Dancing About Architecture with Diplo and the Flossy Boys

We were trying to explain to a friend last night that most DJs no longer use vinyl, and now use vinyl emulators. Yes, the primary trend is to plug in the ol’ laptop and scratch away at your digital files. We DJ around town, and have made the migration from vinyl to CDs to MP3s / M4As over the years ourselves, so we don’t view this practice as being less authentic. In fact, in the right hands, it opens up whole new avenues of sonic overlays to explore.

We caught Flosstradamus’ monthly party at Subterranean last night, and as we walked in the crew that was on stage to warm up the crowd were already displaying extraordinary finesse as they popped in teensy bites of Justice and Boys II Men into the mix. The younger crowd was eating it up, but they weren’t being driven into a frenzy, yet. Flosstradamus eventually took the stage (and we were lucky to have stakes out a spot on stage ourselves or we would have never even seen the guys work their magic due to the throngs of dancers crowding the mixing tables) and started slinging out their own signature brand of mixes.

We’re big fans of the duo, and hadn’t really seen them since they’d blown up on a national level, so we were really looking forward to their set. We didn’t walk away disappointed, but we didn’t walk away with the same sense of glee we experienced, say, at their set in the Biz3 tent last year. We suppose our own overblown expectations may be to blame, so we won’t blame the Flossy boys for that.

What we totally weren’t prepared for was to see Diplo take the stage to throw in his own surprise set. His mash-ups and remixes are legendary (and truth be told, Autobot and J2K owe him a pretty hefty sonic debt) and his production of M.I.A.’s debut was nothing short of revolutionary. So maybe that’s why we so surprised to see him turn in a rather pedestrian set. Yes there was some new M.I.A. thrown in, and plenty of crowd pleasers, but we expected him to be more adventurous in his selections. Don’t get us wrong, we really enjoyed ourselves, but we were expecting more.

And maybe that’s the problem with being a music critic at a dance party, right? Can one really dissect and analyze something whose whole purpose is to move asses on the dance floor? And trust us, all the DJs on the decks / laptops last night knew exactly how to drive a crowd wild, so maybe next time we need to just shelve our expectations, tuck away the mental notebook, and just fucking dance.