.
The sheer amount of juggling of physical media was impressive in itself, and it struck me how much the constraints of a DJ set must have changed as the music itself went digital. I watched Cook flip through his records and realized that oh, of course, he had to put music in place first to be able to do that. To us watching and listening, it is all just sounds flowing, but to the DJ everything takes physical work. There had to be so many things back then which could be imagined but not actually performed on-stage. And things which could only be done with the right amount of setup time, thus limiting what could go right before.
DJ:ing, what a cool craft.