Carl Cox definitely has his fans. "I came all the way from Philadelphia to see him!" said the guy dancing next to me in an Avalon packed with Hispanic and Asian boys last Saturday night. As it happens, Cox too came a long way to be seen — from London, where he’s attained top status as an acid-house turntable DJ. What brought him was the recent release of his first US-issued CD, Global (ffrr), a session featuring the kind of deep, plush rhythms that are atypical of acid but dominate American house.
Cox is a purist DJ, a throwback to the beginnings of house. He brought a minimum of equipment to his gig, just one box of 12-inch singles, and he used two turntables only, no tapes or CDs. He took the turntables at 11:30 and played a full 150 minutes of the loudest New York–style hard-house I’ve ever heard. Loudest and hardest of all was the opening track from his CD, "Natural Born Grooves," by Kickback, a one-minute track that he extended over and over again. Deep drums punched the air and were thickened by even deeper atmospheric bass lines as streaky sound effects and tiny hi-hat drumming glistened, all of it non-stop except during the rhythm stop breaks, when, without slackening the beat at all, Cox used the silence of his bottoms to hold the crowd in suspense, only to hit it even harder coming out of the break. From hard rhythms to hard stop breaks, he made his beats rock.
Cox is no mixer, in the New York DJ sense of the word. Only rarely did he use the quick cut (in which the DJ jumps from one record to another), and his extended mixes didn’t feature long overlays (in which one record’s music plays alongside another’s, eventually giving way to it). The soul-music origin — radiant, prettified, and sinuous — of these classic DJ devices is foreign to the music he laid down at Avalon. Rather, his style of push-hard, exhaust-your-body, take-a-breath, get-punched-again derives from funk, a work music with little use for looking pretty. The work that his huge deep rhythms demanded was body work, the rhythm of the stripped-to-the-waist boy gymnasts who set the tone (and the style) on so many American dance-club floors. Cox didn’t just work the bodies of his screaming, exerting Avalon fans, he hit them full force, held them in anticipation, hurled his music at them, as if he were a soccer striker and they an outclassed bunch of goalkeepers. This image was made manifest when at one point in his mix he programmed atop his beat a line of (sampled) soccer hooligans chanting. The crowd chanted too.
