Physical Therapy Shares His “Waiting Room in DJ Hell” Mix
The set is a recording from his collaborative installation with Gobby and Jeffrey Joyal for PAMM’s WAVES series.
Last month, Berlin-based producer Physical Therapy performed at PAMM, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, as part of an installation called The Waiting Room in DJ Hell, also featuring visual art by UNO NYC's Gobby and sculptor Jeffrey Joyal. The performance was the first of four performances commissioned for PAMM's WAVES series, which highlights musicians collaborating with artists, dancers, and filmmakers. Forthcoming events on the stellar program include collaborations between Kingdom, Dawn Richard and Kyselina™, and Trina, Total Freedom and Jacolby Satterwhite. If you didn't make it down to Miami for the event, have no fear, because we've got a recording of Physical Therapy's set for the installation, an interview with him about the project, as well as photos and video to recreate it for you below.
How did you arrive at the idea for The Waiting Room In DJ Hell? So the idea came to me while making the track that it's named after. I had a vision of a tropical deep house hell made specifically for DJs. Somewhere in between the waiting room in Beetlejuice and a Far Side strip by Gary Larson where Beethoven is forced to conduct and orchestra of banjo players for all eternity. Basically DJs Complaining manifested as eternal damnation.
How did this collaboration for PAMM's WAVES series come about? Though the vague idea of the waiting room existed, the idea for installation didn't come about until Katerina, the curator for the WAVES program, reached out to me. After conceiving the idea, I needed a lot of help fleshing it out into something real. Jeff Joyal and Gobby are both old friends who i've worked with before on visual art stuff so it made sense to work with them. Gobby, who most people know for his music, is an amazing illustrator with an extremely twisted sensibility. Jeff makes process-intensive sculptures sometimes with manipulated and appropriated objects. The whole thing came together very organically in the development and building.
What was your track selection process for this live mix? It is definitely not my typical set—though there are elements in there. I tried to mix loungey deep house, soft rock radio, dub, ambient and techno to create a blend of what I play and the muzak of waiting rooms. There are also a lot of references lyrically and in the track titles to a sacred spaces, god, waiting, and deja vu. It's a slow smooth ride into the abyss.
Photos courtesy of PAMM.
