Well, the live remote broadcast from our Andaz night at the Fez on KBOO was a super success. We had a packed, raging party. People were coming in all night saying, “I heard this on the radio.” Thank you so much to Chihiro and the KBOO staff and Michael and the Fez staff for making everything work so smoothly. That was fun. I’d like to hear the recording. The one bummer was the fact that it is so hard to use the mic without it feeding back. It sucks. I’d love to get in more crowd interaction but when the high pitch screaming starts from the equipment its time to give it a rest.
I had a good time but I had the typical issues I have at that night which is trying to balance the desires of the different crowds. Things went a little different. Anjali and I played in a slightly different order. That meant that I played an entire hour of Bhangra early on when normally I concentrate on filmi. since Anjali’s sets are so heavily tipped towards the Panjabi crowd. I did get in a solid half hour of filmi in my second set. There is so much coming out these days all geared for the dance floor that no matter what I play there are five times as many songs I don’t have time to play. We had a vocal Panjabi contigent until 3am which meant that for my final set when I normally cruise into classic filmi mode I had to swich it up more. Its hard when a group of people just want to hear fimi, a group of people only want slow-n-low bhangra, and everyone else just wants to dance. Its hard to fit it all in and not seem schizophrenic when Hindi songs are often fast and trancey and many of the most-requested Panjabi songs are about 30 beats a minute slower than the filmi requests. To give you an idea of the polarity of the crowd I will mention that only two CDs had three songs played from them during the night. Kal Ho Naa Ho and Sukshinda Shinda “Collaborations.” Night and fucking day. My moment of greatest failure trying to bridge these two worlds during the night was trying to transition from Jazzy B’s “Soorma” into a filmi set. I chose to go with Jazzy’s recent filmi hit “Chug De Punjabi” as a bridge. Well, that involved going from a slow bhangra song, to a fast filmi-bhangra house track that didn’t work either pace-wise or sensibility-wise. The Panjabis didn’t like it (in fact I had the pleasure of watching a mass exodus of dancers from the stage) and I didn’t get a strong response from the filmi lovers either. Oh well, it can enter my personal gallery of embarrassing DJ moments of failure.
One thing that has to stop is people coming in the DJ booth. Even locked, people manage to get themselves in and it is just not cool. DJs have to work. I’m not busting into people’s offices during the day and getting all up in their faces. Respect the DJ booth. Its not a VIP room and it is not a staging ground for requests.
Thank you to everyone who came out and everyone who tuned into KBOO. Fortunately for all the attendees the air-conditiong was working better than it ever has and no matter how hot and sweaty it got it was nothing like the aquarium people were dancing in in July. See you at the shows, y’all.
IK