The name of the pose

At the sixth anniversary of the promoter group Zeppelin, the headliner will be DJ Ferry Corsten — one of the titans of trance music and number five in the overall ranking of DJ Mag magazine.

One of the most popular DJs on the planet, Ferry Corsten, when asked when he realized the importance of his craft, answers that he once ran the following experiment: he went out into the street and asked the first ten children he came across what they wanted to become when they grew up. In reply he heard about the usual firemen and cosmonauts, but four firmly said they wanted to become DJs. That means almost half of future Europeans are looking in the same direction Ferry is aiming — the Danish prince at the court of the Dutch king of trance Tiësto, creator of numerous transnational hits, holder of more than twenty creative pseudonyms and a great master of all sorts of eccentricities.
Thus, at the beginning of this year the news flew around the electronic-music community that Corsten would henceforth perform exclusively under the name LEF, or "Loud, Electronic, Ferocious." Later it turned out these rumours were greatly exaggerated. As Ferry's press agent and, on the side, his wife Lea explained at length afterwards, Corsten has no intention of changing his passport, and LEF is merely a new concept of parties and club sound thought up by Ferry to stand out from the cohort of trance DJs. Its essence is that it doesn't matter what music you play — trance, house or electro — the main thing is that it be fast and spirited. Corsten test-drove such a well-conceived and, above all, timely idea on his mix "Creamfields 2005," where, besides the customary mastodons of "symphonic" trance Above and Beyond and Gabriel and Dresden, he included electro tracks from Anthony Rother, Thomas Andersson and even "Never Win" by Fischerspooner.
Having shown a reasonable democratism in music and, effectively, declared the beginning of trance's diffusion into electro, Ferry remained a conservative in everything concerning DJ technique. In a period of the wholesale abandonment of vinyl and the switch to laptops and emulator programs, Corsten still plays records, allowing himself only occasionally to resort to the help of compact discs. "I really like all these modern programs and devices," Ferry says of the relentless technical progress, "they'll undoubtedly change our profession. However, personally it seems to me that the main thing in a good set is how artistically the DJ behaves at the turntables and the mixer. You'll agree that watching a guy buried in the rectangle of his laptop is boring." One has to think that it wasn't the thunderous music but precisely the sight of the DJ artistically raging before a many-thousand-strong crowd, making the people react to every gesture and every smirk, that played the main role in the choice of profession of those four children Corsten surveyed.

this text was originally published in the magazine TimeOut Moscow (C)

December 16, the Mansion on Savvinskaya Embankment, Zeppelin Pro-Godskitchen: Andy 'Redanka' Holt (UK), Ferry Corsten (Netherlands), Ronald Van Gelderen (Netherlands), Michelle Quasar, Vesna, Vlada, Portnov, Rudyk Ivan