BLOG 04/08/2020
The Jan Diaries — Listening Is Golden
The column opens on a beach, with two women having a conversation that is really two parallel monologues: neither is listening, each is only loading the next sentence while the other one talks. Jan Kinčl uses that scene, filed in a Croatian summer that also took him to the Moondance festival in Trogir, as the diagnosis for something that goes wrong far more often in a DJ booth than anybody admits.
What the piece covers
A back-to-back set means two DJs alternating one track at a time, a kind of musical ping pong, and Kinčl says he has heard a great many catastrophic ones over the years. The fault is never technical. It is the beach conversation again: two DJs pursuing separate agendas in the same hour, each waiting out the other’s record. The standard he sets is simple and demanding — the point of a b2b is that the end result exceeds the sum of its parts, two musical signatures fusing into something new and telling one story instead of producing confusion.
From there the piece lays out three ways to get there. The first is continuation: paying attention to genre, intensity, instrumentation, the era a record was produced in, its geographical origin and its production style, then matching those parameters closely enough to stay unobtrusive while still leaving a personal mark — a fluent dialogue in which both voices stay recognisable. The second is knowledge, and it is the least forgiving. A DJ whose command runs to one micro-genre has a small vocabulary, and a small vocabulary cannot sustain a conversation. The third is contrast, which works only when it fills a space that has been empty for a while: a well-timed musical joke after a stretch of monotony lands, while contrast for its own sake just sounds disconnected. Experienced DJs pull it off because decades behind the decks let them hear deep connections between records that look unrelated on paper — but Kinčl insists the principle is learnable long before the decades are in.
The part that stayed
The best line is the one that ties the booth back to the beach: “Teško je nastaviti nečiju rečenicu ako ne obraćaš pozornost” — it is hard to finish somebody’s sentence if you are not paying attention. The column stops short of a formula, and says so: the good stuff lives in the balance between flow, knowledge and contrast, and that balance is a subject for another time.
Read the full piece
The full column, in Croatian, is on Red Bull Croatia. Four minutes.