Ovation

20 June 2025

The stage is resplendent with a crop of artificial daisies. From the ornate ceiling hangs an industrial lighting grid. A 3m by 3m by 12m array of long threads of Christmas lights form a large oblong – dwarfed by the space they are attempting to occupy. Five dark patches between the yellow flowers reveal themselves to be workstations populated by tools for making electronic and analogue music. We look down on a crowd of people who are waiting for the music the workstations are promising to make. No matter the delivery: there is going to be a lot to look at.

One by one, the band members take their places at their desks. Handsome men, heads of hair quaffed or capped – and all dressed for work. A gentle sound of unidentifiable source begins its omnipresent hum and the heads below begin to bobble in hope of a common rhythm. One will come, but it’s a long intro. The beat will drop. It will.

The band member’s heads are down and engrossed in the respective tasks of music production set out before each of them at their workstation. A hint of when the beat might dop will come from the moment that they will inevitably look at each to count in when the trick will kick. And so we watch their body language for signs of shared body language, visual check-ins or ripples of telepathy across their skin. We search in hope. And in vain.

Their eyes never lock, glances are not shared, no communal stage dance emerges. The intro becomes the song. And the next. And. Promised peaks and troughs do not materialise. We sink in the soup of acoustic median. The daisies and strobes and Christmas lights array are louder by lumens than any discernible decibel roughage and I am lost in a dream of their tinsel.

Another song comes and goes indiscernible from the next. I am now certain each member of the band is alone. Each at a desk as at a WeWork cubicle. One audience member below has found a rich vein of rhythm to power a wild and radical dance. Neither we nor those around him can understand it to be coming from anywhere other than his own personal link to a parallel universe.

Another track comes and goes, I think. The music tunes itself out of my ears and my attention drifts to the view of the packed room and its elaborate decor now awash with a gentle watery light show and the warmth of a thousand hopeful faces smiling towards us. We see what the band sees. A Beetles-style crowd from a silent film yawn-raging in the hope that hearing something, anything, might grant the ability to scream audibly into their nightmare.

And yes, another track comes and goes. This is a whole new scale of infinity. And the it stops. There is nothing discernible between the now-silence and sounds it has replaced. Save that the band members stand and leave the stage, their ninety minute long intro no faded out.

The audience applauds. And applauds. And applauds. And screams, audibly at last. And whistles and stomps and claps and bangs. An ovation! But this is not a band of encores. We look for the gaffers to appear stage left and right to wind up the cable and re-box the workstations. Bang scream whistle stop ovation. We wait for the house lights to come on and for the ushers to appear. Bang scream whistle stomp ovation. Bang scream whistle stomp ovation.

But they return! Marching with an as yet unseen energy released as if from a life’s internment. They are smiling. And looking at each other! Obviously, they like the applause, but there is something else added and I don’t know what. Not yet.

They play another track, but one without elevator intro vibe. The song has pep and pop. It has cliff-hangers, and pick ups that rescue our ears from the depths of valleys of lost hope. Holy fuck I think the keyboard player is dancing! The song ends. Not too suddenly, but neither too soon nor too late. The track had an arc! It’s what I expect from a last track and also much much more.

But the ovation returns and they have another track in them. And to an amazement that tazers my goose bumps it also has pep and pop and lift and duck and tuck. When this song ends the band members leave their workstations again and walk to the front of the stage where they collect microphones planted there earlier. They join arms, and take a bow. And another.

Kruder speaks into his microphone, points to the front upper right balcony where sits a large than life woman in a splendid hairdo and white apparel as if dressed to the grandest of grand operas. A living apparition of Bianca Castafiore. She gestures in thanks to the audience as if to take a bow, then retreats from the gesture and directs the audience to redirect their applause to Kruder and Dorfmeister and the band of musicians that have anointed and trained to make live the performance of their decades long DJ back catalogue. She directs repeated and powerful double handed thumbs up approvals towards the stage and its daisies and lights and its band and its DJs.

This, explains the now beaming Kruder, is his mother.