DVS1
I slid through a cramped hallway into an improvised bar. A flood of people shouted to hear each other over a rumble emanating from somewhere unseen. I didn’t know why I was here, but it wasn’t to socialize. Cutting through the crowd, I could feel the floor begin to shake. My pulse throbbed in my neck. I rounded a corner into darkness and a wall of sound crashed into my body. I couldn’t hear anything, only feel it. My sternum vibrated, moving me from the inside. Distraction dissipated into sensory submission as I was swept up in a sea of shadows flowing through stroboscopic light. Smoke hung in the humid air above the frenzy, stacked speakers giving way to rafters covered in beads of sweat. Holding on ’til dawn.
I couldn’t have realized it at the time, but the person behind that first experience—the same one I would photograph a decade later—ushered a sense of presence into my life that would evolve the way I moved through the world and sought meaning in the years to come.
Zak Khutoretsky, better known as DVS1, cultivated the nascent underground Minneapolis dance scene throughout the 90s and 2000s before relocating to Berlin and ascending to a residency at Berghain. His unrelenting, ten-hour Monday morning closing sets at the club became the stuff of legend, cementing his reputation on the global stage and earning him a platform to spearhead discourses on art versus entertainment and dancefloor ethics.
When I got word late last summer that Zak would be in town with enough time to take me up on a standing offer for a photoshoot, I quickly outlined a visual theme and scouted locations and lighting that broke away from the post-industrial look that dominates the space. We spent an afternoon and evening working through a few rolls of film to tap into an aesthetic of “Ancient Futures,” juxtaposing the elemental nature of rhythm with the machine music DVS1 uses to create soundscapes and command dancefloors.
In the years following that first show, Zak and I had a few brief exchanges, but he was busy, and I didn’t want to come across as an over-eager fanboy. I traveled to Detroit, New York, and Berlin to hear him play, but it would have felt antithetical to what I’d come to appreciate to gush to him that he was my idol. In the end, sharing my creative expression with the person whose own stands as a singular inspiration in my life was much sweeter anyway.
Love to the friends who have been there along the way. -P