Sometimes an event isn’t really about the music at all.
I was recently invited to DJ at a local art museum as part of something called Opening Menorca 2026, a three-week series of events at galleries and cultural spaces across the island. The project, an initiative of the Menorca tourism board, is meant to position the island as a cultural hub, and while it may be more wishful thinking than anything, I applaud the undertaking; you gotta start somewhere, after all.
What made it especially nice for me was that the museum in question, LÔAC, is a five-minute walk from my house. Maybe less. And the event was scheduled from 6 to 8 p.m. on a Sunday. It doesn’t get much easier than that.
The gig wasn’t without its quirks. It took place in a long, narrow hall with an arched ceiling—a carport, basically—that could comfortably fit about 40 people. Even before I began playing, powdery flakes of lime were falling from the ceiling onto the DJ booth, leaving the equipment looking like I had a terrible case of dandruff. My set was to take place after a brief presentation from a Madrid artist, Iñigo Navarro, but once he was done speaking, the assembled public traipsed off through the rain to visit his exhibition in a chapel about 300 meters away; I wasn’t entirely sure they’d come back. But, perhaps beckoned by the folding tables stocked with free local wine, cheese, and cured meats, they did return. And between the drizzle outside and the refreshments within, it turned out to be a lovely little event.
I hadn’t really known what to expect, so I’d prepared a set of generally listener-friendly ambient and ambient jazz, which turned out to be the right choice. The acoustics weren’t great, so you couldn’t really beatmatch anything with much complexity. But long, tonal fades were fine. And nobody was really there for the music anyway. Some folks sat in plastic stacking chairs arranged along the sides of the room, others mingled by the food. There were grandparents and five-year-olds; the average age was probably in the upper 40s. But all sorts of friends, and friends of friends, from various milieux and contexts were there. The mayor showed up. There was even a Futurism Restated subscriber who happened to be visiting Menorca with his family for the week, which was a particularly nice surprise (thanks Anders!). The whole thing was ultimately just a nice excuse to gather together as a community and while away the last few hours of daylight on a rainy Sunday in April.
In preparing for the set, I ended up recording an hour-long practice session at home the night before. It’s pretty similar to what I played at LÔAC, but with the benefit of some more intricate mixing in the back half, the sorts of blends I didn’t want to risk in such a boomy room with no monitors. It’s a mix of old (Dettinger, Detroit Escalator Co., Jan Jelinek’s Gramm alias) and new (Jonny Nash, Appleblim), including unreleased material from Laurence Pike’s forthcoming Balmat album and an unreleased track from Total Blue’s Anthony Calonico, off his solo debut on Music From Memory in May.
I’ve uploaded it the mix here as the fourth installment in Futurism Restated’s Eavesdropping series, as an exclusive for paying subscribers.
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