THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER3, 2022 45
d.j. but with space to dance—can cost
twenty thousand euros.
Solomun and Janson hugged, and
Janson quickly turned back to his con-
trols. D.j.’ing requires concentration.
One is not only selecting tracks but
also splicing them together in tempo,
and in a sympathetic key. Moreover,
modern decks essentially allow a d.j.
to remix tracks while playing them,
and clubbers now expect some impro-
vised wizardry within a set. During the
next hour, several other prominent d.j.s
joined Solomun and Janson in the
booth, among them three Germans—
Adam Port, &ME, and Rampa—
known collectively as Keinemusik. They
produce and play silky, melodic house,
and this summer they were the hot-
test thing in dance music. (&ME and
Rampa produced two tracks on Drake’s
latest album, “Honestly, Nevermind.”)
They also frequently collaborate with
Solomun on remixes. The trio had just
flown in from New York, and they were
headlining the next night at DC10—
an inf luential club near the airport.
They all looked exhausted, but, like as-
pirants in a medieval court, they’d come
to Pacha to pay their respects.
At 2:30a.m., Janson was playing his
final track, a buzzy remix of the 1984
Belgian disco number “Love Games.”
Solomun cued up his first track—“Dos
Blokes,” by the Spanish producer Orion
Agassi—then listened to it on his head-
phones to insure that its beat matched
the outgoing rhythm. Many ravers near
the decks had pupils like bath plugs,
and they greeted Solomun’s approach-
ing set ecstatically. The roiling hook
of “Dos Blokes” poured into the club.
Like almost everybody present, I raised
a hand in the air. While doing so, I
dropped my notebook, then spent an
uncomfortable minute crawling amid
dancing feet to retrieve it. Solomun
flashed a thin smile but hardly acknowl-
edged the clamor. He was at work.
I
biza, a gorgeous Spanish island in
the Mediterranean, is forested with
pines and fringed with dramatic coves.
When Phoenician merchants first ar-
rived, in the seventh century B.C., they
named the island ’ybsm, after Bes, the
Egyptian god associated with music,
dance, and sex. ’Ybsm became Ibiza. In
recent decades, it has been a destina-
tion for transgressive interlopers: beat-
niks, jazz fiends, artists, refugees, hip-
pies, celebrities, yogis, ravers. Walter
Benjamin, who spent time in Ibiza in
the nineteen-thirties, made note of the
inscription on the cathedral’s sundial:
“Ultima multis,” or “The last day for
many.” The sundial has since dis-
integrated, but its message could serve
as a hedonist’s credo: Seize the night.
Clubs began attracting
people to the island, which
is about twice the size of
Martha’s Vineyard, in the
mid-twentieth century. Ac-
cording to “Dope in the
Age of Innocence,” the Irish
émigré Damien Enright’s
vivid memoir about the
counterculture era in Ibiza,
jazz was then the hot sound.
In 1961, Enright wrote, the
island’s night life was fuelled by Ben-
zedrine and alcohol, and centered on a
bar named Domino, from which poured
“the wildest, freest, most innovative
music most of us had ever heard.”
In 1966, two brothers, Ricardo and
Piti Urgell, established a night club
called Pacha outside Barcelona. The
name was suggested by Ricardo’s wife,
who predicted that the club’s profits
would allow him to “live like a pasha.”
(Not long ago, the Urgells sold the
Pacha Group to private-equity inter-
ests for three hundred and fifty mil-
lion euros.) In 1973, the brothers opened
an Ibiza outpost, and it became a melt-
ing pot where hippies hung out with
film directors and pop stars danced
with fishermen.
At the time, the prevailing music
was disco, which was played largely
using conventional instruments. Trac-
ing the genesis of modern dance music,
with its electronic beats and sounds, is
like trying to find the center of a cloud,
but most enthusiasts agree on certain
milestones: Roland drum machines,
David Mancuso’s Manhattan loft par-
ties, Kraftwerk. In the early eighties, a
group of Black Chicago d.j.s steeped
in disco, R. & B., and synth-pop began
playing locally produced dance music
at parties. The Chicago sound had a
strong 4/4 beat, a little bounce, and
often soulful vocals, and it usually
pulsed at about a hundred and twenty
beats per minute. That was house
music. An electronic-music scene also
grew in Detroit, with harder, sparser
tracks that often lacked vocals. That
was techno.
House spread faster. “Last Night a
DJ Saved My Life,” an authoritative
history of the disk jockey, by Bill Brew-
ster and Frank Broughton, tells of a
single record purchase that transformed
Ibiza. In 1985, DJ Alfredo, an Argen-
tinean who played at a gi-
ant Ibiza night club called
Amnesia, bought from an
American dealer his first
house record: “Donnie,” a
single by the It. The track
was spare but passionate,
and Alfredo fell in love. At
Amnesia, he began mixing
the new house sounds with
disco, flamenco, and other
genres. Many dancers aug-
mented the music with Ecstasy—a syn-
thetic drug that had recently arrived
on the island, and which promoted
powerful fellow-feeling.
In 1987, several British d.j.s on va-
cation—Danny Rampling, Paul Oak-
enfold, Johnny Walker, and Nicky
Holloway—took pills and listened to
Alfredo at Amnesia. They became evan-
gelists for house music, and have been
widely credited with bringing it to Brit-
ain. (The “Ibiza Four” were important,
but the story discounts many other
bridges built between disco and elec-
tronic music in Europe; for instance,
d.j.s at the Hamburg gay club Front
were playing house records at least two
years before the Brits heard Alfredo.)
The new genre both offered escape and
demanded commitment. You spent
hours dancing with sweaty strangers,
in thrall to a series of records that flowed
seamlessly into one another.
By the mid-nineties, many new
night clubs had opened in Ibiza. Low-
cost airlines made the island an afford-
able destination. If you loved electronic
music, an Ibiza vacation soon became
a non-negotiable part of the summer.
For top d.j.s, it offered serious money—
and a path to international notoriety.
By the turn of the millennium, Oak-
enfold was playing concerts at Wem-
bley Stadium.
In 2019, more than four million tour-
ists visited Ibiza, which has a population
of a hundred and fifty thousand. Juan
