Musical Storytelling: Notre Talk 20 with Dixon

“I think people go to the clubs because of the community. You want to be a part of something, you want to be a part of a group, you want to find the girl, or the guy, or someone that you can feel rather safe with… Being there I realized that there was something else. People were expressing themselves differently, wearing clothes that were different from what I was normally seeing on the street. Especially back then, I couldnt Google it, or research it in the way I can easily do today. I was drawn into it, and trying to connect with the people, most of them were probably older, but, maybe even more now, there is a range of ages, and that was one of the beauties of the scene.”

“It’s real-time storytelling. Reacting to a situation, reacting to rain, reacting to a shitty soundsystem, reacting to a couple dancing nicely, or this music nerd who is looking really hard in your direction because you’re not playing deep enough. This is the only important thing about DJing in my opinion. It’s not about how you mix, it’s not about what music you play, it’s not about how you act behind the decks. There are millions of definitions of it, but for me, it is important that whoever is playing the music, whatever kind it is, there is a story this person can tell.”

“When we all think of our favorite albums that we all have from the last 20-30 years, I think we realize those albums are often the first album from an artist, or the second album of an artist. The longer a career goes, the less we are interested in the artist, or the art becomes less interesting. Looking at fashion brands, you can only make it onto the spot[light] when you can define something that is fresh and new, and then you have the ability to stay with it for a bit. When you can survive the first four seasons and you can still sell this thing you became famous for, while creating a universe around it, you can’t change too quickly."

“…when it came to digital art, there was a moment that I compared to the early days of house and techno. In the early days of house and techno there were drum machines and synthesizers—machines that people were using in a way that you were maybe not supposed to, or machines that you could not go to university to learn what you were doing, but you just do it. I realized there were these young people that had mostly no idea how to use a certain software, but the outcome of what they were doing, maybe not intentionally what it was supposed to be, but there was something raw, something creative that I really, really liked."

“ If I were to describe what I like, it’s never a perfect sneaker or a perfect album. It’s always something that in the moment is a bit awkward, or raw. It’s in the beginning. It’s something fresh. And I’m also trying to achieve this in my work. I’d rather look back on it five years later and think “What the fuck did you do?"

“People are very one-dimensional when thinking about the talents of other people. Virgil was a person who was approaching [art] completely the other way around. This is what I really respected about him. I knew his flaws when it came to house music, but there was a lot of knowledge there. And he probably had flaws in fashion, and he probably had flaws in architecture, but he approached all these fields with a certain understanding—actually with a certain strategy—and by doing that he created something that was very special for the time he was with us. He connected a lot. A lot. And he connected a lot of people. Through him, I met a lot of people from different fields, art or architecture and whatever. So he was a connector."

“What we [were] going through twenty years ago, music became digital, and music became shareable through the internet, and music lost its value for the companies that were involved in it. We had to understand what that meant for the business, [and] for the product. You can apply a lot of the changes that we were going through to other fields. In Germany we say “sucked into itself,” and that we needed an outsider to actually make [the music industry] move on. This goes for the fashion industry. Why are there still so many seasons? Why is there a midseason? We all know the fashion industry has been talking about this for years, and there are people trying to change it, but they don’t in the end."

“I went through the changes in the music industry and realized that the changes are not over…So how does the fashion industry react to this now? What are they doing to reflect the fact that a lot of things that they were proud of will not be valuable in five years?"

“I was never [musically] influenced by another DJ, actually. I was influenced by an interview with DJ Pierre from Chicago. In that interview he gave me the confidence to actually fight for my definition of house music and not just follow what the people want to hear. He was stating that he was traveling the world with all of these traditional tracks that everyone wants to hear from him but that he has all this other stuff in his record bank that he wanted to play. He said he always takes the time to play what he wants to play, and if he feels like he’s struggling, he puts on one of his classics, and the people will love it. It’s a very simple thing, but I think at this moment I realized that I could do my thing because I also have these tracks that maybe I didn’t produce but I know that just work. So I can go into whatever deep direction I want to go, or strange direction, or just my direction. And if I struggle I have tunes to bring people back. That was the beginning of my first residencies, when I was really beginning to express myself through music. It was never a DJ that I heard that made me go “This is what I want to do”, it was an interview."