DVJ Den Tait. New Horizons of Club Entertainment

Technological progress is advancing by leaps and bounds. Only yesterday we were listening to compact discs, and today we've moved on to snow-white iPods. Even little old ladies use mobile phones and pocket computers. Against this general backdrop, DJs with vinyl (or CD) look like protected dinosaurs. But the inventors have reached club entertainment too. At Fortdance 6, besides the record line-ups and everything else, a very important event took place. For the first time in Russia a revolutionary new art form for clubs was presented - DVJ-ing (combined mixing of video and sound). The DVJ was Den Tait, a 25-year-old guy from London who has devoted almost half of his life to electronic music.

For several years now Den has been part of Pioneer's professional DJ equipment testing team; alongside Roger Sanchez and James Zabiela, he tries out all of the company's new products. He was one of the first DJs to make full use in his set of the unique capabilities of the revolutionary CD-DVD player "Pioneer DVJ-X1", which lets the DJ create his own video clips by combining audio and video streams during his set, and in this way he became one of the founding fathers of DVJ-ing. 44100 decided to find out whether Den enjoyed performing in Russia.

Yes, quite. I'd never been to Russia before this. And I was simply blown away by the
friendliness, energy and enthusiasm of Russian clubbers. These people really know how to party properly! Besides, the forts themselves are a unique venue for such an enormous party. As a veteran of Ibiza and the Miami music conferences, I can say that the organization and production were excellent. The zone I played in was beautifully decorated and equipped. There's no greater pleasure for a DVJ than playing in a place with 12 plasma panels and a huge projector!

All the DJs who played before Mylo were excellent. I really liked how much they all love house music. At big events like this they mostly play fairly hard trance. So Russians have very, very decent taste. I really enjoyed playing with Katrin Vesna - in my opinion she's very talented and, most importantly, she looks great and moves beautifully behind the "decks".

I studied design at university and worked as a freelancer for a long time. And that helps me a lot in working on my exclusive DVJ material. Learning how to work with video is nothing more than the next step after you've learned to create websites and print work.

Two DVJ-X1s, a video mixer connected to a Pioneer DJM 1000 audio mixer. And screens to display it all on. In a small club a few plasma panels are enough. Larger venues require far more serious kit.

Ha-ha! I really like what Sander Kleinenberg does. He has very interesting and original video material, and having been to his Everybody party I was very impressed. No less cool is James Zabiela. He's a real fan and enthusiast of DVJ-ing. He's especially good at working with scenes everyone knows from Hollywood films.

The Chemical Brothers - Believe. Man, those robots are scary.

Hmm, right around when this interview comes out, another PLASA exhibition opens in London, and a new device that everyone's long been waiting for will be presented there. But for now I can't say anything more.

Not often, but it's happened. Sometimes a girl in a noisy club asks, "What's your name?". And then she thinks she's met Darren Tate. Ha-ha