The Dream Party: Dream or Reality?

The very best party is probably still ahead of me... For a party to turn out well, it has to be a small club, for about 300 people, with good sound, really high-quality DJing in particular, and a lot of air conditioners. And it should be somewhere in Singapore, on the ocean shore. I wouldn't play there myself: the best party is the one where you're not working. I happily go to parties even when I'm not playing, I even dance on the dancefloor. The ideal would be to gather my friends, and from among the celebrities I'd invite Danny Tenaglia and David Gahan. It would be a large crowd of good, beautiful, stylish people. The music - definitely not techno. And the bar wouldn't sell strong alcoholic drinks, so that everyone drank champagne. And after the party everyone would board a ship and sail off to some island for an after-party to do a barbecue...

For an ideal party there have to be many factors. One of them is a grown-up, prepared audience. The ideal party is when in everyone's eyes I see an understanding of what's happening. It can be any place, there might even be no music as such, because a party is, first and foremost, communication. Here many people, when they come to a club, are tuned exclusively to consuming music. In the West people come, above all, to have fun. This is, first of all, of course, the failure of our professional work, because in Russia there are very few DJs who have a charisma of their own.
A party has to have a scenario, in any case. I remember, when I was starting out, it was very important for promoters at the very least to build the line-up correctly. Back then DJs were more vivid, there were fewer records, at a single party you could quite easily hear some vocal concert, and house, and closer to the end - trance and drum'n'bass. That is, arranging the DJs correctly is a whole science. And of course, back then there wasn't such churn. People, coming to a club, didn't rush off to a second, a third; it was one shared story from beginning to end.
Naturally, a party is a kind of dramaturgy, theatricality. But that's only for those people who need something more besides the music, quality sound, a lighting man doing his job and a good DJ. Basically, people (the audience) got what they wished for: every weekend - 10-20 excellent artists and musicians, from rock all the way to top DJs. But now, having eaten their fill, they don't know what to do next. All that remains is to invent a new musical style, or a new drug.
I'm lucky, my Dream Party awaits me - on my birthday, 22 September, at the club "Shanti" I'll be playing with my favourite musician and DJ The Timewriter. There I'll see the people dearest to me. And every person should strive to realise their best ideas, because it's through their embodiment that the cosmos is built.

In my experience there have been successful parties, and as a rule I played at them. But now I want to do something of my own. And my Dream Party would take place in the open air by the sea: crystal-clear sea air and a starry sky. This summer, in Montenegro, I found the perfect spot for it: a café with a big dancefloor, set in a bay of sheer cliffs covered in pines. By day it's a sunbathing spot closed off from the other holidaymakers, and by night... you won't find a better place for a party. I'll try to throw a party there next year.
And since I'm talking about an open-air, the scenery here is created by nature itself. All you need is to think through the light sources so they don't interfere with looking at the stars and support the atmosphere. As for the audience, the presence of famous people is not the main measure of a party's success. Although some figures are, after all, good acquaintances of mine, so I'd make a few calls to show-business figures worn out by touring and performing, with an invitation simply to relax. I'd see to it that all the guests felt good: from comfortable, quality-tuned sound and a DJ booth to skilled bartenders at the bar and a spot for those who want to rest... If you're going to throw a party, you have to keep every little detail under control. The music at such a party would be unobtrusive at the start and active at the peak - so that everyone who wanted to could dance. Costume events and parties with a particular dress code are rather curious to look at. People - at heart they're always children, they want to take a creative approach to their image and break the rules, rather than follow "fashionable" clichés. As for the seaside open-air - I'll have to call Neptune and summon a shoal of mermaids for go-go.

Lately I've grown so tired of parties that right now, for me, the ideal is not a party at all - it's the absence of one. Otherwise, it's definitely a small club, where 70% of the people are familiar to you. On the other hand, a successful party can happen in any place, even a huge one. Probably a successful party is when everything coincides, when the mood of the DJ and of the crowd that has come coincide. In this case the promoter's work is very important. It determines what kind of people will come to the party, whether they'll come at all, and, indeed, the mood, the sense of celebration. I'm no fan of bringing in any theatricality. But on the other hand, if you're performing alongside some wonderful dancers, like Danila Polyakov and Masha, that helps you enormously as a DJ. In that sense, if you're lucky and excellent professionals are performing with you, then the presence of anything besides the music is a big plus. It's the same with design. When parties are rare, then of course it's nice to think something up, but nobody does that now - the clubs run their usual programme. But if you're going to change the aesthetic, then I prefer not clubs but open-airs, like TusArt. First of all I'd invite friends, not any famous people. Besides, I don't even know them. Although all our friends are partly celebrities too. I'm a bit outside the glamorous crowd, that is, if it includes characters from the society pages, they're more brutal than glamorous. The music - fun. Fun, varied, not tedious, dirty. And if I weren't playing there, I wouldn't go to the party at all.