- For the generation who partied prior to the advent of beat-mixing, the importance attributed to modern selectors is often perplexing. DJs only play other peoples' music, they argue; why waste substantial money on bringing them from very far away? But they forget that 40 years have passed and, thus, there's 40 years' worth of extra recorded material floating around. No longer is the DJ tasked only with filtering readily-available contemporary music and assembling it into a narrative. In many cases, he's also a hoarder. An archive; a repository for the records most of us can't find, can't afford or haven't heard of. This bit is particularly applicable to Hunee, the Berlin disco fanatic who touched down in Melbourne on Friday February 10th for his inaugural Australian gig.
With heavy snowfall in Germany disrupting flights, he almost didn't make it, so it was reassuring to arrive to see his slight frame grooving behind the decks around 1 AM in The Mercat Basement, as suitable a venue as the city has to offer. Dark, pint-sized, fitted with a booming Funktion One system and located in an area devoid of other nightspots, the dingy club doesn't attract casual passers-by. Instead, it's patronised by a large group of regulars, at least in the case of parties run by Animals Dancing. On Friday, everyone seemed to know everyone, and the prevailing mood was one of weekend hysteria, with people out to party. (Only a minority seemed interested in Hunee being the focal point for this.)
Throwing down genuine '70s disco for the first hour of his set, Hunee enjoyed a packed and energetic dance floor. At a glance, it was a perfect party. After a while, however, the lack of response to the shining patches of horns and singing strings became apparent. It was as if anyone could have been in the booth, playing any old thing and limbs would have continued to swing with the same blind intensity. Perhaps sensing this, Hunee shifted to a more contemporary tack, dropping Todd Terje's "Inspector Norse" and Caribou's remix "It's a Crime" from Virgo Four. Or perhaps that was just his plan all along. Whichever the truth, the responses were more emphatic, particularly in the case of Terje's sunny jam.
Switching back to his hard-found disco wax shortly thereafter— and still battling skipping needles—Hunee once again seemed plagued by an apathetic dance floor, despite consistently good tunes. It wasn't to last, however, with the crowd eventually thinning to a smaller group of appreciative diehards. Spanning house (his own "Took My Love"), techno (Marcellus Pittman's abrasive "There's Somebody Out There'") and disco (Donna Summer's relentless "I Feel Love'"), the remainder of Hunee's six-hour set was eclectic, but sacrificed naught cohesively. It also concluded with multiple encores; a sure sign of success. If nothing else, his obscure disco cuts validated the concept of the DJ as a historian.