>The DJ isn’t doing anything there, though. That’s just the breakdown of the four tet remix of Eric Prydz — Opus. He’s just playing it straight.

No, no, a thousand times no. What you witnessed in that video is one of the most inspired moments in the modern history of house DJing. For the benefit of all readers, I'll try and explain the context and subtext of what's happening.

Opus by Eric Prydz is a truly absurd piece of music. It takes the build-and-release of tension that defines modern "EDM" and teases it out to the point of self-parody, relentlessly building up over the course of four minutes, exploiting every psychoacoustic trick in the book. It is the ne plus ultra of cynical house music, a track that basks in the vapidity of the commercial "EDM" scene. For all that, it carries real emotional weight, primarily because of the underlying dissonance between the adrenaline-fuelled hype of its structure and its harmonic progression; at the great climactic moment, it modulates from A major to the relative F# minor with a series of descending arpeggios, simultaneously soaring to the heavens and dying away to nothing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRA82xLsb_w
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcpFCit6r5c

The Four Tet remix profoundly subverts the original composition, reverting to the more contemplative structures of traditional house music. It hints at formulaic tension-and-release, but it never delivers, it never reaches that climactic moment of euphoria. Opus is the sound of four thousand people in a superclub going absolutely wild; the Four Tet remix is the echoes of that moment on the taxi ride home, the ringing in your ears as you lie in bed in the early morning, the bitter aftertaste of the MDMA comedown.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47nIoXraa_Q

The Amnesia closing party is the full stop at the end of the Ibiza season, a non-stop 12 hour bacchanal to say farewell to the summer. Once a semi-private affair mainly attended by DJs and club workers, it's now the hottest ticket of the season, a landmark event for those who consider themselves veteran clubbers.

Maceo's decision to play the Four Tet remix wasn't a track selection, it was a philosophical statement. The sun has risen and the last moment of the last party is looming. The crowd are cheering and whistling, they're raising their arms to the heavens in anticipation of this great moment of euphoria, the drop to end all drops. They know what's coming, their phones are recording in anticipation, but the moment never arrives. Through his choice of track and cue point, Maceo pulls the rug from under the feet of the crowd, turning climax into anti-climax. He turns a moment of euphoria into a moment of contemplation and self-reflection. If you watch closely, you can see the confusion and disorientation of the crowd, you can see a room full of people who don't know what to do with themselves.

https://thump.vice.com/en_uk/article/78jvne/this-video-of-co...

That's the artistry of DJing in a nutshell. It all exists on a meta level, it's a conversation that's happening entirely in the audience's heads. The American "EDM" festival scene has tried to turn this conversation into a mere transaction, but there are still DJs with the skill and sophistication to challenge their audiences and confound their expectations, to create moments of profound complexity out of sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats.