DJ Sasha:
Crossfade into the Digital Domain
Club DJs are part magician, part travel agent. It’s their job to create an atmosphere, to keep the night and the mood flowing, to take the audience on a journey from one hour to the next. And it must be done seamlessly, for if the audience can tell when one track ends and other begins, the DJ isn’t doing his job properly.
DJ Sasha is a master of the seamless journey.
Reinvention
When Sasha (a.k.a. Alexander Coe) first started out, his instrument was a box of vinyl and a couple of decks. The club audiences were small but enthusiastic. These days he shows up at clubs with his Mac rather than with a stack of records, often drawing audiences numbering in the tens of thousands.
He’s also expanded his musical horizons, not only spinning records, but releasing them as well. He has created best-selling CDs that blend house, trance, progressive breaks, and world music influences — guaranteed floor-fillers. And he’s a highly sought-after producer, having remixed tracks for artists as varied as Madonna, Pet Shop Boys and Simply Red.
Sasha’s evolution from small club DJ to solo artist to DJ icon in many ways reflects the evolution of house music itself. What began as an underground evolution of disco in the early ’80s quickly morphed into a global showcase for electronic music grounded in hard beats and sly, hip grooves flavoured with everything from hardcore hip-hop riffs to Indian ragas. This art form has continued to reinvent itself ever since. It’s DJs like Sasha who drive the change.
The Future
Sasha’s typical setup includes an iMac G5 and Ableton Live software. This combination gives him tremendous freedom to manipulate music on the fly, creating unique performances for each show. But his first public performance with a computer as his instrument wasn’t exactly by choice.
In 2004, while putting the finishing touches on his acclaimed CD, “Involver”, Sasha was asked by his label to perform cuts from the unfinished work at a crucial PR event. Understandably reluctant to have the media hear a work in progress, he proposed to play live at the event, presenting his music on a PowerBook running Ableton Live.
“I sequenced the album but with all these kinds of rough mixes”, Sasha recalls. “I basically DJed off the computer and it was like, ‘Ding! This is incredible. This is amazing. This is the future’”. It was more than the future for Sasha — it was an epiphany.
Remixing on the Fly
With a little help from some friends who helped him create a custom controller for Ableton on the Mac, Sasha found new freedom to DJ in a completely new way. “It allows you to make real edits spontaneously”, he says. “To do very seamless two-track mixes. That style of mixing has always been something I’ve been associated with, and this allows you to that brilliantly. And you can throw in extra stuff. You can extend, break down, chop up intros, throw in effects. It turns it into a really hands-on experience”.
Sasha’s custom-designed controller allows him to control Ableton Live on his Mac.
This spontaneity lets him create a completely new sound that fits with the peak of a DJ set. “And it sounds like a remix”, Sasha says. “That’s definitely a fun part of it. When you can do stuff like that, it’s very powerful”. What makes it even better is that it’s a true original for that one event, that particular night. “That’s the great thing”, he says. “They’re not going to hear that remix anywhere else. Sometimes in online forums they’ll talk about remixes of songs I’m playing. But they’re not remixes — just chopped up versions. Anything that kind of confuses people, I’m really into”.