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DJ Dubfire, who, with Sharam, makes up the production team Deep Dish, spun a two-hour techno set at Avalon on Friday. Unlike the usual DJ performer, however, Dubfire sat in front of the dancers, visible on a stage more appropriate for rock bands. The dancers – young, slender, white – did not mind; they packed the floor, with arms upraised as Dubfire played them gently with his signature sound: an ethereal, semi-melodic warble carried on fast, electronic, soft-textured, electronic beats. Though his Deep Dish team owns a great house-music label, Yoshitoshi, Dubfire did not play house. Indeed, he never plays anything that is hard or dirty; his is a clean, lake-water sound, easy going yet also catchy. With seamless overlay mixes he sustained an undercurrent of beats that shifted shape from gentle to intense; occasionally he cut the music with brief “pause breaks.” His usual means of changing the pressure, however, was to roll from staccato beats to smoove grooves and back again when least expected. The dancers loved it.
As for vocals – the very face of house music – there were none. Dubfire’s world is an instrumental one, an impressionistic soundscape that allows dancers a lot of liberty to interpret however they like. Dubfire’s strangely unemphatic music might easily be heard as a kind of evasive generality, demonstrating nothing but suggesting almost everything. It worked only because his mixes kept the dancers’ attention shifting from beat to electronics and from cool melodicism to even cooler ones – and aback again, and on and on. Dubfire could readily have played his set backwards without altering its impressionistic message. There was little cheering and a lot of milling about, from dance floor to back doorways and so forth – easy to do because from wherever you happened to be Dubfire’s music tasted and felt quite the same.
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Topics:
Live Reviews
, Entertainment, Music, Electronic Music
