MAINE CANVAS: Connor Ferguson

Selection from Trip the Light Fantastic June 21st, 11:59 PM It was always a pleasure to DJ at gay bars; it was always a pleasure to DJ at gay bars in college towns; it was always a pleasure to DJ at gay bars in college towns like Iowa City on nights like this, when the energy of the crowd was as high as the heat.

“It’s the hottest night of the summer!”

“The ice machine is running slow because it’s too overheated. Someone better be ready to run and grab bags of ice!”

“At least the fog machine isn’t overheating!”

Just a few of the utterances DJ Epoch heard as they made their way through the modest door of Studio 13, this epicenter of gay culture for the community that’d persisted for two decades; it’d once been known as Alley Cat, an homage to its location in an alley bookended by a bank and an alternative elementary school and a string of pubs that focused more on food than their capacity for moving bodies. Ever-changing, explosive graffiti greeted DJ Epoch like so many nights before, their laptop and hard drives slung over their shoulder in a discreet black satchel, as seemingly discreet as the interior of the bar, which was made up of black walls and black floors and black counter tops and black stools, all so black so when the neon lights were turned on for the night they popped even more. The floors were admittedly a little sticky from alcohol consumption and spillage, vigorous cleaning and policing of drinks no match for the kind of nights Studio 13 usually facilitated, but DJ Epoch didn’t mind too much, it was part and parcel with clubs like this. If nothing else, the booth they’d be working their magic in was generally pristine, and one of the older bartenders had an obvious crush, so it was even more immaculate when DJ Epoch arrived.

DJ Epoch had done plenty of sets here over the years, but this night felt especially special: the summer solstice; one of the highest attendances seen for the year based on how much cover was paid to the bouncer; the theme of the set being an odyssey through the decades; it all aligned with their interests and their aims. It was even, ridiculously enough, validating to the name they’d chosen for themselves, an homage to the evolution of dance music, of the way playing certain genres and artists and styles was similar to donning period costumes, how a remix spliced key signatures and conventional structures, the length of a track a more common measure of time for them than the hands on a clock.

Deep into their ’80s set, the air in the booth as stuffy and dense as the air outside of Studio 13, DJ Epoch daydreamed, or nightdreamed, of Laini somewhere in their shared apartment, fanning herself and making coffee ice cubes so their cold brew the following morning wouldn’t be diluted or lukewarm; they wondered and, in an odd bit of pessimism, grieved how these mundane thoughts were more commonly intersecting with their sonic mission, a mission that had once consumed DJ Epoch to the point they’d dropped out of school to try and make it as a disk jockey alone. They promised themselves they would not remain behind their computer for the entirety of the night, that they would allow for some automation of music so they could be in the crowd, too, sweat and breath and heartbeats joining with the primordial release of breakbeats and synthwashes, an adventurer on an expedition to rediscover why they still did gigs like this at all.

During the second half of the ‘90s set, DJ Epoch noticed a group of four ford their way to the center of the dancefloor, a woman and three men, beautiful simply for the sake of being under the smoke and the lights and the sound; there was something intangibly hopeful and a little sad about all of them, unmoored but clinging to each other anyway. Two of the men in particular were near the booth, their obvious hesitance clashing with their obvious attraction, and DJ Epoch made it

their goal to immerse them, an old disk jockey trick: focus on a small collective as a barometer for the music selection.

Madonna and Cathy Dennis and Janet Jackson and Everything But the Girl had been the skeleton key. Easy.

Pop, disco, house, bubblegum, new jack swing, trance, drum and bass, microgenres upon microgenres emerged from their hard drives and siphoned through their music systems and blasted from the speakers, calling to the two men’s response, even as their companions drifted to the bar.

Even with the music, they were moving to their own rhythm, rediscovering each other through awkward bumps and grinds and head nods and hands searching for what to do, if they should raise in the air, if they should meet and hold the other, inquiries through movement.

Later, when DJ Epoch tried to explain this couple, if they were a couple, to Laini, they had been able to recall so many details about their physicality: red hair, black hair, barrel chested, swimmer’s build, tall, wearing a button-up, wearing a Henley, tattoos and piercings, hands that carried the wear of their work onto the club scene, lips with pronounced Cupid’s bows that seemed to knock arrows of laughter through the din of the bass and the haze of the summer and the armor of each other, an eventual closeness that seemed to distort the space around them. DJ Epoch almost felt as if they had captured them on the film strip of their mind, projecting them onto the silver screen of the morning conversation over cold brews.

Laini said she couldn’t differentiate the two from DJ Epoch’s description, that they seemed to meld together, and perhaps they had.

They were dancing together, and to DJ Epoch this meant to dance as one: it was impossible for two people to be that close and not match their movements in such a way that they were

completely in sync; they’d stepped into each other, away from everyone else, partitioned away from the rest of the club, their attention only on the chemistry of their bodies; for a moment, or maybe it had been hours, DJ Epoch slipped into that personal world and spun music for them alone, and they’d done what so many mentors had told DJ Epoch the best dancers did, not the most technical dancers but the most emotional ones.

They had tripped the light fantastic.