Derrick May is in the house. But first…
I remember back in the UK at a night called Scratch watching Mixmaster Mike, the Beasties turntablist, deliver the most devastating display of scratch-mixing I’ve ever seen. At one point he warped one of the vinyls to distort the sound – and that shit didn’t even skip.

When it comes to dance music, it’s a different game – breakbeat and hip hop djs are all about quick changes and sudden drops, creating a fragmented tapestry that combines elements of different tracks; dance music is about seamless mixing and tweaking the levels to create peaks and troughs.
So back to Derrick May.

One of the Godfathers of Techno in a haven of rock – seems like a non-sequitur right, but to give the Hard Rock crew their dues, it was a pretty good set up, with the dancefloor taking on at least the semblance of a club, thanks to two giant screens with some mad projections and of course one of the best soundsystems on the island.

May came on just before two and for the next couple of hours treated a jubilant crowd to some genuine turntable mastery. There wasn’t a moment where he wasn’t working a track, dropping them in almost like a hip hop DJ, cutting the mid range, dropping the bass, twisting beats out of shape. It was a privilege to witness. It was techno, but softened by lots of synthesizer and housey vocals
Respect to Hard Rock Café for throwing the gig – but boy, we wanna see the man at 66 – that would be nitro…