JULY 2022: CLAUDE YOUNG IS LAUGHING
In her 1996 book Club Cultures, media scholar Sarah Thornton wrote extensively about a subcultural scene that was still only in its adolescence. “One reason why tapes of DJ mixes can be bought at raves, markets and under the table in dance record shops,” she explains, is that “dance fans desire documents of DJ performance.”
This idea, that a mix is neither traditional recorded music nor experiential live event, but rather a specific document tied to a time and place, rang in my mind last week. In a panel discussion about club culture and capitalism, Bloomfeld and DVS1 spoke about recent podcast mixes they’d individually recorded for well-known platforms, not necessarily because of a deep desire to do so, but rather feeling compelled to do so because they would be published by well-known platforms. In this era of club culture’s middle age, the DJ mix is still a document of taste and interpretation yet it is also regarded almost as an endlessly generatable resource. Mixes are fed like tokens into a slot machine with no bottom, at a rate that outstrips any reasonable metric of demand. They represent a transaction of capital, but one where the labour of the curator-conduit usually goes unpaid. Composers are absent from this equation altogether. Each performance is replaced by something new, weekly, daily, or monthly.
During a recent moment of decision fatigue, I did what I do at least every couple of years: returned to a beloved mix that I’ve heard so many times that I usually couldn’t say for sure when I’m actually listening, or just finding joy in the familiarity of every shift and change. This mix, by Claude Young, was released under the DJ-Kicks series the year after Sarah Thornton’s book; I discovered it perhaps a half decade afterwards. As a young and deeply orthodox house devotee to that point, this mix represented the unsheathing of vital knowledge. Techno had mostly clattered at some distance away from me, with no real appeal or clear entry point. But from his position within the third wave of Detroit techno, and with the limber wrists of a trick turntablist, Claude Young performed what appeared to me, at the time, like an extended magic trick. The mix was a revelation over multiple chapters, disorientingly unpredictable and polyrhythmic, bouncing between multiple copies of the same track, punctuated by bracing backspins.
When I asked myself this time why I keep returning to this mix in particular, there was no romantic answer. It serves a purpose: it is a hard reset in audio form, when I need to take a blowtorch to the cobwebs of fatigue and daily grievances. Every moment of it is endearing and well-worn. Or, so I thought.
As I recently stomped around my apartment listening to the mix for the zillionth time, with headphones on loud, something unexpected stopped me in my tracks. Like Bruce Willis’ purgatorial therapist character in the Sixth Sense, I rewound this 15-second moment, over and over again, completely taken aback by a sound I’d never noticed before. It’s very easy to miss. Around eight minutes in, and buried deep within the minimal static of Torsten Pröfrock’s “2”, you can, faintly but distinctly, hear the captured sound of a muffled conversation, and then one person - I want to think it’s Claude Young himself - warmly laughing.
References:
Thornton, S. (1996) Club cultures: Music, media, and subcultural capital. Wesleyan University Press.
German translation by Thilo Schneider / Artwork by Johnny Abate