I’ve written almost 7000 self-indulgent words in 19 posts about DJs now. And I’ve had 20 days to think about what I was going to write about Scott Hardkiss. I’m still stuck.
It’s very difficult to explain why he’s at the top of this list, even though I knew from the beginning he’d be there. There are a lot of things that other DJs did better. I had great nights dancing to Scott’s sets, but only a couple of them, and in my case they weren’t episodes of hedonistic lore. He was not the charismatic host, or the technical wizard, or the influential pioneer. But he was the musician.
By which I mean, as a DJ, Scott Hardkiss was a true musician, and the simple things that a DJ does -- buying and selecting records, ordering and mixing them – were actually part of a coherent creative vision, and when he played, the whole of the music became dramatically more than the sum of the parts. I can’t really say that about anyone else on this list.
Now please allow me to backtrack. I don’t think this matters. Most great DJs are not trying to compose with the turntables, and those who stake the claim, or have had others stake it for them, are almost always terrible, terrible trance DJs whose idea of a creative vision is playing three records that sound exactly alike simultaneously.
But Scott was not one of them. He was a musician, and his mixes were music: beautiful, ascendant, funky, percussive, warm, psychedelic, dubby … completely original music. The closest sonic analogue would probably be Andrew Weatherall’s era-defining productions for Primal Scream and One Dove – two of my very favourite albums. That Scott could improvise something so beautiful as a live DJ with other people’s records and some simple sound effects still blows my mind.
Oddly, his own studio productions only occasionally got to that place. But when he’d put them in his DJ sets they would take flight. That is not something I’ve seen before or since, and it’s a pretty good indication that Scott Hardkiss was truly one of a kind.
http://www.mixcloud.com/ohm_r/scott-hardkiss-live-room-zero-sidea/
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