4.30.21 by Matty McPherson
It struck me as blasphemous that DJ VLK (not pictured) would be accused of playing festivals in Europe. I mean, it is just blatantly not true that DJ VLK, an upstanding citizen of a European entity, would do such a thing. Plus, who exactly would be the type of festival to book DJ VLK?
You, yes YOU, claim that 2020’s Ballermann Partykeller is a dead ringer for the 1-2am slot at an Electric Sun Desert Festival type festival? I mean I just have to refute; VLK seems more like the ‘3am…somewhere’ eternal afterparty kinda fella when (to quote dronegaze hero Whettman Chelmets) “everybody’s over all the stuff they put in their bodies but someone walks over to the turntables and just starts messing around.”
Oh my apologies! You meant to cite Nun Darme Stu Turmiento — his latest dispatch from within the Strategic Tape Reserve — as definitive proof of his EDM festival capabilities. Well… Let me think about this. You see, what set 2020’s Ballermann Partykeller ahead of the competition was the gleeful curation that VLK brought to the turntable. Electroclash schlager, in addition to “interviews with the hottest Mallorca celebrities, such as Maite Kelly and Mickie Krause?!” I mean, it was a match made in heaven — if your idea of heaven is like mine and involves voices shrieking from a demon oblivion against the tightest of schlager bops on pitch-perfect loops. For a 60 minute mixtape, it felt like both a complete joke and the strongest energy flash counter to any of V/Vm’s mixes of an era gone by.
Nun Darme Stu Turmiento is more concise; a 35 minute zone cut in half across Side A and B. Yet, “this is the second release[!] covering VLK’s employment history following 2018’s ‘Avril and Sean in Camden’.” This time, it is a Hoboken Italian restaurant that no longer exists; where a “small one-speaker portable radio tuned to WKTU, New York’s premier late-90s dance-pop station [could easily be heard] on busy evenings when all of the booths were filled, [by] less well-regarded patrons could be seated at one of the small tables next to the kitchen door.” Why anyone would complain about “the disorienting multi-genre sound mix” is beyond me. Acting as a “sonic historical reconstruction of the environment,” VLK has practically leveled up to both a mix wizard and an honorary #italiano.
Immediately, as soon as the tape starts, VLK is already taking those old world voices and updating them for the modern Ferric Oxide enthusiast. Having truly used all the power that comes with current era digital pitch-shifting innovation, VLK really brings me into the hustle and bustle of a Wednesday night busboy shift: the slow, atmospheric meanderings against rapid action electro-pop beat blasts — oh and a litany of drop-dead vocal quip fuckery. For its 35 minutes, Nun Darme Stu Turmiento is unrivaled in its sense of space recollection and the uncanny echoes that follow.
To say it’s funny would be a disservice — after all this is literally a DJ’s coming of age story, damnit! However, I cannot stop cackling at just how well DJ VLK’s visionary approach to cultural synthesis and spatial reconstruction outright…bops. It begs a close ear, as the kind of sensations that VLK’s dance-ontology traffics in is not uncommon to the food service worker that dashes between Top 40 at the register and E2-E4 as the dishes. Throughout the tape, VLK sprinkles in dozens of serendipitous dance tracks. There’s a Donkey Kong country zone created entirely out of pitch-warped vocals and beat drops. A funky cyber bleep n’ horn section that closes side A without warning! To top it off, the greatest display of “love” since Nathan Fielder forced it out of a “Smokers Allowed” cast member!
So, is DJ VLK a dead ringer for that 1am slot? Christ I hope so, as much as any food service worker should. Look, what I know in my heart is that DJ VLK is a hero, a patriot, and a true party starter! If the world has sense, then all the left field meat markets will be playing this by the year’s end. You better do yourself a service and pick this one up from the Strategic Tape Reserve before they run out of their tape rations of this beast!
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