THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER3, 2022 53
In Sarajevo, the intensity of the
music increased as the hours dissolved.
I joined the crowd. At the front, near
metal barricades, young men and
women were stomping the pavement.
Solomun was due to finish playing at
2:30 a.m. At about two, when there
seemed no prospect of his winding
down, he asked Bor to request an extra
hour from the city authorities, which
they granted. Light rain began falling
and a cheer went up. A canopy was
erected over the decks. One man, a
third of the way back in the crowd, lit
a red flare. Suddenly, the gig had the
intensity of a protest march.
Solomun pounded his fist in the air.
He finished his set with the edit of
“Yumi” he’d done on the plane. As it
played, he realized that the extended
opening was not as moving as the orig-
inal version. “When you double it, the
moment is gone,” he declared. At 4 a.m.,
sharing burgers and fries with his
mother and cousins in the Presiden-
tial suite of a Sarajevo hotel, Solomun
said that he would remember the night
of the red flare for the rest of his life.
S
everal hours later, Solomun flew to
Istanbul and was driven straight to
the venue for his show, on the Black
Sea. He changed in a trailer. Starting
at sunset, he played a four-and-a-half
hour set for seven thousand ravers; at
1 a.m., he began a five-hour after-party
for six hundred people. The after-party
room was so hot that dancers wrung
sweat out of their shirts. Solomun con-
tinued playing until the crowd had
dwindled to a hard-core contingent of
fewer than a hundred people. Eventu-
ally, even he was forced to concede that
the night was over. When he turned
off the music, dozens of acolytes sur-
rounded him, some to press on him a
USB stick containing a demo. Finally,
at around 6:30 a.m., he left with a
woman he knew from a previous visit
to Istanbul. Their time together would
necessarily be brief. The car to the air-
port arrived in ten hours.
Flying back to Ibiza, Solomun said
that his mind was blank. The two con-
secutive parties had drained him of
ideas and energy, yet he still had to play
at Pacha in a few hours. High summer
was always like this, he said. On New
Year’s Day, 2020, a film-director friend
had asked him about his wishes for the
year ahead. Solomun replied, “A one-
year break would be fantastic.” Two
months later, the first COVID lockdowns
arrived. He recognized that other peo-
ple were suffering, but he was quietly
grateful for the peace. He spent two
summers in Ibiza, where he attended
Mass in the cathedral on Sundays, and
worked on his tennis game with a local
coach. Unlike other d.j.s, he wasn’t
streaming sets during lockdowns. He
understood that d.j.s wanted to play
such shows to support the dance com-
munity, or to connect with fans, but in
Solomun’s view d.j. work was either
live or meaningless. Last fall, as some
clubs and festivals reopened, he de-
cided to quit d.j.’ing altogether, then
reconsidered.
“I can always close the door,” Solo-
mun said. “I get joy from other stuff.”
Financially, he was set. He wanted to
write film scores, and had ideas for movie
and television scripts. His role as a rec-
ord-label boss was consuming. He had
also invested heavily in two startup busi-
nesses, including a health app. Some
days, he thought that it might be time
for other d.j.s to have their turn in the
limelight. But he had been excited by
the hunger of audiences after the pan-
demic. “People party much harder—it’s
much more intense, it’s crazy,” Solomun
said. “The power of music, the happi-
ness of the music. Sometimes what I
get back is very hard to handle, but...
it’s worth something.”
On the flight, Solomun closed his
eyes for two hours, bundled up in blan-
kets and cushions. When he awoke, the
sky was darkening and the plane was
descending. Solomun said that, what-
ever the excesses of the days and nights
before, the feeling of getting closer to
home always lifted his spirits. He was
excited about his +1 for the evening, a
relatively obscure d.j. from Northern
Ireland called Cromby. Out the pilot’s
window, dead ahead, I spotted Ibiza.
In the dying light, it glowed amber and
pink, like the last ember in a fire.
“Oh,” I said. “It’s the island!”
“My island,” Solomun said.
“Hey, I got you a beautiful orchid to cheer you up until
it turns into just a stick protruding from dirt.”
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