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	DJ TIESTO Turntable technician

This year DJ Tiesto, from Breda in Holland, stands as the number-one DJ in the world, at least according to thedjlist.com. A week ago Tuesday he performed at Avalon — to a club three-quarters full — and demonstrated why he is rated so highly. He does not play his sets in a DJ booth, out of sight, but on a stage, where he and not the dancer is the center of attention. His set brimmed over with technique, technique, and more technique. And his sound was the Europop and techno-beat mainstream, long familiar. The crowd loved it. Tiesto is tireless. He moves from quick cuts to soundboard distortions, often layering the two; he jumps from deep beats to skimpy, cool melodicisms; he drops in some voice samples; he changes the texture of his beats. Often he seems to do all of these almost at once. The music boils and rolls, frenzied, rarely catching its breath. How he manages to hold his fireworks show together is a puzzle. Yet he does it and at the same time keeps the beat, like a jazz drummer doing one of those exhausting entire-drum-kit solos that elicit volleys of audience applause.

The problem with Tiesto’s approach, at least as demonstrated at Avalon, is that two hours of exhaustive drum-kit soloing has little to do with the undulating, soulful rhapsody that is disco, and that by making himself the focus, he takes back from the dancers the primacy that disco gave to them and that was one of disco’s most important innovations. In disco, the music emanates from every part of the club, from all of its speakers, enveloping the dancer and spotlighting him or her. Tiesto’s music emanated from him alone. There he stood, with two turntables and a sound box in front and a black screen in back (behind which he kept his 12-inch singles; every so often the stage lights would darken as he retrieved more vinyl from that stash) and video screens on either side of him, in which one could see him, now with his headset in the ears, now out. His face remained expressionless, almost zen in its calm as he wreaked his ceaseless furor. Turntable magic it was; disco it wasn’t.