Tacomans looking for good electronic dance music usually need to travel to Seattle to get their fix. Last Friday, however, students needed to go no further than Pacific Lutheran’s own dance venue, The Cave.
Four student DJs and the student radio station, LASR, teamed up to bring an amateur DJ show to The Cave. Strobe lights, lasers and a projector screen lent to the club-like atmosphere. At its peak, about 60 students came.
“It was sort of a mini-rave, but there weren’t any drugs from what I could see,” junior Chris Johnson said, who performed under the name DJ WID3SCR33N.
Students danced and jumped around. One dancer spun LED lights on a string, and a handful of “glovers” gave each other “light shows” using gloves with light-up fingertips.
Senior I.V. Reeves planned the event, coordinating the concert with LASR and inviting his friends to DJ. Reeves also DJ’d the third set of the night, playing mostly hip hop and rap.
Junior Bruno Correa, a.k.a. DJ Fiendcraft, opened the show with a set consisting of hip hop, trap and house. “My favorite genre is tech-house, but not many people like that, so I do a lot of, like, electro-house,” Correa said. “It’s pretty popular now.”
Johnson’s set also featured trap influence, but was distinguished by its heavy bass. “I definitely like that real grimy, slap-you-in-the-face type bass,” he said.
Johnson said he got serious about DJing when he received a turntable for his birthday last year. “I’ve always been interested in it because I’ve DJ’d at a couple places around campus using my iPhone,” he said.
Johnson said he was asked to DJ at Tingelstad’s all-hall event “Under the Seastad,” but when the Resident Director asked him to keep his set appropriate for a fourth-grade audience, he politely declined.
“We’re all adults here. People aren’t nice in the real world, and you’ll hear a lot worse things,” he said. “If you want me to play at a fourth-grade level, I should go to an elementary school.”
