![]() ![]() She went so far as to demand that Life and Death remove her photos from their website. Vaal has kept her true identity a closely guarded secret for the past three years, as she made a name for herself on the European dance club circuit. ![]() And as she gave one last round of hugs to her fans at the club in Antwerp, it did seem strange that someone just becoming known at age 25 could be so at ease with the whole routine of fame. He even wondered if Vaal wasn’t one of his peers from the dance world performing under a pseudonym. When he first saw her perform, Milleri found it unusual that someone with such a sophisticated sound and such authority onstage could have come completely out of nowhere. “She’s like an alpha, she takes control of the crowd,” says Matteo Milleri, one of Vaal’s closest friends and the founder of Life and Death Records, an enigmatic Italian music collective where Vaal got her start. ![]() If, as she built to the final crest of her set, you wandered through the mass of steaming bodies, you would have seen a series of young couples who just couldn’t take it anymore, pushing each other up against walls and ecstatically making out. For the next two hours, via an unrelenting wall of intricate sound that referenced everything from sticky dub beats to sweet electro melodies, Krautrock to the Ronettes, Vaal brought the room up into a state of jittery joy, down into a brooding, primal kind of melancholy and back again. As Vaal took her place behind the wall of speakers, tucked her hair behind her ears, and plugged in her headphones, several hundred backlit faces looked up at her, ready to be told how to feel. one December morning in Antwerp, the British DJ and electronic musician known only as Vaal strode, head down, black baseball cap pulled low over her face, through the crowd of sweaty Belgian kids toward the booth at a club called Ampere.Ī good DJ is like a conductor, charismatic in an authoritarian way, able to control the energy of the crowd and use it to power a communal physical and emotional journey (drugs or no drugs). ![]()
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