24 Hours in the Life of...

- 3DWorld Magazine - Australia

"Midnight when it all comes down,
Only the brave and the fools are around" - The Monkees

Anything can happen after midnight. In this business you have to repeat that to yourself like a mantra. After midnight the expensive drugs come out, and so do the expensive girls, for that matter. Money changes hands in a manner most inhospitable to the tax office. The music changes as well. At three in the morning, at any time in any culture, the music is a different beast altogether from what you might hear in the same spot 12 hours earlier that day. In New Orleans, the wheezing of an accordion is transformed into a humping, sweaty conglomerate of glistening black skin, cigarette and cigar smoke, and deep, primal, deafening rhythms, if you are up at that time of morning. In Japan, Leonard Cohen dribbles out of a battered tape deck between the groan of chair legs on polished concrete. The night before in this next generation night-club Merzbo held the audience, a fearful scene of decadence and post-western soul-searching, held them tentatively between strands of traffic noise mottled by bird call and a recording from a New York public toilet, all sequenced and routed through an echo processor.

When Danny Howells got a call from Global Underground earlier this year, he was excited about the sound of a new project exploring that temporal dichotomy. Shrugging off the safety of conservatism, Howells opted for a more open approach to their 24/7 compilation. The idea was to capture in a two-disc set the essence of the muso-circadian rhythms of a DJ; that is, a Day disc, and a Night disc. This isn't a new concept at all, really. Recently released compilations Paris by Day/ Night explored the theme of two styles of music revolving around a geographical point. This time the focus is the DJ though, what he might be listening to at three o'clock on a Saturday afternoon; (The sun is shining through a window with white trim, people can be heard laughing from another room, probably the kitchen. The music on the Day disc reflects this vibration, this diurnal harmony.) Or three in the morning, when the Hellfire parties start and Danny can be found three hours into a ten hour set.

Danny explains the struggle to come to grips with a compilation project, and his motivations. "Some people feel you should be capturing a live set. But my argument is why should we try to capture live sets when there's bloody thousands of live sets on the internet which do exactly that job. I feel that you should capture the essence of a live set, or what you do with an extended set. That's what I really work towards, doing the extended set so I can really go across the board. I just feel that sort of platform is there to create something that will be listenable in the future, while still maintaining the character of the DJ. I'm not too fussed about going out to try to duplicate a live set on a mix album. I've found it much more fun, more challenging, stimulating to diversify and try to capture what I do in a long set. I do a lot of long sets, like ten hours, taking in a wide range of different sounds; therefore I've gone for that approach on this album. It's a side I haven't explored in other compilations really."

Danny's singular taste and style have earned him, over the last 12 years, a lot of friends in high places. His first such friend was John Digweed. During a midnight polo game, Digweed's CD Walkman was crushed by his own horse. Desperate for something to listen to, he grabbed another one from the bench which had one of Danny Howells' mix tapes playing. Now, midnight polo is played by only the bravest men, on a small island in the Persian Gulf. John got into the sport after playing a private party for King Hussein of Jordan and his forty-six wives. The men wait for a moonless night, and the game is played by starlight only. The ball, made from alternate layers of camel scrotum and pitch, is soaked overnight the day before in kerosene and ignited at the start of each game. The men chase this swirling ball of flame around the desert sand for hours sometimes before the fuel runs out and the ball disappears into the Arabian night. This signals the end of the game. After that game, Digweed was so impressed by Danny's choice of tunes that he invited Danny to play at his Bedrock parties. Later, playing alongside Junior Vasquez and Danny Tenaglia at New York's Twilo, Danny must have experienced an epiphany. These were the guys he looked up to back in the halcyon days of Bedrock and any other club that would have him in the UK, and now he holds a residency there whenever he can get back in town.

Danny has been known to play 12 hour long sets at many clubs, a feat that rivals even Digweed's Arabian nights. "It can be quite challenging physically to play on your feet for that amount of time solidly," Danny winces, "I find it much more rewarding to do something that you can be proud of. If it goes right, then you feel really proud, and if it goes wrong you have to work at doing it better next time. I'm not going to take the easy route and turn up to do a one or two hour set. I feel that is cheating people. A lot of the clubs I play at know me for the longer sets and want that. When I play a longer set I can play around a lot more. I can throw in breaks, techno, tech-house, progressive, ambient, pop, anything at the beginning of the night. Then at the end of the night, some disco, or reggae. You have a chance to hopefully make anything make sense, even presenting familiar material in a new way that surprises people. You're a little bit more limited in what you can do in a two hour set. Obviously, I enjoy doing two hour sets, but I really love the longer ones where I can go a bit apeshit."

Danny is a man of hours, not minutes. He spends hours behind a deck at most parties, then spends hours traveling to his next gig, sometimes days. For the past few years he has been on a permanent tour taking in the four corners of the known world. "A cozy residency would be nice in terms of not having to travel," Danny admits, "but then I have to think if I'm stuck in the same place every week I'm going to completely go stale. I don't gain any inspiration from being in the same place too much. I'm much happier touring because it exposes me to so many things that it keeps me fresh. I think [settling down] may be nice in the future if my back gives in, buy for now I'm still very active and I have a lot of energy and I want to use that and travel as far as I can."

"I sort of get tired and worn out from doing it constantly, but then, whenever I get a weekend off I'm stuck for what to do; I'm lost, I go mad."