The Vinyl Aesthetic and The Digital Aesthetic

It is an odd thing, a contradiction in terms, to be a DJ without turntables.

Look on any DJ discussion board, or better yet: ask the man or woman behind your local wheels of steel how they feel about CD decks, mixing software, or anything other than DJing with wax. Tides may be changing, but chances are good you’ll still hear righteous indignation at the idea of DJing with anything but vinyl.

And, perhaps, rightly so. A good viewing of Scratch will inform you non-hip-hop heads out there about just what vinyl means to a DJ: tactile control over the music, which in turn means tactile control over a crowd. Your hands, your fingertips, can reach out and move people. And not just that, but you can give life to the work of bygone musicians, combining and manipulating audio ghosts exhumed to play again to new ears. It’s power so closely tied to a love of music that it can’t corrupt. And that’s truly a powerful thing,

The vinyl aesthetic is warm, the warmth of analog. The wax stays room temperature in its sleeve and then heats up under your fingers and under the lights. It has smell, and texture; it feels natural, though it’s just as fabricated as a CD or DSP microchip. Vinyl has character, and digging through dusty crates of it in dustier record stores is a cocktail party of wonderful eccentrics you get to meet for the first time. Its nature makes sense for hip-hop music, house music, soul, jazz: music with innate rhythm and life.

So why did I sell my turntables today?

I can understand and appreciate the vinyl aesthetic, but it is not my aesthetic. I remember my parents owning records, but I don’t remember them actually playing records. Instead I remember tapes and their myriad problems, and then our household’s comparatively late foray into CDs. I loved CDs like vinyl DJs love their wax. My collection was legend in middle school, and it filled shelves upon shelves, and later binders upon binders. I loved the hum of CDs spinning up and spinning down, skipping forward and backward between tracks, and the sleekness of them. I loved that the music was there out of almost nothing.

Predictable, then, that I fell in love with the MP3s: the music really was now there out of nothing. And as my musical tastes grew to match my love of the pure digital aesthetic, MP3s and digital audio were the perfect fit.

Playing Autechre on vinyl doesn’t make sense.

I am not a hip-hop DJ, and certainly not a skratch DJ or turntablist. Those men and women are true artists, and for them I reserve a reverence at their skill and mastery of the vinyl aesthetic, total and complete. And nor am I a jungle or house DJ, spinning sounds built from the hip-hop mold and buttressed by back catalogues of bygone soul and jazz wax. I love all these sounds and the myriad sub-genres and styles around them, and will happily play them for myself and others, but never in the role of a real DJ. If I mix some hip-hop on my radio show I consider that idle fun, not a real mix. It seems almost disrespectful to the nature of that music.

I call myself a DJ when I’m nestled squarely in my digital aesthetic, virtually spinning audio borne of circuits and code. Only in that domain do I feel confident as a DJ, and only in that domain do I really open myself for a DJ’s audience, for appreciation and criticism. Everything else for me is just playing tracks.

This is the why and the how of being a DJ without turntables. I’m content to have software to play my digital audio and a hardware mixer to provide the necessary tactile element, but in my ideal scenario I wouldn’t touch so much as a trackpad. I see in my mind an interface like that used for video editing in Minority Report, visual and gestural and utterly without contact or touch – a paradoxically organic way for man and machine to communicate with each other. The movements of my hands and fingers, my eyes, my body, transform the sounds I play for my listeners, and my listeners are there in the club with me, and in other clubs via simulcast, and at home listening to their audiovisual streams.

For me, that is futuristic and aesthetically consuming, not vinyl, and in that respect I bear no relation to most DJs today. But I understand and appreciate vinyl, and am always happy to listen to the work of someone who truly loves it. In turn, I’ve gotten compliments on my limited DJ forays into a purely digital aesthetic, and I hope that continues as I work at it.

It’s a wonderful thing to have so many different ways of bringing beautiful sounds to people’s ears, be it with wax and needles or microprocessors and binary.