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Tim Buiting and Jordy Brada
DGTL Barcelona 2018: Five key performances
- PublishedAug 13, 2018
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- Here are five highlights from last weekend's blowout at Parc Del Forum.
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- It seemed appropriate that DGTL Barcelona 2018 took place on one of those blazing hot Catalan weekends when it feels as if the sun is trying to do you personal damage. DGTL Barcelona, an offshoot of the Dutch festival, takes its environmental responsibilities seriously—so much so, in fact, that it calls its sustainability programme "Revolution" in hopes that governments will follow its example. On a musical level, "revolution" is perhaps not the word for the festival's 2018 headlining acts, who were mostly crowd-pleasing tech house titans like Dixon and Solomun. There's nothing wrong with that of course, but most of the interesting music was happening lower down the bill.
Here are five key performances from across the weekend.
Tijana T A number of acts at DGTL Barcelona injected freshness and verve into the four-four thump. Belgrade's Tijana T was one of them. Her excellent Friday afternoon set mixed wafty techno (Blawan's "Careless"), melodic electronics (Brame & Hamo's "Sports Complex") nu rave bangers (Slam and Green Velvet's "Take Your Time"), IDM-ish experimentation (Randomer's "Shadow Harp") and lots and lots of acidic squiggles, all mixed with insouciant energy to create a modern warehouse sound that roused the sun-baked crowd from their afternoon daze. She was at her best when most experimental, with her set maybe suffering from a little too much 303 noodle at around the hour mark. But the way she boosted the crowd's flagging energy with a sharp melodic injection, courtesy of Robert Hood's frenetic remix of Carl Taylor's "Debbie's Groove," suggested a DJ at the top of her game.
KiNK At most festivals there's one act that connects with the crowd so strongly that it feels like a genuine bond has been formed. At DGTL 2018 that crown went to KiNK. Rather than a purely musical triumph, though, the Bulgarian's set felt more like a grand spectacle, one flawlessly designed for vast spaces like Parc Del Forum. Years of live performance have taught him to wring every last bit of excitement from his knob twiddling, hand waving and button pushing, and at DGTL he leapt into every move with the energy of a puppy in freshly-laid snow, banging his head like a druid at a Napalm Death gig and assaulting his knobs as if he wanted to wrench them off the mixer. At one point he used a controller to summon snare hits out of mid-air, looking for all the world like Animal from The Muppets. The music that accompanied this was perfectly plotted to make big rooms move. It felt, in fact, like a highlights reel of all the other sounds you might have heard at DGTL: lingering acid blips, Detroit stabs, thundering drums and potent synth riffs, with a gigantic breakbeat thrown into the mix to finish the night off.
Black Coffee If KiNK was an obvious booking for DGTL, then Black Coffee was a more unexpected choice, especially coming directly after the Bulgarian's all-purpose aural assault. "When you're on the dance floor it is fine to have something harder then a little bit deeper," Floris Groeneveld, head of booking at DGTL, explained later. "That's a little bit the situation with KiNK and Black Coffee." Sure enough, energy levels dropped somewhat at the AMP stage as Black Coffee played his first song, mixing soulful chords with a wistful vocal. His presence was more restrained, too, keeping a low-key, almost bashful persona behind the decks. Lesser DJs might have felt the impulse to play up to the crowd, but the South African was in no mood to be rushed. Instead, he slowly built his mixture of vocal-heavy house and percussive flair, his simple, effective mixing offset by well-worked echo effects. By the time he dropped Kölsch's anthemic remix of London Grammar's "Hell To The Liars," the crowd was eating out of his hand.
Carl Craig & Cassy Back-to-backs have become a standard, if largely productive, way for club promoters to shake up their bills. DGTL 2018 was no exception, pairing DJs that, while not necessarily obvious partners, shared a certain musical attitude, like Fort Romeau and Pional. Cassy and Carl Craig were perhaps a more obvious mix, having played together numerous times in the past (they even once interviewed each other). Onstage, their chemistry was obvious—they talked, joked and helped each other out, broad smiles on their faces, with Craig even acting as an MC when Cassy was on the decks. This warm feeling translated into their set, which was full of house classics—Jaydee's "Plastic Dreams," Inner City's "Good Life," Gusto's "Disco's Revenge," even "Gypsy Woman (She's Homeless)" by Crystal Waters—teased and stretched expertly, offset by more underground sounds. "Plastic Dreams" proved particularly epic, with those instantly recognisable drums buzzing around for a good ten minutes before the song's iconic organ melody brought in a moment of wonderful release.
Honey Dijon Honey Dijon's DGTL set showed how DJing can be a genuinely creative art when done with enough inventive flair, especially in the form of intuitive timing and extravagant juxtapositions—for instance, Stevie Wonder vocals over Chicago house beats, or Whitney Houston's "I'm Every Woman" over hard techno snarl. I thought I never wanted to hear Ultra Naté's "Free" again, after it was hammered to hell by DJs in the late '90s. But Dijon managed to rejuvenate the song's message of liberation by dropping the acappella over hammering techno beats, which she lowered till they were almost inaudible as the song reached its chorus, promoting an impassioned singalong. The way she unexpectedly dropped a thunderous bootleg of the Bee Gees' "You Should Be Dancing" as giant confetti cannons went off over the crowd will stay with me for a long time.
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