The Jan Diaries — The Etiquette of the Club Warm-Up

Red Bull Hrvatska · The Jan Diaries · 20 February 2019

Written from Kreuzberg in February 2019, this entry of The Jan Diaries takes on a subject Jan Kinčl had been circling for years: the warm-up set, which he calls the most difficult and least noticed discipline in DJing. His observation is that colleagues both younger and older struggle with it, and that almost nobody talks about it the following day.

What the piece covers

A good night, the column concedes, is made of many things — sound, lighting, interior, drink prices, the behaviour of the staff. But the factor that decides how far an evening can go is the one nobody mentions afterwards. Kinčl argues that the warm-up is the most important slot of the night, because it either leaves every scenario open or locks the evening into something linear and predictable. His analogy is a multi-course meal in which the appetiser is meant to prepare rather than satisfy. He learned the craft in the most direct way available: years of back-to-back sets with Matija Duić at CYCLE, the monthly Zagreb night, starting at eleven in an empty room and building the atmosphere from nothing. What those nights proved is that restraint and timing measurably raise the odds that a party reaches its full potential.

The practical part is about perception. Watch how the room fills, who walks in, how they carry themselves; early arrivals go to the bar, talk, and absorb the mood in their own time. The warm-up DJ’s job is not to be anyone’s favourite DJ or to be noticed at all, but to make the room comfortable and raise the intensity in increments small enough that people start moving without registering the decision. Lead an audience from A to B to C and they will allow far more than if they are hit with C immediately — a principle, he notes, that extends well beyond clubs. Fifteen years ago in Berlin he watched German DJs master exactly this: he does not always enjoy an entire night of slow, drawn-out mixing, but the good ones are skilled enough that ten hours pass without anyone noticing.

The part that stayed

The etiquette section is the sharpest. A warm-up directly determines what the guest can do; experienced DJs turn up fifteen minutes early precisely to read the crowd and work out how much room they have been left. Kinčl admits to the younger DJ’s mistake of trying to impress a guest with the wildest warm-up imaginable, and notes that the problem is worse when he plays live with Regis, where the palette is narrower than in pure DJing. He has tricks for salvaging an amateur hour handed to him, but wonders aloud whether fifteen minutes of research into who else is playing is really so much to ask. His verdict is unhedged — “Odgovorno tvrdim da je warm-up termin najbitniji dio večeri”, he writes, claiming responsibly that the warm-up is the most important slot of the evening. Peak-time-only DJs become one-dimensional; those who study the warm-up can handle any room, and his example is Volcov from Verona.

Read the full piece

The full column, in Croatian, is on Red Bull Croatia. Six minutes.

The Jan Diaries | Bonton klupske predigre → redbull.com