- It doesn’t get much bigger than Thanksgiving weekend for clubbing, partying, and general debauchery here in Chicago. The four-day weekender bender is famous not only for its large consumption of turkey, but also for its ability to draw the masses into confined spaces. With this in mind, it was only fitting to book UK heavyweight Sasha for the Saturday night headline spot at Vision Nightclub (for those of you who are unfamiliar, Vision is one of Chicago’s largest and foremost dance clubs, sharing rank with the likes of Crobar and Sound Bar to name a few).
I made my way to Vision with the intention of catching a glimpse of the opening DJs, revered local boys John Curley, Jay Prasad and Kyle Szmurlo. I got inside at around 11:30 p.m. and made my way up through the spiral staircases and corridors to the main dancefloor, and to my surprise, the club was already nearing capacity and there wasn’t much room to navigate. The dance floor was a sea of bobbing heads. People were waiting for Sasha to arrive. The smoke machines were on overdrive.
Given the inaccessible state of the dancefloor, I made my way to the balconied areas where I could take part in the proceedings without having to fight for breathing space. At this vantage point I was unable to see the DJ, however the music was still very clear and audible. As I sat down with my drink and looked over the ocean of people, I couldn’t help but tap my feet to the solid 4/4 grooves being thrown down. The landscape was bumpy, with elements of funk and electro. Heavy rumbling basslines were rolling through with edgier stabs atop of them. DJ Delicious’s remix of Mike Monday’s ‘Tooting Warrior’ came at the end of the low-end affair, which in turn lifted the tempo back up towards tech and funk.
Sasha took over sometime close to 2 a.m. His appearance was signaled by a halt in the music. People cheered and threw their hands in the air as he opened his set with a drawn out minimal groove, slowly proceeded to insert complementing sounds and bleeps that brought life to the dancefloor. For the first hour or so of Sasha’s set, the music remained well grounded with a solid 4/4 time signature, with little or no build-ups. As the night progressed so too did the tempo, and the lighter, more filtered aspects that complemented the early groove fell away to make way for a more driving electronic sound that encompassed big room prog, techno, and minimal aspects.
The latter part of his set seemed to take on an otherworldly aura. Different sounds were being sewn into the music with masterful intricacy. Sasha wasn’t simply mixing records, rather he was bringing records to life through a process of stripping them down to their bare essentials and then building them back up in a completely different way. There was a definite minimal aspect to his set, although I would not say that he was playing minimal techno. He was, simply put, dissecting records and re-attaching the essential elements together to create his own unique sound. And so, to all those punters out there who think that mixing with Albeton Live and a MIDI controller is cheating and requires less skill, think again. Although the traditional aspects such as beat matching have been eliminated, this new way of DJing opens up a whole new realm of possibilities that requires a completely different level of skill.
Many thanks must go out to Pure Future for orchestrating an unforgettable evening. With many more big-name events in the pipeline, I look forward to seeing what their camp can come up with in the forthcoming months.