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Solar-Powered, Pop-Up DJ Booths Will Make the World a Better Place

An idea that encourages sharing culture rather than hoarding it lands in Europe.
Image: YouTube.com

Circa 2006 and for the following six or so years, I was a dutiful hipster DJ. The reader might find a picture of me from around then with a record bag over one shoulder and exclaim, "Ah ha, of course! What a hipster asshole Michael Byrne is," and you would be right. I did really like doing it though, and not even for the free drinks and lucrative payouts ranging from $20 to even $50 (if there was a band playing nearby), or for the multi-hour demonstrations of good taste in genres of music including but never limited to minimal techno and Kit Clayton. I liked sharing the music I thought was interesting and good, and I really liked doing it loudly. And if a person danced: actual heaven.

Music can be such a personal thing now. Many thousands of 17 year olds might convene in some disgusting mud hole to not give a fuck in dangerous, profound ways while loving really any sound that Infected Mushroom could conceivably produce, from a rancid fart to the Gymnopédies, but overall, we like our music to be reproduced as close as physically possible to our actual brain matter. We share music now, both in the software-mediated sense and via social media—the latter of which would be the replacement for the mixtapes and burned CDs or yore, if anything is—but we experience it alone. And to be honest, I'm not entirely sure what the mythical centers of in-person musical sharing were then but it at least feels more alone now.

I guess that's why I like the portable pop-up DJ booth concept so much: it invites not just sharing but shared experience. The project comes courtesy of the Dutch company Yalp and is described by FACT like so:

It’s a simple enough device – you bring your mobile device and rest it on a special pad, which picks up the musical output without any wires (seriously, it’s like magic). Then you can muck around with the various effects (bitcrusher, delay, pitch shift etc) using the platters as controllers, and crossfade as necessary. Obviously if you wanna get the most out of it as an amateur DJ then you’ll need two devices, but we reckon that collaboration is being encouraged here.

Sure, this could be mostly annoying (though it seems to have some clever dampening capability), but it could also sometimes turn into something really great. I'm reminded just a bit of Montreal's Piknic Électronik series, a weekly event held in the midst of the lush greenness of the island park Parc Jean Drapeau. It's basically a bunch of dance music fans, tourists, families, weirdos, and really anyone you could expect in a park on a nice day, together listening and dancing to music. The DJ lineup is a bit better than "just any jerkoff with an iPhone" but the overarching idea of sharing culture in a public space (for free) is crucial and imminently hopeful.