DJ BL3ND live at Crocks in Thunder Bay, 23 October 2015

DJ BL3ND performs in a mask and kept his real name out of the billing, which left the poster little to print beyond a city. It said Los Angeles, CA, under the stage name, and above that it said Loffredo & Associates and H.I.T Management presented the night at Crocks. For a DJ whose following grew out of online videos, that was enough.

The date needs a word. The headline said Friday 9 October 2015, while the poster text and the ticket link both said Friday 23 October, and a Thunder Bay listing site filed the show under the 23rd. Both dates were Fridays, two weeks apart. Three of the four mentions agree, so this page goes with the 23rd.

Nine-thirty, twenty dollars

Doors were set for 9:30 p.m. The event was 19+ with photo ID required, the standard rule for a licensed room in Ontario. A pre-sale ticket cost $20 plus a service fee, bought online from the promoter’s own shop, and five Thunder Bay outlets were named for over-the-counter sales: Rainbow on Bay, Extreme Pita, Waking Giant Coffee Co., Espresso Joya and Renaissance Cafe.

The price sits low for the year. Across the thirteen priced Crocks shows of 2015 on this site, tickets ran from $5 to $95. Twenty dollars was well under the Akon night, where general admission was $45, and under the $30 advance price for Tech N9ne.

The outlet list is worth a look. Two coffee counters, a cafe, a pita shop and one more shop on Bay Street made up the street-level network, and the poster said the sale date for them was still to come. There was no box office to queue at. A club ticket was something you picked up near where you already bought lunch.

A hip-hop fortnight with a dance night at the end

Tech N9ne had played the room on Thursday 8 October, two weeks before this date, and that Special Effects tour stop was a rap show sold by the same promoter. Read together, the two nights show the range of a downtown club in one autumn month: a Kansas City rapper first, a masked electro house DJ later.

Nobody else was billed with BL3ND. That is normal for a DJ night, where one performer covers the whole evening. It also puts the calendar to work: 23 October fell a week before the Hallowe’en weekend, and a masked headliner was a neat fit for it. That pairing is a reading of the dates, not something the promoter said.

The mask and the numbers

BL3ND started in Los Angeles in 2009 by handing mixtapes to promoters and clubs, to little notice. What changed things was posting videos of himself playing in the mask, and those clips found an audience online. In 2012 he made his debut at the Electric Zoo festival in New York.

The festival polls followed. DJ Mag’s Top 100 listed him at number 91 in 2013 and at number 78 in 2014. His sound is electro house, hard and loud, built for a floor that is waiting for the drop. In a rock town, that made the booking an outlier, and a cheap one to try.

A year on, the same Friday slot

The first visit was on Friday 3 October 2014, and it has a show page of its own. One year later the frame was familiar: a Friday, the same address on Cumberland Street South, the same 19+ rule. What had moved was his standing, with a Top 100 climb in between.

The 2014 date sat differently in the calendar. Four days after it, the room hosted the death metal band Amon Amarth, so that October opened with a DJ and went straight to swords and longships. In 2015 the DJ came last.

A repeat booking a year on is a small bet on a returning crowd. Thunder Bay has roughly 108,000 people, and a DJ act that sold well once can be brought back at a modest price. That is a reading of the pattern, not a reason anyone gave.

For a room that mostly sold guitar bands, the night was a change of pace, and a clean one. How late the mask stayed on is not something anyone recorded.