I found a fantastic animation telling the story about the first time the narrator came into contact with techno on Eclectro recently. Especially the part at the end is pretty interesting: "keep on listening to find out where the beat is going..."
A story about techno from The Amazing Rolo on Vimeo.
That's something that's pretty unique to most electronic music played by deejays these days: it's not just song after song after song, it's a string of decisions that does not end, that keeps on moving. Much more like real every day life than, say, a pop album, which consists of different songs and, probably the biggest difference, individual singles.
There's something we all need to be a bit more attentive too: we can all produce 'hit ideas' once in a while, but if they don't make sense in the whole set of songs a brand is playing, it's probably not that effective. Hence the reborn attention for connection planning, probably. See the latest edition of Contagious for a short but good article on the new media and strategy marriage (which probably isn't thta new, like so much disciplines that are being renamed these days).
While I was listening to the Daft Punk Live album recently, it struck me how much attention they had put in the buildup of the set. There were some seemingly illogical decisions there but if you put on the whole show in the car and listen to it from start to finish it all just works out perfectly. Of course it helps if you've got 15 years of hits to use, but the overall feeling was really fresh, always surprising and cotinuous, and still very Daft Punk.
I've been getting back to the turntables and, admittedly, Ableton Live recently and I've got some stuff on planning vs deejaying coming up, just not sure what direction it will take. But I get the impression that I'm not the only planner dabbling in electronic music at any rate so I might set something else up in the near future.
