He was the very first DJ on the top of DJ Magazine’s Top 100 and he’s the only DJ I know of to play the countdown to the millennium TWICE when he rung in the year 2000 in Australia, then flew back in time, across the International Date Line to do it AGAIN in Hawaii! He’s a become a Burning Man staple, and for 16 years, from 2001 until they closed, he was the undisputed King of Space, cementing the club’s iconic status as a nightlife legend. Oh Yes, Oh Yes, Oh Yes! For this House N Techno Tuesday, #HNTT, I’m talking about the techno icon whose name rhymes with Barl Box…
Carl Cox may have lost his longtime home when the legendary Space nightclub closed at the end of the 2016 Ibiza season, effectively putting to bed his 16 year residency, but that hasn’t stopped the 57 year old acid house forefather and King of Ibiza from continuing to rule the island, and the world at 140 bpm.
While there are rumors of the Space name materializing in new form, possibly across the island in San Antonio, the explosion of tourism in recent years has taken a serious toll on the White Isle, exhausting resources and forcing the government to limit permits for new clubs. Because of this, who knows when Space will pop back up and give the king his home back, leaving him to “lay on the couch of other clubs and borrow sugar and milk”. In the meantime though, Hobo Coxy has been popping up all over the place, connecting with other DJs and continuing to curate the soundtrack to the best nights of our lives, from pop-up parties in Ibiza to Burning Man.
2019 saw a second successful season of his One Night Stand pop-up parties, thrown in different clubs around Ibiza and featuring up and coming djs, in addition to the man himself. This season settled in underground mecca, DC10 , the unassuming techno paradise that sits halfway down the tiny country road to Ses Salines and welcomes a crowd that’s ready for grinding beats and weird shit they’ve never heard before. This is a dream for a master like Cox, who’s been on the decks for 40 years and has a MASSIVE collection of music, including 150,000 vinyl records.
While he may have been having One Night Stands with the techno thots at DC10 all summer, that didn’t keep him from his longtime love, Resistance, a party that started at Ultra in 2004 as Carl Cox & Friends and morphed into Resistance over the years, taking up residency on Tuesday nights at the biggest club in the world, Privilege, which has a 10,000 person capacity and is kind of unreal. You really need to just go there and take it all in to understand.
As if he didn’t have enough going on with dueling residencies in Ibiza all summer, Cox also has his own Burning Man sound camp, , Playground. A 15 year veteran of the annual arts fest held in the Black Rock Desert, Cox has been running his own themed camp for years after spending the first few as a solo attendee. Well known and decked out with two stages, Arrival (dusk til dawn) and Dune (dawn til dusk), Cox and friends like Joseph Capriati, Adam Beyer, and DJ Tennis whip up furious techno-filled dust storms on the playa that have made burners return for over a decade now.
From disco to house to techno, Carl Cox is a rave force to be reckoned with. I’ve seen him all over the world, many times since the first time I saw him in like 2001 and have NEVER had a bad night at a Carl Cox party. Perhaps that’s because the King simply won’t tolerate that, as he recently proved when he stopped his set to break up a fight. And that’s why we love you Coxy! You’re a great person, a dope DJ, and a rave and techno (and acid house) ICON and our #FMF #HNTT Pick of the Week!
*Featured Image via WeRaveYou
