Successful DJ and producer Florian Picasso and his management team at Kronos, have announced today that they will be bringing the DJ Mag franchise to France and
Switzerland starting in October.

This is a great opportunity for France to have a dedicated magazine which is devoted only to dance music and Florian already has received some powerful support on the project from fellow
countrymen, David Guetta and Bob Sinclar.

The plan for the magazine will be to deliver the most upfront news, music and interviews to their readers and to establish DJ France as the go to guide for all things EDM related in France
and Switzerland.

The debut issue is slated for release this October at the conclusion of ADE, and following the announcement of the DJ Mag Top 100 results in Amsterdam.

Florian will contribute to the magazine with editorial, interviews and at large coverage, with the inaugural issue set to feature an in depth interview Florian did with Showtek.

It’s no surprise that nightclubs are dark places, they foster feelings of lust, sex and love and sometimes, when we dance there, we can go through the stages of fancying, loving, fumbling foreplay, intercourse, climax and post-coital bliss just by making eye contact, and holding it, with someone on the other side of the dance floor. Dancing is, according to George Bernard Shaw, “The vertical expression of a horizontal desire legalized by music”.

There is tons of evidence for this, from the anecdotal to the scientific. Lets start with the science and work our way down. Darwin thought that dance was part of the mate selection process and more recently two groups of researchers (Brown et al., 2005 and Fink et al., 2007) suggest that the way we dance might be influenced by our hormonal and genetic make up, such that we use dance to communicate the quality of our genes to potential mates.

In my own lab I have observed similar findings. I filmed people dancing naturally in a real nightclub and I found that men with high levels of the sex hormone testosterone dance differently to men with low levels of testosterone and, most importantly, women prefer the dancing of high testosterone men. Now, if we couple this with the finding that the female sexual partners of high testosterone men report having more orgasms during sex than the sexual partners of low testosterone men we can see how dancing style is well worth looking at when we are looking for a mate.

What about women? When women are at the more fertile stage of their menstrual cycle they dance differently to when they are at the less fertile stage of their cycle. I have found that men rate the dancing of women who are at the fertile stage of their cycle to be more attractive than the dancing of women who are at the less fertile stage of their menstrual cycle. So what’s so different about the dancing of fertile and less fertile women? It’s all in the hips. At the more fertile stage of their cycle women move their hips more when they are dancing compared with when they are at the less fertile stage. I have used eye tracking devises to see where men look on a woman’s body when she dances and I have found that men spend more time looking at the hips of women who are more fertile than they spend looking at the hips of women who are less fertile. So, the more time men spend looking at a woman’s hips the more attractive they find her!

by Dr Peter Lovatt

Defqon.1 – 18,000 people attended and they are all those terrible drug addicts you hear about…apparently

Well you’ve probably heard that a bloke died at the Defqon 1 party allegedly from a cocktail of drugs and 84 people got themselves arrested.

All the same grumblers are now grumbling in the same way they have been since the old days of Warehouse Raves in that time-tested “We told you so” way. Of course no one is bothering to mention that the extent of police attention to the event was likely to produce these sort of arrest numbers. No one is mentioning that Alchohol kills more people and causes more havoc than recreational drugs ever do week in week out…tut tut

I am sure if on the same night the police were out in force at any event where young people were letting off steam and having fun they would have averaged about the same numbers of bodies in vehicles. Why if they just visited the average suburban party, proportionally they’d find just the same number of young people taking drugs.

I Popped a pill, danced a lot, snuggled in the corner with a hot guy..what a night..Little did I know that was it: the demon was on my back. I needed more and more and more. A week later I was mainlining heroin and prostituting myself to not hot guys and listening to Death Metal..

There were even 20 overdoses apparently! Little wonder that people gulped all their pills down quickly and unsafely at the sight of barking dogs and mobs of snarling policemen. If there were more than the happy level of overdoses one could perchance blame that on an over the top police presence?? If they really “care” as they suggest, then possibly not turning up ala Gestapo might be more helpful…

Out of 18,000 people enjoying the music the police arrested 84 for possessing or taking drugs. That means around 0.004% were being slightly naughty…lets have a bit of perspective here!

Ok I’m not exactly a big fan of drugs, but I do like Dance Parties and this exact same stigma has been dumped on people enjoying music outside the norm since..oh I don’t know…the late eighties when warehouse parties were the thing (yes kiddies once we could just take over a Warehouse and enjoy the music, no insurance, no police, no barking dogs…).

People took pills then, maybe the same percentage that do now. But it only makes sense that if there’s all us old Ravers still creeping around waxing lyrically about the “good old days” that nothing too harmful was going on. Of course every generation believes it parties harder than those previous, but lets face it we had just as much fun and we’re all still alive and not a generation turned into Zombies by a few recreational party lollies.