48 THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER3, 2022
me, “I’m blessed that I don’t have to
think about money now.” But, he em-
phasized, “I was happy before. ”
Solomun’s +1 concept was risky, be-
cause it depended so heavily on his al-
lure. He also insisted on redesigning
Pacha’s main room, because, as he told
me, “the feng shui wasn’t right.” The
d.j. booth was near a balcony and faced
both the dance f loor and the V.I.P.
area. Solomun wanted to play directly
to people who had bought general-ad-
mission tickets, and with his back to
the V.I.P.s. He asked for the booth to
be moved to the center of the club.
His contract additionally stipulated
that he be the only d.j. allowed to make
use of this arrangement, and so his be-
spoke booth was wheeled in on Sun-
days and wheeled out on Monday
afternoons. “He wasn’t into the V.I.P.—
it was a little bit of a slap on the wrist
for them,” Hulme said. “But it turned
out the V.I.P.s absolutely loved it, be-
cause they felt like they were in the
booth with him.”
Solomun’s first season at Pacha made
a small profit. By the second season,
every Solomun+1 night was full. Plu-
tocrats fought for space behind the d.j.
booth. Hulme remembers selling a sec-
tion of the V.I.P. area for fifty thou-
sand euros to a group that left the club
after two hours. The section was then
resold. Hulme also recalls that celeb-
rities, including the Brazilian soccer
star Ronaldo, had to wait to enter the
booth. “It became the toast of the town,”
Hulme said. “Half the plus-ones, we’d
never heard of.... It became very ap-
parent that it was all about him.”
W
hy would anybody go to a club
especially to listen to a d.j. play-
ing other people’s records? Until my
mid-thirties, this question confounded
me. I enjoyed a wide variety of genres,
but—apart from a mercifully brief jun-
gle phase in high school—I hardly ever
listened to dance music, which I expe-
rienced mostly through singles on the
radio. It seemed facile to me—a ma-
nipulative sugar rush. Then, in 2017, my
wife and I left our kids with their grand-
mother and visited Ibiza with friends.
It was my first trip there. That Sun-
day, we went to Pacha for Solomun+1.
When Solomun began his set, I was
transfixed. This was no sugar rush. I
didn’t know any of the music, I didn’t
even understand some of it, and there
were stretches when I didn’t take much
pleasure in what I was hearing. The
music was presented as one long phrase,
continually promising a resolution that
never materialized—it was like being
trapped inside a five-hour Bach fugue.
But along the way there were moments
of melodic grace, beguiling transitions,
and a constant, bone-shaking beat. Oontz,
oontz, oontz, oontz. The rest of my group
went home at some point, but I stayed,
befriending a contingent of sweaty
Argentineans. We remained on the
dance floor until 7 a.m. I emerged onto
the sidewalk, astonished by the morn-
ing sunshine and tottering like a new-
born foal—a convert.
After that, I dived into dance music,
and my wife soon caught the bug, too.
We raved in forests, in warehouses. We
learned to mix and played at parties.
These experiences were both thera-
peutic and regenerative. The memory
of a single night out could sustain us
through dark winter months of school
commutes, work deadlines, even per-
sonal crises. I loved all the commin-
gling stories in a night club—stories
that seemed vivid in the moment but
dissolved when the lights came on. Sol-
omun also loved this drama, I later dis-
covered. He said, of Berghain, the Ber-
lin club, “There is no filmmaker, not
even Tarantino, who could capture all
the craziness in there. The eroticness!”
I’m forty-two. My kids are ten and
seven. It’s a strange kind of midlife
awakening, but I am clearly not alone.
In the crowd at Pacha, there seem to
be as many thirty- and fortysomethings
as twentysomethings. I often spot peo-
ple in their sixties. In 2013, when Ed-
ward Frenkel, a Berkeley professor of
mathematics, was about the age that I
am now, he became a fan of Solomun’s,
and spent some nights in the d.j. booth
at Pacha. “He never played the same
way,” Frenkel recalled. “It took me some
time to realize that he actually had a
much stronger bond with his audience
than most d.j.s did.” It wasn’t that Sol-
omun gave listeners exactly what they
wanted, Frenkel said—he simply knew
“what channel of communication was
open with this particular audience, and
would operate along that channel.” A
Solomun set, he told me, returns us “tothat space we had as children, mes-
merized by music, mesmerized by look-
ing at the starry night sky.” He went
on, “The function of the d.j. is to pre-
side over the ceremony. He is the priest,
or the shaman.”T
he afternoon following his night
with Gerd Janson at Pacha, Sol-
omun texted me, “Morning :)” It was
nearly five. He invited me to join him
at a spa. Half an hour later, we were
changing into swimsuits in the locker
room of a five-star hotel, heading for
a Finnish sauna and an ice bath. Sol-
omun explained that his Monday vis-
its to the spa were the most important
part of his week: he sweated out the
night before. He put on a robe and flip-
flops, and walked upstairs at a regal
pace, occasionally stopping to say hello
to someone who’d recognized him. In
the sauna, he put ice on the heater and
drizzled the cubes with essential oils
that he’d brought. Solomun swirled
a towel above his head, to move the
air, and we sat there, perspiring, as he
reflected on the previous evening at
Pacha. “Such a good party,” he said.
“The vibe was so nice.” Endearingly,
he pronounced “vibe” with a “w.”
Solomun isn’t a natural performer
in the d.j. booth. “I don’t like attention,”
he told me. “To be a d.j. is against who
I am.” But, over the years, he has learned
a few moves. Sometimes he solemnly
rocks from foot to foot as he builds a
set; when a beat drops, he greets it like
a conductor bringing in the string sec-
tion, or a gardener attacking a stubborn
branch with hedge trimmers. At mo-
ments, he skips around the booth doing
a semi-ironic, elbows-out dad dance.
The previous night, he had been mostly
in this playful mode.
In past years, a good night at Pacha
would have been followed by an after-
party. Schoeps claims that, in the sum-
mer of 2013, Solomun played thirty-
six after-parties, including one after
every Solomun+1 show. A Pacha set
would blend into a Monday after-party,
which might—after a few hours of
sleep—flow into another ticketed party
on Tuesday, at Sankey’s, lasting until
Wednesday morning. Solomun was
motivated to play for so long, he ex-
plained, because the end of a night felt
a little like death. On his decks, the