Telma @ Lux Frágil (20/05/22)
It’s been a while since I reviewed a night out the day after, the way I used to do on the blog I kept when I moved to London in my early twenties. Back then I would come home from fabric or Corsica Studios or wherever, sleep a bit, and on waking up get straight on to my laptop. I’m looking now at my review of Prosumer at Dalston Superstore in August 2009, published the morning after, and it even contains a short meditation on the function of writing this stuff down:
I’ve said all of this before, or at any rate I’ve tried. I’m running out of anything to add to it. Obviously you can only really get so far when trying to describe things, and now I wonder if I’m doing it more out of an impulse to relive it the day after rather than any attempt at actually describing it for anyone reading. I guess I am. If so, am I limiting or even changing my memories of what happened by re-running it through this website? Memories ARE re-running things, but does the act of writing on top of thinking make a difference? I think ultimately for me all that’s really there in my head is a series of sensations that can’t be written out or even really said out loud. So then I wonder what the writing it out is for.
This was approximately a month before I closed that blog down and I can feel the exasperation in those last posts as I struggled and failed to find words for what I was experiencing. Perhaps I had got a bit jaded and felt nothing was new any more. Perhaps there’s only so many times you can go on about how good a DJ was or how good the drugs were. But despite my doubts and frustration, there is still an immediacy in the writing of those posts that I seemed to lose somewhere over the following years.
So when I started up this newsletter during covid I remember thinking that, once parties started again, I’d like to write about them in the same way I used to back then, when I was not very good at expressing my emotions in person but good at getting them out on to the page. Now it feels like things have almost flipped round: age, experience and more than a little therapy have helped me to express my emotions better in person, while my writing now feels more formal, guarded, neutral.
Of course things aren’t novel any more, I’ve been around the block a bit and it takes more to impress me or to get me worked up enough to bother praising or complaining about something on the page. There’s a sadness attached to this realisation, but it also feels quite ordinary.
Then there’s another factor contributing to this guardedness: I am now much more inserted into this world of parties and DJs in a professional capacity and feel subject to an unspoken code of conduct when it comes to talking about other people’s work. Ten years ago I would moan freely and publicly about the shit sound at Eastern Electrics (it was always shit) or the latest dreadful warm-up set from Hector in fabric Room 1. Today I find it difficult to write even a single semi-critical comment about someone’s party or set, lest it be received the wrong way.
This doesn’t feel like a very good state of affairs. A culture of silence around unsuccessful aspects of parties or records or sets must hold the scene back in quite a big way, as people continue to do things badly with no repercussions or simply without knowing any better. It’s all a bit ‘You rub my back and I’ll rub yours’, something that was covered well in this Mixmag piece by the ‘Secret DJ’ back in 2019.
Of course many things are to some extent subjective, but that’s no reason not to share our subjective thoughts with each other and talk them out. If only it were that simple. I think the days of me taking potshots at parties and DJs from the sidelines are probably over. But I’d like to try and be a bit more honest in what I share about my own experiences, both in person and in this newsletter.
If you were expecting this bit of hand-wringing to be followed by a no-holds-barred diatribe about my night out yesterday, I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed, because I actually had a great time at Lux. Telma was warming up the main floor for Roza Terenzi and, much like on my last visit last November, I got what I expected: two to three hours of early-doors club joy followed by a sharp exit when things got busier and louder. Rather than cover all that ground again in this post, I’d like to talk about the experience of being at the club early, and then dancing to Telma’s set, which she pitched perfectly for the occasion.
So, the club. I make no bones about my own love-hate relationship with Lux, but there’s no denying that on a good night it still has a bit of magic. There was something beautiful about being there right from the start, before they even turned the lights down in the disco. The bar staff were finishing their pre-shift meal and getting changed, and the intimacy of this pre-party moment is always a bit of a revelation wherever I happen to witness it. These are the working people you see night in night out doing their job with (in Lux at least) a sort of mechanical level of professionalism: the focus, the posture, the ritual of the change and receipt being delivered on a small tray, only very occasionally with a smile. But last night, for example, I got to see one of the longer-serving and certainly more straight-faced bar staff, who I’ve been buying drinks from for over seven years now, in her bright day clothes, eating and having a laugh with her colleagues. Meanwhile the light technician was testing out the lights, the sound technician was setting up the mixer, and DJs and bookers were floating around catching up with each other. You could feel it is really a family affair.
The sound technician, Martim aka Twofold, has been working at Lux for four or so years now, though half of that time was obviously nixed for covid. He puts a lot of love into his work and I was excited to hear that the recent remodel of the upstairs bar meant he could re-install and tune the sound system in that room to his own specifications. What a job! This night, though, I wasn’t spending time in the bar. I was going to be downstairs dancing from Telma’s very first record - and it sounded absolutely marvellous down there, as it always does when the volume is lower and the room is slowly filling up.
So there I was, dancing around the middle of the room to find the sweet spot where the sound was balanced and the floorboards vibrated ever so delicately through my shoes. This placed me in the dark space between two large, red spotlights, and every so often I would stray slightly to one side purely to enjoy my shadow dancing in the glow. Telma started with dreamy house and breaks, everything sounding spherical and soft through the system. She slowly moved into what I believe she would describe as ‘proggy house but acid’ tunes, which I’d guess she was pitching down considerably and started to build an irresistible groove. At times she would leave this zone and venture into more techy or even housey territory, before returning to the proggier vibe. The mixing was unfussy and functional, though at times I wanted her to bet a bit more on knitting the kicks together rather than cutting the outgoing one completely from the mix.
At this point there can’t have been more than 30 people in the disco but the vibe was lovely, everyone enjoying the warm hug of the sound system and feeding off each other’s enjoyment. The regulars were in attendance of course - Joãos Botelho and Pacheco, for two - and plenty of friends of Telma had come to support her. As I was dancing I reflected a little on how comfortable I felt in that environment. In the past I would often go clubbing alone, in London or Berlin or wherever, but always with a sense of limitation and self-consciousness. These days I’ve mostly let that go, even in situations where I’m the only person in the middle of the dancefloor - and Lux can often feel like a bit of a judgey crowd. But I realise that if I start to get nervous for whatever reason, I can imagine myself with my friends, dancing with abandon on the Pbar floor or at one of our old Oxford roof parties, and this reminds me of how much fun it is to just deliver your body to the music regardless of who’s around you.
So deliver myself I did, dancing til about 02h30, by which point the front half of the disco had filled up to the point of getting jostled a bit, and had got loud to the point of my ears needing a break. Telma had also upped the pace and intensity in anticipation of Roza, and while she did this skilfully I felt a little bit of loss at having to leave behind the patient, dreamy warm up. So instead of wandering upstairs for a bit I decided to call it a night and walk home. (For anyone who knows Lisbon, this is quite a serious hike up and over Alfama and Graça, but I was in such good spirits that I did it almost without thinking.)
I could tell that everyone in that room last night, including one of the club’s bookers, was feeding off the confident energy Telma was transmitting and willing her on further. That in turn gives the DJ more confidence in a sort of virtuous circle, and everyone ends up just having a blast. I felt like that from the other side when playing at Pbar a couple of months ago and I have a strong idea that Telma felt it too yesterday. It’s a bit of a cliche that a DJ’s favourite DJs are usually their friends, but there’s something really quite unique about seeing someone you know well play, and play amazingly, especially in quite high-stakes settings like last night. I’m hoping this is the first of many such opportunities Telma has, and I intend to be there again next time, dominating the dancefloor from the very first beat.
Edit: the set described in this post is now available to listen back here: