10 days on the road with Ben Klock

Mixmag comes to in the back of a hot Mercedes. We must have nodded off. We only had 40 minutes sleep at the hotel. The tour manager, Randy, sits in the front, remonstrating with an impatient driver. We’re in Sicily. Probably. The hotel is just 10 minutes from the airport. However, our flight to Amsterdam is in 44 minutes. With 39 to go, Ben Klock appears, the same way he always does – just in time, and in sunglasses, T-shirt and dark grey jeans despite it being 38 degrees. He gets in and the taxi screams off, weaving through traffic and cutting lanes, while we get into our roles. Randy, doing online check-ins and gate checks with military efficiency; Ben on a different frequency, trying to work out the final dynamics for a set on the other side of Europe in eight hours’ time; and Mixmag, blinking blearily, trying to get everything we see down on our phone.

It’s day five of Ben Klock’s tour. Ten sets in 10 days.Bringing a journalist along was actually his idea. The enigmatic Berlin-based DJ personifies the pinnacle of underground philosophy: he recognises the curiosity about his life and work, but hates doing interviews. On this trip, then, he requested a ‘shadow’ instead. For the benefit of any readers not currently in the interesting headspace between pissed, hungover, adrenaline-fuelled and sleep deprived, we’d best start from the very beginning.

Departure Gate, Frankfurt Airport

The flight to Belgrade is delayed by 15 minutes. The queue has disintegrated. Towards the back of the gate, two men, all in black, sit at a table. One looks intently at his smartphone. One sits on a steel record box, with a laptop.

“Stressed-out DJ in an airport? You must be Ben Klock.”

Ben turns to look at Mixmag with amused bewilderment. It dawns on us, facing the two individuals dressed in regulation funeral/techno attire, that the beach shorts and white tee look probably doesn’t blend. The tour manager, introducing himself as Randy, takes one look at our chunky bag, and audibly groans.

“One bit of advice. Don’t drink too much. It’ll catch up with you,” he says. Ben then pulls out a series of tiny glass bottles. “Ginger tea. Imported. Keeps you awake, without all the caffeine and stuff. On tour you’re not a DJ, you’re an athlete.”

With that, the pair silently rise from their seats and queue-jump masterfully through the gate. Mixmag joins the back of the line. So, this is going…. well.

Belgrade Airport

“On me. Head down, pass ready, look like you do this all the time.” With Randy’s coaching we miraculously jump every queue, pacing along in Ben’s priority-pass slipstream. We end up in a car park. “Phones charged? Good. Gig’s in two and a half hours. Journey takes three.”

Randy switches off like a light. Up front Ben is hunched over a laptop, playing 10-second loops off against each other in Rekordbox. “You prepping for the set?” we ask. “Oh no – this one I know what I’m doing. This is for Dekmantel in a few days’ time.” Ben looks at me, grins. “Hey. Sleep whenever you can.”

Lovefest, Serbia / Set 1

Mixmag is awakened by a wall of sound thrumming off the side of our door. The car’s bouncing over some sort of a field. Bleary, we blink and open the door to hot cigarette smoke and scowling giants. Serbia. “You slept? Good stuff!” says Ben, picking up his steel case and tearing off, Randy and I running to catch up. A promoter joins us mid-flight and ties wristbands to us on the move. “You’re on in six minutes, Ben,” an Eastern European accent says from somewhere.

There’s a sudden sense of vertigo as we hit the main stage. Perhaps 10,000 people are packed into a sloping hill ahead of us. Ellen Allien winds down a blasting techno kick until there’s silence and uplights. There’s a roar, then a hush from the crowd as Ben starts. Sub-bass becomes a kick, becomes a melody, becomes a percussion hook as Ben’s set, Ben’s tour, roars into life. The sides of the stage crush with VIPs and the crowd below surges more than dances. Ben drops James Ruskin & DVS1’s ‘Page 1’, which, between the black booth we’re in, the lit crowd below us and dawn over the horizon, adds to the other-worldly element of it all. The sense of heated descent increases as Ben’s machine-like set continues to wind up. Snares and hi-hats float over the top of shimmering risers. An ever-present kick nudges slowly up until it’s tracing into the 130 bpms. Five hours ago we were in Frankfurt Airport…

“I mean, there’s no toilet door. It’s basically a minicab with wings.”

We’re in a transfer car on the way back to Belgrade airport, and we’re discussing the not-so-glamorous realities of what happens when you need the loo on a private jet. We’re jacked on espressos, we’ve had no food and only two hours of sleep, and there’s a lot of high spirits. Ben is visibly more relaxed now that the first set is over. By not sleeping in, not holding anyone up, Mixmag feels as though we’ve passed some kind of vital test, and the conversation can start. Both Ben and Randy have got their laptops out, comparing video and photo footage shot by Randy last night – in addition to being Ben’s tour manager, he’s also the official photographer for both him and his Klockwork label.

“It’s a challenge that we do actively think about: how to stay ’underground’, I suppose, while still making sure we’re getting the coverage,” Randy says.

Rome FCO Airport

“There isn’t a hardest part about touring,” Ben is explaining. “Touring is the hardest part. But you do end up having lots of little homes. One hotel you like, or one restaurant you love. Like this one, for instance.” We’ve just spent 25 minutes doing laps of Rome Fiumicino airport to find this one deli. But, as Mixmag devours Mozzarella and red wine, we have to agree that it’s undeniably been worth it.

“You know, I’m kind of envious of rock bands. Rock bands tour for six months, then stay in the studio for six months. So, to answer the first question you clearly asked me...” Ben laughs; we’ve started an undiscussed, but mutually understood game, in which we can ask Ben anything as long as it doesn’t actually feel like a question. “What production?! I’m proof that it’s very hard to produce when you tour all the time.”

Afrobar, Sicily / Set 2

Mixmag is running across the sand. Our flight was separate to Ben’s and delayed. We follow Enriquo, a promoter-turned-emergency driver, and go up over a concrete wall, through a back curtain, inadvertently bodycheck a hanger-on and we’re in. Randy sees us, whispers to Ben, who’s mid-set. He whips around. “You made it!” he grins, handing us some Champagne. The crowd is around 1,000-strong, and young. “It’s a different set up in Italy. Even kids, they don’t do pop. They do techno,” Enriquo yells. Ben looks looser, taking more risks, working the upfaders harder than he did in Serbia. Into his flow. Four decks throw hot blue lights up into hot sea air. Ben shifts between all four: from a distance at random, but on closer inspection curating a nervous stable of loops and percussion stabs, cueing here, fading there, teasing a rampant crowd with judders and hints as the sky around us starts to fuzz pink. The sound dives between wide spaces and low bypasses, Ben low-key flirting with girls side-stage as Void monitors release eye-watering audio and the sun comes up over the sea that’s literally lapping at the back of the crowd.

“If we’re not in Amsterdam in five hours, we are fucked.”

We’re in the back of a Mercedes. Ben has slept in. Randy is losing his shit. Mixmag has lost our primary toothbrush. It’s all falling apart. Eventually, Ben arrives. He hasn’t slept more than twenty minutes. “I went to bed. But, you know. Dekmantel is today, so...”

The airport was rammed. So rammed, in fact, that it was remarkably easy to get through security. Despite Mixmag’s boarding pass not working, despite the bag scanner’s buzzing we sort of, just, kept walking. Now we’re on the plane. Ben has immediately sat down, working through Ableton edits for tracks. Eight hours until Dekmantel. Oh, and the whole rest of the tour. We can’t keep our eyes open, but even nodding off we see Ben, laptop open, game face on, waving off the offers of free coffee and breakfast. None of us have eaten since the airport in Rome.

Boiler Room Stage, Dekmantel, Amsterdam / Set 3

Ben bounces down the stairs backstage, the way an athlete limbers up. He’s done the same with every set of steps since getting off the plane. “Yeah, I’m pretty nervous,” he says. “You play to ten thousand and you’re not nervous, because it’s just one moment. But with this, you’re playing to hundreds of thousands of people, forever, and every second of the mix can be analysed, and checked, and commented on.”

Ben is handed a black towel for the heat on the decks, but declines it for his now familiar white one. “It’s my lucky towel but it’s always different. It’s just a towel from whichever hotel I’ve stayed in.” Ben’s all nerves as he gets on the decks. There are cameras everywhere. Tactical ravers in the back, armchair pundits in the front, directors off to the side. Hot downlights. A crowd that cheers and goes silent on visual command. DJing as a competitive sport. Ben shakes his neck, snaps his shoulders back-stage. Round One. Cue. Fight.

He needn’t have worried. His set is a 90-minute compression of everything we’ve seen so far. He starts hard, then in 15 minutes eases into a supercruise, hopping effortlessly between techno, and flashes of straight house. It gets progressively hotter backstage. The terse nods become genuine shoulder-rolls. Ben’s sweating but his mixing stays tight, signature snares and the kind of basslines your mother warned you not to talk to jostling for room in the tight, hot air of the theatrical stage. With 30 minutes to go, he looks like he’s finally enjoying himself. On the home straight. Taking a few more liberties here and there. Looking a bit more spontaneous on the decks.

It ends, and there’s some form of lengthy monologue about Berlin, or techno, or Ben, or something – but the prizefighter isn’t listening. He’s closing Dekmantel on another stage in 20 minutes.

UFO Stage / Set 4

All smiles now. Rolling through tunes, trying things out, experimenting, bro-hugging Marcel Dettmann who hangs around briefly after his own set. “Yeah, I’m pretty relieved
it’s over. Grab a drink!”

Gallipoli, Italy

“I was into Pokémon, sure. But in the 90s, back when it was cooler,” Marcel Dettmann states solemnly. We’re one of perhaps a 16-strong Klock and Dettmann entourage in a seafront restaurant. Ben’s spent most of the evening laughing and cracking jokes. Any final post-set doubts about his performance were put to bed an hour ago during the airport hotel transfer, when Randy showed us a meme taken from the comments left on Boiler Room’s Facebook page. “Just Fuck Me As Hard As Ben Klock’s Boiler Room Set” it reads.

Now Ben’s interchanging between topping up wine glasses, talking about everything from the merits of cooked vs raw seafood to the way his home town of Berlin has changed to become more outward-looking, and learning new words. He professes open amazement that ‘porcupine’ in Italian means something roughly along the lines of “land-sea urchin” (though his enthusiasm may be vaguely linked to the fact that the information comes from a tall, tattooed Italian supermodel parked next to him at dinner). Eventually, the group piles into three cars and is driven around the corner to Cave Gallipoli.

Cave Gallipoli / Set 5

Marcel & Ben take the stage for a B2B set. Perhaps 1,500 people are jammed into the space. An interesting dynamic emerges on the decks: Marcel the extrovert, setting up camp at the mixer, flashing up faders and allowing heavy drops; Ben off to the side, even when it’s his cue, working the EQs, the effects, all precision. From 02:30 Ben stops playing reactively to Marcel’s cues, however, and takes matters up a notch with a series of deft track switches. The crowd surges in response. Marcel waves in a wall of snares. The two are now shoulder to shoulder, grinning. Competitive schoolboys. Marcel the jock; Ben the chess player. The two run up a Jenga tower of synths and risers, Ben all the while running a fine line between letting the clutch all the way up and holding back: a frenzied sea below leaning on every hook, every change, waiting for the techno promise of another drop somewhere over the horizon. The crowd have lost their shit. At 05:30 Ben just manages to escape the people now clambering over the booth. We dive up a series of side passages behind a toilet block and emerge into a back room where an afterparty is kicking off. Phone stashed.

Sardinia

We’ve spent a vaguely hungover day drifting from boutique hotel to Rome’s airport, to Sardinia, and probably the most luxurious hotel Mixmag has ever seen. Now a group of slick Italian promoters are plying us with wine. What began as a polite conversation soon descends into laughter as the promoters and Ben swap stories about Naples.

Five bottles of wine and four kilos of raw fish later there’s a change in temperature as the promoter receives a phonecall. The Allen & Heath mixer has been swapped for a DJM 600. This is not good. Ben explains why, based on audio quality and EQ functions. But it’s not as simple as that. “The booth is the one constant on tour,” he tells us. “The one thing that stays the same, no matter where you are. That’s why you have a rider. The crowd can be huge, small, the audio can be thin, or booming, In order to connect with everyone I have to feel relaxed in my work-space, it has to feel comfortable. Because when you’re on tour, the booth is home.”

Ritual Club / Set 6

Last night the venue was called Cave. Tonight, it literally is a cave. The crowd is different: button shirts, dresses, mojitos and Champagne. The Italian Instagram elite. The warm-up act’s done an admirable job of moving into chunky techno, but there’s tension in the booth. Ben got an Allen & Heath mixer in the end, but there are low-end issues and not quite the usual screams as Ben takes the decks. There is, however, a nonchalant rolling of shoulders across the crowd. Following Ben’s usual 20-minute ascent through driving techno, the seatbelt signs go off and tonight he goes deep, referencing soul and dropping Floorplan’s ‘Never Grow Old’. This works – big time. Ben turns, grins, grabs the Champagne. “Fuck it! Let’s drink!”.

The crowd get more into it the deeper Ben goes. Slowly, he teases the agenda of the night’s trajectory back to familiar straight-up territory, the crowd willingly, or unwittingly, following. In customary Italian style, the night ‘ends’ 25 minutes earlier, allowing Ben ample time to play a string of extra tunes to a crowd now chanting a football style song that translates as... “They’re not fucking leaving. That’s what it means. Sometimes they sing it from midnight onwards,” yells promoter Mirko in the booth.

We’re at an afterparty in an all-night cafe. We’re introduced to the concept of vodka shots inside pints of beer. “Even the Scotsman’s shocked!” laughs Ben. Mirko has had a fallout with his girlfriend. Cue Ben making a heartfelt video plea on Mirko’s phone for forgiveness. Ben looks knackered, though relaxed. Mixmag has designs on bed. But it’s the day off tomorrow, and Mirko has other plans.

Flow Festival, Finland / Set 8

We’re reunited. Ben had 24 hours off, and a set in Ancona. “The beach stage was at a weird angle. But it was pretty cool.” That’s all you’re gonna get, folks. We were in Berlin for 36 hours, of which 28 were spent champing at the bit, waiting to get back on tour. “Tour is a drug. You missed the constant adrenaline, right?” “Perhaps,” we respond, repressing memories of shots, pints, bar crawls with strangers and attempted fights with terrified Canadian students. We’re starting to understand why some DJs lose it.

We’re back in the groove now, sitting behind a curtain on the main stage, consuming ginger tea and apples. Ben rapidly goes through some last minute tweaks as the warm-up act thrums out 132bpm kicks that shake the curtain. There’s that pre-match sense of anticipation now that’s become a familiar rush, a craving. Ben heads through the curtain and sets up shop: steel record box (his only luggage for the whole trip) down on the left. Bottle of Champagne and regulation single glass, lucky towel beside decks. It’s a close, indoor venue and Ben opens hard, rising on kicks and bassy builds before easing into the techno cruise just after midnight, his expansive, shuddering basslines reverberating in the markedly colder Finnish air – despite the heat of the tent. The rows of blue lasers make a dizzying rash of little pinpricks on the crowd. It dawns on Mixmag that DJs never see the floor, the lights, the booth the same way the crowd do. Different frequencies. The crowd sort of bounces on the spot, looking aggressively sober in contrast to the stage-invading, tattooed Italians of previous nights. “They’re into it, they’re just Finnish,” someone backstage tells me. The set ends with polite clapping and a solitary “Thank you, Ben!” from the back of the room. Must be the temperature.

“I go through phases,” Ben tells Mixmag as we make our way through the hotel we’re staying in, carrying some €16 takeaway pizzas with us. “Sometimes when I play I like to be sociable, and other times I like to get into my Jeff Mills vibe – no distractions, just music. Then, at other times, I just sort of play.”

DGTL Festival Barcelona / Set 9

Following a fascinating tour of Barcelona’s reclaimed industrial sector via a lost golf buggy, we arrive backstage at DGTL. Acclimatisation complete: Home is now wherever there are downlights and several thousand people 20 feet away. We reconnect with Marcel’s group. There’s a moment where Marcel and Ben are teasing each other, swapping cigs and hiding each other’s booze while the two tour managers give each other tired smiles like parents watching their little stars.

“I like DGTL because of the low setting. The booth is pretty much at ground level,” Ben says. He winds up at 00:44 and you can feel the raised intensity: smoke and lasers from the crowd hitting the stage too, eye contact with individuals, heat. Ben wipes sweat with his lucky towel and an enterprising Spaniard sees an oppurtunity, launching a bedroom-label T-shirt into the booth. Ben laughs, picks it up, looks at it, nods and places it in his record box. High-fives in the crowd. There’s a sense of the end of the tour already: Ben’s playing harder tunes earlier. Smoking a bit, moving off the decks to bro-hug people backstage. There’s a crew of maybe 25 people in the booth, enterprising groupies, opportunistic tour managers and tactically quiet PRs. There’s a tidal movement toward the booze table whenever the dedicated security moves off.

At 02:53 Ben Klock drops the Carl Craig remix of Junior Boys ‘Like A Child’ to a crowd bathed in blue light and thrumming the barriers. The set ends in a blaze of yells out front and downed shots backstage. Goodbyes over, Ben beats a tactical retreat across the concrete expanse toward the hotel, flanked by Randy and Mixmag, trying and mostly succeeding to avoid kidnap by roaming groups of selfie-hunters.

Berghain, Berlin / Set 10

“His set’s in fifteen minu- oh wait, here he is.”

Mixmag is standing with Randy a little way off from an around-the-block queue for Berghain. There’s a steady stream of rejections passing by. Eventually a black BMW with ‘BEN’ on the registration plate pulls in. Ben gets out. Three hours’ sleep since DGTL: 2 in Barcelona; one here. We move to the front of the queue and reach the door. We’re waved through and Ben looks back, gives us a nod and a grin, then disappears through a side entrance as we’re left to navigate security.

We’re in the main room at Berghain, for the Ostgut Ton night. Marcel’s kicking 108db, according to the digital read-out in the booth. The air is hot and misty with sweat. The space feels close despite the towering ceiling. There’s sparse lighting, and periods of pitch black punctuated by two tracing white lights and some thin red lasers. Aged and futuristic, all at once. The candlelit bar has a row of Macedonian shields along one wall. Ancient democracy. You’re in charge now. You sure you’re ready? Back in the booth a barman ceremonially brings Ben a single ginger tea.

Ben looks different. It all makes sense: the cut off T-shirt, the fitted jeans, the enigmatic, ever friendly, ever distracted presence clicks neatly into Berghain. He hasn’t so much stood into the booth as plugged himself in. There’s a relaxing of shoulders, something akin to a professional safebreaker feeling his way to pick the pins of a lock with consummate ease. Ben moves in at 114db and the club reacts, albeit subtly. The temperature noticeably rises, the crowd move that bit faster, the white spaceship-like scanning lights increase their pace.

For the past 10 days, Mixmag has shadowed Ben. It seems to us that touring DJs never really leave the booth, physically or mentally. All over Europe, all over the world, it’s the same artificial horizon, the same cool blue read-out of waveforms, loops, tempos and levels below, and a variety of shifting people, languages and sunrises above. Touring isn’t really about moving country to country. It’s time travel, standing in the booth while all around you the cities and scenery changes. After a while, ‘out there’ seems so foreign, so unusual, that solace can be found only in a pair of hot downlights, in a headphone cue or in your record box always being by your left leg. Our day off was miserable. We were itching to get back on tour.

It’s the knowledge that you’d drop any relationship, any job, any commitment to chase that fever dream. Not for the fame
or the money. The afterparties aren’t glamorous, they’re just decompression. It’s about the relentless momentum, a force behind you pushing you uphill, a high constantly being chased. And sometimes, the tiniest sensation that this isn’t real life. This isn’t actually how it works. Outside there’s this slipstream called reality, but you’re cocooned from it in this booth. For many DJs, it plays itself out on social media via bizarre rants, or weird attachments to esoteric causes. Most, though, are too busy chasing a life so in line with the rapid simplicity of the music they play to even notice any more.

But with Ben Klock there’s another universal, one that goes well beyond DJing as a lifestyle. Whether he’s playing a cave in Italy or a festival in Serbia, whether he’s just off a plane after a few minutes’ sleep or has just rolled out of his own bed and around the corner to Berghain, there’s something happening that goes beyond technical virtuosity, beyond name recognition or hype, beyond the current vogue for one genre of dance music or another. When this enigmatic, sometimes aloof character gets behind the decks, he makes a genuine connection with the people on the dancefloor – whether they’re ecstatic Spaniards or reserved Finns. It’s something that many DJs aspire to, and few consistently achieve. It’s been a privilege to see it up close. A punishing, exhausting, perception-altering privilege.

The set ends, and Ben hops out of the booth. Mixmag follows, but pauses, watching him drift off. This is our stop, we decide. He is absorbed into the crowd, decompressing. There are 18 agonising hours until DC10 Ibiza. Until the next set, the next high, the next booth.