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Starting something new is rarely simple. Opening a book without yet knowing its characters, diving into a TV series with the fear of wasting your time, even picking a new restaurant: each time there’s a quiet resistance. Not a heroic struggle, but a subtle heaviness, a laziness mixed with comfort. Trusting what we already know is always easier.
Music is no exception. Today, platforms overflow with albums, algorithmic playlists, and tracks carefully calibrated by code. We are saturated. This abundance pretends to be freedom, but it’s closer to an endless buffet where appetite fades through overexposure. In this fog, we retreat to the familiar, our “forever” playlists, our teenage anthems, the chord progressions our brains have already learned to reward.
And this is precisely where DJs should step in, not just as transmitters of music, but as antidotes to our cultural inertia. Because plunging into the unknown is difficult, almost unnatural, we sometimes need a firm, curious hand to lead us toward territories we would never have crossed alone.
Today, we intellectualize everything. We dissect the gestures of daily life as if they were equations to solve. We read op-eds, listen to podcasts, feed an endless loop of analysis and micro-debates that turn every choice, from what we eat to office politics, into a matter of reflection. We have, or rather we must have, an opinion on everything.
This permanent hyper-rationalization leads to a quiet but deep fatigue: the urge to seek refuge in comfort, to return to safe things, to rewatch series we already know, to order the same dishes at the same restaurants, to replay playlists that recycle our memories.
Going to a club, at least for those who immersed themselves in techno and house, long stood as the exact opposite of that logic. It was an antidote. Not a space of control but a release. A place where thought was suspended, where the body took over, and where trust shifted. You didn’t walk in to choose, but to abandon choice. You entrusted your night to someone else. To the DJ, the central yet unsanctified figure of the ritual, or to the venue’s artistic direction, which had carefully imagined the night. The implicit promise was simple: let go, you’re in good hands.
This is where the art of curation comes alive. A DJ doesn’t just play records (or wav), they construct a narrative within the saturated flow of music. An artistic director doesn’t just fill a calendar, they define an identity strong enough to hold together strangers gathered in the dark. In a world where everything is available, scarcity no longer lies in access but in trust: trust that what is about to happen won’t simply be familiar but will be necessary, unsettling, liberating.
A good club, a good DJ, a good DA all know that the value of a night isn’t measured by how many familiar tracks were played, but by how many unknowns the crowd was willing to embrace. They are the guides who make the unfamiliar habitable.
Outside of my “comfort” tracks, the songs I listen to most in my personal playlist come from DJ sets by selectors who truly know their craft: Cassy, Sven Väth, Gerd Janson, or Avalon Emerson…
If we expect DJs and artistic directors to set us free, then they must embrace the role of being remedies to our musical laziness, not providers of comfort. Their job is not to reproduce the warmth of a reassuring playlist, but to shake us out of the torpor into which platforms and oversaturation have pushed us. We don’t go to clubs to find what we already know, we go to confront what we didn’t even know we were looking for.
The danger, of course, is the temptation of ease. Booking safe headliners, playing predictable tracks, recycling sounds that already dominate everywhere, this flatters our inertia instead of challenging it. But a club worthy of its name, and a DJ who truly believes in their craft, must dare discomfort: that moment when the crowd hesitates, doubts, and then lets itself be swallowed by the unknown. That is where liberation happens.
In a world oversaturated with choice, DJs and artistic directors hold not only aesthetic power but an almost political responsibility: to re-educate our tired ears, to teach us again how to love the new, to restore the appetite for discovery. Not by leading us gently back to the familiar, but by throwing us, softly, or not, into the vertigo of the unfamiliar, whatever the BPM.
If we expect DJs and DAs to set us free, then they must accept being the antidote to our cultural laziness, not its accomplices. Dropping an unknown track is like offering a leap into the void: it may cause hesitation, but it can also spark the flame that reignites everything.
Jeff Mills speaks of this without hesitation. His approach, particularly in Exhibitionist 2, lays bare the inner mechanics of DJing: the intention that binds what one thinks, what one does, and what the other feels Detroit Music Magazine.
It is not mechanical comfort, but a shared trust, a pact between artist and audience.
Nina Kraviz too: interrupting control to play a track she received ten minutes earlier, testing it in the car, then dropping it into her set, this raw, imperfect, stress moment is precisely what makes the set and club unforgettable( To Be Magazine.)
So a choice must be made. For DJs and artistic directors, it is the choice between the safe and the unknown. For the audience, it is the choice between the comfort of habit and blind trust in those who shape our nights. It is precisely in this encounter that our minds can be freed from excess, from algorithms, from saturation.
I want to be able to dive into a dancefloor and know that the DJ, the DA, are there for me for us. That they are a discreet but essential remedy to cultural suffocation. A boom-boom ootnz-ootnz that heals, a repetition that in truth is no repetition at all. Because here lies the real paradox: techno, though built on repetition, renews itself far more than an automated playlist, than a feed recycling our memories as we walk in circles down a familiar corridor.
So take risks. Offer us the unknown. The audience will learn to trust you again and maybe, in that shared vertigo, we’ll recover the club’s original promise: a space of freedom where discovery is still possible.