I am not anti anything really. Sometimes I pretend and take a half hearted stab at hating on some things. I foax moan a lot,but deep down my hearts not in it. Live and let live. So I am no anti digital DJ'ing. It's obviously the future and so even though I mostly play records and a few CD's, the idea of playing digitally appeals to me. For one, the cost of records which is pretty staggering - 10 euros for a a new record in a shop is just a lot of money and the internet is no cheaper when you factor in postage. Also I am impulsive and can never focus on building any kind of collection. It's why I've got records from Chilean folk bands in the same stack as Judas Priest 12"s ( killer drums), wonky disco edits and punishing techno from plus 8. This pattern applies to most of the records in my living room.

So wanting to tailor my output to a more conventional club aesthetic,the thousands of tracks of music that I have been accumulating on my computer presented an opportunity to play in a different way, and that's the way everyone is going right? So I began to look for a controller and in the process of thinking how to extract the first couple of hundred tracks out of of my iTunes I decided that my computer would run better if the music files were on an external disk and not taking up 95% of space on the hard drive. So with a little caution I got stuck in moving files. And guess what? I totally fucked it up. In the aim of trying to do things differently I ended up losing most of my music. I'm not sure what this means or if there is a moral in the story, but I can tell you this; the main feeling is one of relief. All those tunes I should have been listening to, the addition of new music at the expense of actually listening to it. To have those feeling dissipate was an unexpected foil to the gut loosening that came when I realized my schoolboy error. And so it was back to the records and deep down, I was kind of glad. Forced to re-appraise my vinyl collections, I hunted out more slabs of wax with a narrower frame of reference. Buying on the internet, I was able "fill in the gaps" something that really had never occurred to me before. And so with an injection of records with my kind of aesthetic but a more functional nature, I found the new new perspective I was looking for. And so for me, for now at least, for better or worse it's back to the wax.

Take from SLIM August Issue

Written by Owen Elis