Just out of general interest, I’ve checked out over 10 hours worth of Solomun mixes the last few days. Probably closer to 20 now.
I don’t fully fathom his huge success as his sets are often surprisingly chill, weird and/or monotonic, not really hands in the air party material, as one would assume for a DJ who draws such huge crowds. And I do know that DJ sets are difficult to judge at home, without the big sound system, the dancers and the booze and drugs. But still. If I listened to his sets without knowing he’s a DJ whose Boiler Room set gets 60 million plays, I couldn’t guess that he’s super famous cos the music is often, well, quite chill.
That New Yorker piece is quite something. Heard him once in Egg at some useless night ages ago and it was pretty underwhelming standard thuddage of the time from memory. Instagram seems to think I should pay attention to him but all those tedious messianic videos set the teeth on edge and I’ve never really investigated further - are there any particular mixes worth listening to in your investigating?
I think Solomun is kinda like Carl Cox or Ricardo Villalobos. Not stylistically, but in the sense that when you listen entire sets by them, despite not always liking the music itself, it’s obvious they can DJ and build consistently good sets out of the material they like to play.
This is not an easy thing to do. Most DJ’s, even when they play good music, play sets that don’t work as a whole.
This remix he’s done recently could be considered Balearic. Though, I’ll be the first to admit that I know little about “Balearica”, even though I live on an island.
I want someone to claim he’s cosmic, so we can have the balearic/afro-cosmic battle.
Personally I’ve never understood how you can have the balearic roadmap revealed to you without having gone to the balearic islands. As far as I can pin it it’s a lightness of mood. Does skunk smoke psychosis darkside balearic exist? Was Alfredo playing Subnation - Scotty in 93?
