The Needle and the Trackpad

The analog versus digital argument in music has never really been about fidelity. It’s about identity. Vinyl people want you to know they’re vinyl people. The guy with the laptop wants you to know he’s doing something the vinyl guy can’t. Both are right, both are insufferable, and the music plays on regardless.

In the DJ world this split gets especially weird. There’s something genuinely beautiful about watching someone work through crates, finding the moment where two records lock into each other—that particular mix of muscle memory and chaos. And then there’s the controller crowd, who can do everything the crate digger can do plus a hundred things they can’t, and who catch shit for it constantly. Greg Wilson, who came up through the early Eighties Northern Soul and electro scenes, has been navigating versions of this argument for longer than most DJs have been alive. His sets don’t particularly care what format you prefer.

The Berlin scene absorbed both sides without much fuss. The city that produced Kraftwerk and also the entire European rave infrastructure doesn’t need to pick a team. You can fetishize the hardware or you can fetishize the process, but what matters is whether the room moves. That’s the only argument that ever actually lands.