Who Is Sveta Ilyinova Hiding From at Minute Seven?
The Tbilisi techno DJ ends every set at six minutes, timed by a plastic chicken. Asked why, she offered dishes, an egg and a tangerine before one real answer.
The timer goes off at 2:14 p.m. on a rooftop above Sololaki. Forty people on orange fruit crates start clapping before Sveta Ilyinova has pulled the fader down. Six minutes. Again.
She plays techno at 134 beats a minute, patient and bare, and she has never played longer than that. At Lamp Works, the courtyard club that runs day parties until the last warm weekend of October, she goes on, plays six minutes and walks off. The timer is a yellow plastic chicken. It sits on the mixer beside her headphones.
I asked what she was avoiding. "Dishes," she said.
I asked again. She said six minutes is the correct time for an egg. Soft, with a middle that still moves. Anything longer is a hard-boiled opinion.
It is a good line. I had also heard it an hour earlier from the sound engineer, with the same pauses in the same places. The egg line has been practised.
So I asked a third time. Sveta peeled a tangerine and put the peel on the crate between us. "What do you want, that I cry?" No. I wanted to know what happens at minute seven.
She looked at the street for a while. Someone below was beating a rug off a balcony.
"At minute seven I know the room," she said. "Then it's a job."
That is the first true thing she told me, and it is a weaker answer than it sounds. The six minutes are excellent. The kick lands on the first bar. The break at 3:40 is the best idea I heard all weekend, a single detuned note held until a woman near the stairs shouted at it. But a set that stops before it knows the room can never get the room wrong. Six minutes is a very good trailer for a film nobody has agreed to make.
She disagreed, mildly. "People remember trailers."
They do. They also never ask for their money back.
She gave me half the tangerine, which I took as a draw. The next DJ walked up, wound the chicken to fifty and played for fifty-one minutes. Sveta stood at the edge of the roof and watched every one of them. She did not look at the chicken once.
I asked what she would do if it broke. She said she would buy another chicken.
