The UK garage great is spinning for a solid day in aid of cancer research – which is fine, but it doesn’t touch the blistering feats attempted by the titans of the form
When DJ EZ – arguably UK garage’s greatest DJ – announced that he was going to play records for a solid 24 hours in aid of Cancer Research UK, the internet gave him a collective slap on the back. EZ, who will be performing his charity set on 27 February, is already a cult figure in UK dance music, worshipped for the startling, disruptive way in which he stitches songs together into entirely new rhythmic forms, and here he was, offering to play one UKG tune after the next for the same amount of time it takes Jack Bauer to save the world. Playing records for 24 hours is no mean feat – at the rate EZ rattles through the hits, he’s looking at banging out over 700 tracks before he gets to stop, which is feasibly more garage than any human can take.
While most observers are enthralled by this prospective feat of endurance, picking apart the technicalities of such an event (crucially: what happens if he needs a poo?), it turns out that DJing until your ears bleed is old hat to one unusual corner of the clubbing industry. By taking on the 24-hour DJ challenge, EZ has inadvertently ventured into a murky territory – a wacky world of energy drinks, extended dancefloor edits, innovative toilet arrangements, fierce competition and sleep deprivation hallucinations: the strange, surprisingly populous world of “extreme DJing”.
The first half was quite hard but the last bit was the worst. I was hallucinating and seeing shadows. People were holding conversations with me and I couldn’t recall what they had said; at times I was almost not the full ticket. I was given a bowl of fruit and, like in the film Castaway, I turned a pineapple into a character called Wilson. He kept me going.
Continue reading...by Ian McQuaid via Electronic music | The Guardian
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