- There's an air of idealism about Plastic People. The club's owner is a hardcore audiophile who once financed a sound-system upgrade by selling his collection of rare jazz vinyl. The venue occasionally uses EMT broadcast turntables, which weigh as much as a washing machine and are impossible to mix on, in a romantic quest for perfect sound. Some of the world's best DJs play at the club, yet they're often unannounced on the club's website. There are usually no presale tickets and the only way to get in on the best nights is to arrive as the doors open. This all may be unconventional, but Floating Points' & nights are a great example of how it can make perfect sense.
The concept is straightforward: Floating Points and a high-profile guest play from start to finish (past partners have included Four Tet, Kyle Hall and Ben UFO). The unannounced guest this time was Caribou, an irregular DJ at the party and one who seems to share Floating Points' passion for genre-spanning crate digging. Throughout the night the music remained strikingly unpredictable. The first two hours consisted of spacious cosmic jazz, beatless neo-classical and African obscurities. When Caribou finally launched into something with a bit more grunt, picking the apt "Set It Off" by Strafe, the sense of delayed gratification was palpable. But just as the crowd started getting into the vibe, Floating points took them off-piste. At one point a disco track was allowed to fade out before a gangsta rap tune from East Flatbush Project rollicked in. Later on, a dancer near me summed it up quite well: "I can't believe I'm dancing to jazz funk on a Saturday night!"
As the night picked up, Caribou and Floating Points wove their way through '90s 2-step, raw 140 BPM techno and West African highlife. Very little of it sounded out of place, and when it did—a record was played on the wrong speed for 10 seconds at one point—the crowd was fine with it. Towards the end, the pair totally stopped mixing, dropping a series of slow burning disco jams from the top then simply faded them out to the sound of applause from the crowd. (A style of mixing DJ historians will associate with David Mancuso's legendary Loft parties.) It was the kind of move that would be horribly out of place in most clubs, but in the confines of Plastic People's dark and tiny dance floor, it sounded just about perfect.