Man vänjer sig.

There is a review of Lady Chatterley's Lover where the reviewer says roughly "a very good portrayal of a gamekeeper's life; if the author could only lose the superfluous romantic subplot it would be an excellent book". I am afraid some of the following will sound a bit like that review, but that's something I will have to live with; there are parts of the tale that can only be told by me.

As some of you may already know, I spent yesterday at kjn's and thette's wedding, as a guest and as a sound engineer and DJ. I spent most of my non-working time last week preparing for my task — finding and listening to music of a dozen different genres, choosing which physical CDs to bring, cleaning out the computers, finding cables. I've gone to bed at 2 every night last week (except Monday, when I was too exhausted after my dental adventure), and finally, early on Saturday morning, I had two bags full of equipment and met up with kjn and thette's father outside the shop to pick up the rental PA. This was the setup:

* a HK Audio L.U.C.A.S. speaker system (one subwoofer with built-in amplifier, two satellites; I forget how many watts)
* a PA mixer
* a wireless microphone, in case any of the dinner guests wanted to make an amplified speech (nobody used it, though)
* stands for the satellite speakers and microphone
* what felt like miles of cables

I brought two Apple laptops, interconnected with an Ethernet cable, running iTunes. The music library was on the PowerBook, which had a bigger hard disk than the iBook, and I just shared the library between them. The thing with laptops is that they also double as CD players. This is a setup I have used before at weddings and parties. Unfortunately, as I soon realised when I was setting everything up and checking the sound (and at the same time chatting with michiexile and fluffboll), this setup was missing something. The mixer, which otherwise seems to be a very good budget model, lacked some things I needed: no crossfade, and no possibility to listen to one channel in the headphones while the other is playing to the speakers. I happen to have exactly those functions on my very cheap little DJ mixer at home, but I realised that if I were to go home to get it (almost an hour by the tube each way), I would probably not make it back in time for the ceremony. So, I had three choices:

1. Fly blind with what I had.
2. Go home, get my own mixer, and possibly miss the ceremony.
3. Walk to the nearest shop that carried such things, buy one, and get back here.

Fortunately, michiexile accompanied me on a quick walk from Eggeby gård to Kista, where I spent 1100 SEK from my own pocket on a simple DJ mixer and the cables I needed. (I couldn't even give them the receipt with a clean conscience — I had put myself in this situation.) Finally I got back and could hook everything up in time to take a taxi to the church.

And then, after the dinner and the speeches (unamplified — after I'd spent so much time getting the sound right, grumble grumble) and some further mingling, it was time for the dance. I opened with Strauss' "An der schönen blauen Donau" (unfortunately not the recording from the 2001 soundtrack, but a very similar one), followed with the orchestrated version of Tom Lehrer's "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park" (I saw people laughing and dancing at the same time; even tuwr, who is otherwise almost completely uninterested in music, came up and thanked me at that point). I think I can say that I've never played so much varied music before: jazz, rockabilly, 80s and 90s pop and rock — I even saw people dancing foxtrot to Kraftwerk's "Die Roboter", which I only put on because I couldn't find anything else fitting in 30 seconds...

Despite my fears that I wouldn't be able to pull it off, I think I handled it pretty well; people were dancing, they liked it, they thanked me afterwards... Those who have heard me play before know I'm not a technical DJ; I can't do a beat mix to save my life, and I have no desire to be a star in my own right. For me, it's like editing an anthology of short stories. An editor can choose among the stories at his disposal, and might pick them after a certain theme or literary style or period; he might annotate or (like Asimov) write a comment for every story; he might even correct typos from other editions — but if he rewrites part of the stories to show his literary skills, or writes links between them to turn them into chapters in a novel, he's out of bounds as an editor, and turning into an author himself. That's how I work: I try to use the material that's available to me, and the Devil may take the exact BPM count. The important thing is that people are dancing and having a good time, I'm only too happy to do this. If I have entertained them, and if I don't actually lose too much money on it, I consider myself fully paid.

Oh, and then there were some people getting married.