19. DJ Harvey

19. DJ Harvey 

The only time I ever saw Harvey in person was at the height of my own activity as a DJ. I was very interested in technique, and spending a lot of time learning to dothings with records that seemed very hard and very important.

Harvey was the antidote. His reputation as a DJ was (and probably still is) unmatched. He is maybe the only DJ to successfully cultivate a proper mystique, partly by being weird and remote but mostly through pure musical iconoclasm. By 2001, when I saw him in San Francisco, he was already something of a legendary figure.

What was important to me was that the legend turned out to have nothing to do with doing difficult things with records. In fact, Harvey did absurd things. Sometimes he would just let the music stop. Sometimes he would change the volume of the record ever so slightly, an action he undertook with the bearing of a watchmaker calibrating a tiny gear. He was ambitious in his selections and totally capable technically, but that was not the point. Sometimes he would seem not to be paying any attention to the records at all, and to be watching the crowd like a screen, as if *they* were the ones making the music, and he was deciding whether or not to adjust *them.*

And it was all brilliant. His reputation was fully deserved. I had a blast, and everyone in the club got what was going on instinctively. And it changed me as a DJ: all those hard things that mattered a lot – I realized that they really didn’t matter at all, that I’d probably never be very good at them, anyway, and that being a serious DJ actually required that I not take myself seriously.

http://www.mixcloud.com/artistsupport/dj-harvey-live-kissfm-1993/