Imagine your Dad/Granddad. Imagine the corner home office. Now imagine he’s got an Elektron Syntakt and he’s making the most brutal EBM and techno. You’re getting the picture: meet Nick Hayes, aka The Last DJ.
It’s about time hard techno, hard beats, and deep tech ticks got a normcore background. So if you’ve been waiting to share your music and worried about setting up some kind of slick spaceship or VFX rig before you turn on the camera – Nick might make you feel liberated.
Someone complains that he should dress like Count Dracula (joking, I hope?) and he responds with my favorite comment: “Primark is life well next to Techno.”
Some of my favorite producers and DJs are equally focused on sound and not making their appearance look like what supposed tastemakers want. So, we wouldn’t be here if the music weren’t hard-hitting – here you go, since you might not guess from just the thumbnail image:
Now some of you I expect might have guessed how the voice would sound (depending on where you’re from):
Oh yeah, uh age better not be an issue as I’m not getting younger, Benjamin Button style or something. (I expect you’re also aging similarly, unless we have some CDM readers doing FTL travel which I suppose is possible.)
He’s got some great tips here, and he’s an easy-to-follow presenter – you can definitely learn a thing or two. Make a pounding kick, for instance.
And then you can go for a Miniature Techno Pony Ride:
I appreciate the notebook approach to set planning – that does work pretty well. Yes, he’s on TikTok. This either means that techno has no age limits, or that young people are now abandoning TikTok along with Instagram and Meta, but … that’s for someone else to worry about. We are all techno.
Dr. Motte of Love Parade fame has already taken notice. Let’s see when Nick shows up in a club.
Brilliant stuff. Worth subscribing on whichever platform you do prefer (YouTube and TikTok benefit from showing longer videos and better quality audio). Thanks, Nick; we’ll be watching!
Techno Viking of course appears as a GIF reaction, so here you go:
Alternatively, he celebrated 800 videos by adding a soundtrack to this video (by permission), which in turn was on Desire Dioxin’s channel as an 800-video and … Krampus in the woods!