Working Weekends: Ryan Elliott

The year is 2008. In a sterile office of the Ford Motor Corporation in Dearborn, Michigan, a sharply dressed young man walks sluggishly to the kitchen for coffee, vainly trying to power his way through a spectacular case of intercontinental jetlag. His trousers are neatly pressed and his tie is well-considered; his identity card, dangling from a front pocket, reads "Ryan Elliott: Financial Analyst".

Hanging around the watercooler, a couple of fellow cubicle jockeys go over the details of their debauched weekend: a 10pm showing of Old School at the local cinema, followed by some post-screening doobs and a 12-pack of Stohs at their crib. Todd, an amicable but doughy bloke from Human Resources, fills his 'I Hate Mondays' Garfield mug with a vending-machine cappuccino. "So what did you do this weekend, Ryan?" he asks.

Ryan ponders the past 48 hours. Jumping in a Boeing and flying across America and the Pacific Ocean to Tokyo; being whisked to dinner by a Japanese promoter who plied him with gallons of cold sake and even colder beer; DJing in a dark and sweaty nightclub in Roppongi, where the assembled crowd went absolutely mental for the warm, throbbing techno emanating from the speakers; beautiful girls smiling at him; the firefight pulse of bass, lights and kick-drum invading his cranium. He remembers jumping into a cab after the club closed, the morning light blinding his weary eyes, and heading directly to Haneda Airport to catch a flight to Detroit. And he remembers the long 15-hour journey home, feeling fulfilled but exhausted to the very marrow of his bones. He remembers every moment of it, all condensed into a three-second flash.

"Not much," he says flatly. "I cut the lawn, and cleaned up the house." Todd scoffs, looks at his mates. What a bore. It was one year later that Elliott finally decided to pull the plug on the corporate Ford Motor job. Leaving his old life behind, he upped sticks and sold his Detroit home so he could move to Berlin – the city where Ryan Elliot 2.0: World Famous Techno DJ would fully take form.

"It wasn't that I didn't want to bother those guys, it was just easier for me – they had no idea what I was doing on the side," Elliott explains of his former double life. Sitting in the glamorous garden of the Roosevelt Hotel pool in Hollywood, it all seems like a lifetime ago now. "I guess I didn't want to go through it all the time to explain it to them," he adds. "And also I didn't want to be judged, because they probably had all these preconceived notions… of which 90 per cent were probably right!"

Continued...

Of course, it's not as though Elliott was a complete unknown back in 2008. He already had monthly residencies at Goodnight Gracie's – with Matthew Dear, no less – in Ann Arbor and at Shelter in Detroit. He played a flawless set in front of 12,000 fans at Sónar By Night with his Spectral Sounds crew. He wasn't by any means unknown, but he's operating on a different level now.

It's not because of his history as a financial analyst that he's succeeded as a DJ, but those previous experiences might just have helped him to become so good at his new job. Elliot embodies certain techno tropes and extends their left-brain clichés to almost comic lengths. His organisational skills and attention to detail are astonishing. He used to chart out his DJ sets in Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, and he co-ordinates the folded stacks of clothes in his closet by material weight and quality (but obviously not by colour, this is techno: "it's almost all black," he laughs). The length of his facial stubble is a finely calculated art form — it's the same in every photo, locked in somewhere after five o'clock shadow and before beard. He's a man of precision. And paradoxically it's this precision, this horological calibration, that makes his DJ sets such a thing of ringing passion.

"I will say that being out of corporate America for six years now, the artistic side of me has grown more," says Elliott, taking a long sip from his pint of Stella Artois and rubbing his black chin. A shiver runs through him as the temperature drops, a crisp bite from the chilly December air. "I enjoyed my time at Ford, but it just wasn't what I was put on this earth to do," he adds, grinning widely. "Sometimes Mondays were pretty rough, let's put it that way."

Just four hours later and the scene has dramatically shifted. Gone are the towering palm trees wrapped in Christmas lights, and the glowing sapphire bed that is the Roosevelt swimming pool. Gone, too, is the accessible pop-jazz music oozing out of the hotel speakers. And in their place is a scene that seems like it could have been ripped straight out of the LA Friday night playbook.

Elliott studiously applies himself to the Technics 1200 turntables in front of him while a girl does her best Cleopatra impression one foot away from the decks, offering a dazzling (albeit slightly inebriated) wavy-armed Egyptian simulacrum in a shimmering tube dress. Behind her, a crowd of roughly 250 punters join in unison. From buttoned-up cubicle drones that wouldn't appear out of place in Elliott's former Ford finance kitchen to the perfectly dishevelled, snapback-topped clones that make up the foundation of LA nightlife, the crowd at Fine Time defines eclectic. Delightfully ornate men with well-groomed moustaches and rolled-up trousers exposing delicate ankles roam the dark space while girls in hot pink fur coats with hair to match walk in concentric circles. In the gloom, silhouetted against the walls, half-a-dozen man-buns can be seen bouncing in rhythmic synchronisation.

Continued...

The promoters of Fine Time have chosen a unique location for the latest edition of their roving club night. Located just a block south of Hollywood Boulevard and around the corner from the Henry Fonda Theater, Sisterhood is a women's clinic that, this evening, has been converted into a laboratory for interdimensional beats. Its high ceiling and stiff, cheap whisky drinks make for a perfect after-hours venue, even if the clinical white walls and single bathroom really don't.

Under the exposed pipework, Elliot performs the sort of high-precision mixing that's almost clockwork, a careful calibration of rhythm and digital tone. From the haunting chants of 'This Is How' by Yotam Avni and the vocal tech-house of Onionz' remix of Taka Boom's 'Groove Like That' to Mood II Swing's 'The Slippery Track', the relentless thrust of Kid Sublime's 'The Loop' and King Cheetah's 'Water Maze', there's one constant throughout his set: a driving four-to-the-floor heartbeat that's so hot it helps the converted clinic melt the window frost forming outside. When Elliott finally slips on Underworld's 'Dark And Long' and sends the whole crowd into a sustained eight-minute climax, everyone in the room knows they've just experienced something special.

With Detroit his city of birth and Berlin listed as his current residence, Elliott's techno credentials are stamped in cement and impenetrable to critique. But more than anything else, it's his monthly residence at legendary German nightclub Berghain that's augmented his reputation. Recent sets at Holland's Awakenings festival and countless DC10 shows in Ibiza this summer alongside DJs like Claude VonStroke, meanwhile, have only helped to boost Elliott's global reach.

"Each month of my residency, at Panoramabar or Berghain, more people are coming out saying they came to see me. I play every weekend now, and the quality of shows has gone up. That's the kind of thing that shows me that people want to hear me as a DJ," Elliott explains after stamping out a cigarette, about to bid farewell. "Look, it's not brain surgery. I don't want to discount what we do, but it's very instinctive. You do the hard part during the week – this should be the fun part."

Ryan plays in London on January 30 and Australia on February 28–March 1