For those that haven’t heard, one of the biggest names in techno, Joseph Capriati, recently performed a 25.5 hour set at Heart Nightclub in Miami. Yes, playing over 25 hours of non-stop music certainly was not easy, but it was accomplished. He did an interview about how he is able to perform for this long and he brought up good points about the debate on analogue vs. digital DJing. With all the rise in technology and producing many old school DJs are praising using analogue and vinyl as more “original” and more “real.” When essentially they all end up with the same product.
“It’s not about the program at all really. I don’t use sync, I use the pitch control always but whatever people want to do, they can. Today you shouldn’t care if somebody plays with vinyl, CDJ or Traktor. I’ve played with vinyl in the past and CDs too. The great thing about Traktor is that you can see which tracks you’ve already played. It really helped me for the marathon and I didn’t repeat anything, not one track.”
“I select a lot of music every week from promos and demos I get, you know, techno mainly. Here I chose groovy stuff. I picked house and tech-house so I had a lot of choice of music and it also really helped having some folders of stuff I’ve never played. I had a random folder arranged for a special occasion, mostly from Romanian minimal artists. It worked amazingly in the early evening ’til 6/7 pm.”
Some good insight here from Capriati, and cool to see that he respects multiple styles of DJing rather than joining a rather silly argument. It should also be highlighted that he did not repeat a single track in his marathon performance; impressive stuff from Mr. Capriati indeed.