Shows

I’m going to start by saying that I had no intention of liking Tiesto’s set as much as I did.  Call me a hipster, but Tiesto has been an artist who no matter how deeply into the EDM scene I got, I never had any interest in listening to.  So much of the dance music that I listened to, showed to friends, eventually blogged about and DJed with was music that I felt like I discovered on my own.  It was all music that I worked to find.  Tiesto never worked in that way for me.  So by the time I checked my email ten minutes before doors opened for his show at UC Davis to find that I had a ticket, I had never given him the credit he deserves.

Ok, I’ll admit it.  For the vast majority of you who are reading this, me saying ‘Tiesto is a very good DJ’ isn’t some crazy revelation.  The man is a class act.  You kind of have to be if your stage visuals are often giant pictures of your own head.  His mixing was absolutely flawless.  Again, this should not have been a surprise to me.  He had 5 CDJs in front of him and often used up to 4 throughout his set.  The transitions were clean and perfected. Even when more then two decks going, nothing ever seemed forced.  Initially I found myself surprised at his song choice.  He threw down.  Hard.  I texted myself notes throughout the night to make sure I remembered the best moments of the set. Early in his set he dropped Sandro Silva & Quintino’s track Epic.  All I wrote was “sandro silva epic REVERB.”  I think that’s the most succinct explanation I can give for what happened to the crowd at that moment.  The insane reverb of that track combined with the sound bouncing off the walls of the cavernous UC Davis Pavilion was indescribable.  Add in a few thousand fist pumping bros to complete the mental picture.

Later on he played classic favorites like Avicii’s Levels and Alesso’s remix of Pressure.  He played a remix of Wonderwall and I liked it.  Maybe I’m too used to hearing that song played at shitty parties by shitty guitarists trying to get laid by shitty girls.  It took Tiesto for me to realize it’s a really pretty song.  Wow I feel lame saying that.  Let’s change the subject. The stage setup and visuals were very impressive. The music video of his song Feel it in My Bones, a collaboration with Tegan and Sara was playing on the screen above him and playing in sync when he dropped the track.  I honestly don’t know how difficult that is to do, but I thought it was pretty cool and so did the rest of the audience.  Towards the end of his set he played Benny Benassi’s House Music.  The energy in the room was fully up, but you could tell the set was coming to a close soon.

Unexpectedly the lights and music suddenly shut off.  Tiesto let the crowd wait 30 seconds confused and in the dark chanting his name until he jumped right into his newest track, Maximal Crazy while “House Music” echoed out in the background.  You could tell that was the moment he had been building up to for the entire night.  So with that I will conclude with an altogether groundbreaking and unheard of idea; Tiesto is very good at DJing.