This goes along with the Pauly D thing:
The King of Oonze Oonze Oonze
(an excerpt from a report about Avicii)
...
The waves are lapping gently at the shore. But Tim (Avicii)'s attention is entirely focused on the sounds coming from the stage, where a warm-up DJ is playing a song called "Epic" by Dutch DJs Sandro Silva and Quintino. "I can't believe he's playing this," he mutters.
"This is really frustrating," he says, grinding out his cigarette and lighting a new one. "Is he gonna play 'Don't You Worry Child' next?"
Felix gives him a warning look and nods in my direction.
"I'm sorry, I sound grumpy," Tim says apologetically. "It's just that it's embarrassing to do the same things."
It's a strange problem for a musician, which is what Tim considers himself to be. While he likes to play mostly his own songs, he still includes tracks by others to keep up the requisite energy level, and "Epic" is one of them. In fact, it's the third song the opening DJ has played from Tim's usual rotation, and each time it happens, Tim cracks open another Red Bull and gets a little more jittery.
"We should make a list of songs that we tell festival organizers not to let other DJs play," Bergling's tour manager, a no-nonsense Irishwoman named Ciara Davey, says decisively, as if writing a note to self. Tim nods, though he doesn't seem any less tense. He's listening to the thumping sound of "Who" by German producers Tujamo and Plastik Funk coming off the stage. "This, too?" he says incredulously. "How many of my fucking songs is he going to play?"
By the time he's set to go on, Tim's face has taken on a grayish sheen. He seems so genuinely convinced this is going to be a disaster that I'm steeling myself for the possibility that his preternaturally brilliant career is about to go up in smoke.
later, when I point out as tactfully as I can how completely insane he was to have been nervous, Tim shrugs somewhat abashedly. "It's just like, you have to really stand out now, DJing," he says. "Especially now that electronic dance music is getting so big and saturated, and there's a lot more like similar DJs competing against each other. People are just coming out of nowhere."
He should know, because Avicii kind of came out of nowhere. Four years ago, Tim Bergling was a high school kid in Stockholm, remixing songs on his laptop in the style of house-music acts like Swedish House Mafia and posting the results in the comments sections of music blogs. While his parents were confounded by the "constant donk-donk thumping" coming out of their youngest son's bedroom, his ear for melody caught the attention of Ash Pournouri, an ambitious then 26-year-old club promoter who could see the electronic-music boom coming and wanted in on it. Pournouri asked the 18-year-old to coffee, figuring at least he could use his connections to help him get some club gigs. But after Tim warily ambled up, all disheveled-Viking hipster, a grander vision began to take shape. "He started saying all of these things like, 'I'm going to make you the biggest artist; we're going to get there in two years; you're going to be bigger than that guy and that guy,' " Tim recalls.
Before Pournouri could make him the biggest DJ in all the land, however, he had to teach him how to DJ, which was something Tim had never actually done before. Thanks to computers, these days, DJing is mostly "before work," Tim explains. Most of the set list and transitions are worked out before he gets onstage. The notion of a DJ who determines what to play by reading the room "feels like something a lot of older DJs are saying to kind of desperately cling on staying relevant."
Since so much of it is predetermined, I ask, what is he doing onstage? He sure looks busy as hell up there: Twisting knobs and pushing buttons and smiling and dancing. But after watching his show a few times, the only real difference I notice when he twists a button or pushes a knob is that sometimes it gets a little louder or quieter, like he's deploying all of that energy just to change the volume.
"Yeah, it's mostly volume," he shrugs. "Or the faders, when you're starting to mix into another song, you can hear both in your headphones, you get it to where you want and you pull up the fader."
The rest of it, the dancing and the constant arm-pumping motion like
Right on, doesn't this moment totally rule? That's all performance, which was Pournouri's first lesson.
"A great DJ interacts with the audience," he says professorially over the phone from Australia, where he recently gave a talk titled "The Avicii Case Study" at the country's first-ever Electronic Music Conference. "You have to engage people. Dancing, smiling."
Anyone can play a gang of hits, he goes on. The trick is to make them feel like they're really at a show. "It sounds very abstract, but a great DJ takes his audience on a journey," he says. "You want them so into it that they can't leave. The tracks that get the attention are the songs that create some kind of feeling. And that became a precondition for everything we did in the studio."
Bergling and Pournouri produced "like a hundred" tracks, and along the way they settled on a kind of formula: a four-chord beat, overlaid with a melody that contains emotionally provocative but universally accessible lyrics. Rob Kapilow, the author of the book
What Makes It Great?, likens Avicii's songs to Muzak, not only because almost all of them riff on other people's compositions (the piano line repeated throughout "Fade into Darkness," for instance, is lifted from "Perpetuum Mobile," by '80s-era classical music collective Penguin Café Orchestra), but because its main purpose is to create ambience. "It's peppy, it's upbeat, it's got a steady groove," says Kapilow. "There's nothing not-smooth about this music, nothing to annoy you. This sort of repetition is very comforting; it's why children want to hear the same book over and over again."
Back in Mexico, Tim plays a new track, tentatively titled "Someone Like You." "It's so simple," he says, laughing. "I mean, All my life I have been waiting for someone like you? It's almost stupid...."
http://www.gq.com/en...3?currentPage=3
iguanapunk, on 23 March 2013 - 10:03 PM, said:
MultiQuote
