EXB-205_Web

BERLIN AT WORK
Paula Ragucci
DORIAN PAIC
FROM JET-SETTING DJ TO DESK-BOUND AGENT
Last July, Dorian Paic found himself
alone in Munich Airport, tired and
sweaty. As he scanned the overhead
displays for his departure gate, clutching a
boarding pass for a Lufthansa flight back
to Berlin, the weight of 15kg of house and
techno vinyl cut into his shoulder. It grew
heavier as he weaved between passengers
on the way to the plane, exhausted but
pumped full of adrenalin at the familiar
prospect of a missed flight. He was on his
way home from his first DJ gig since the
pandemic shut the world down in March
2020, and one of just a handful of dates he
would play in the uneasy period between
Europe’s first and second coronavirus
waves. “I couldn’t believe I’d been doing
that every weekend for more than 10
years,” Paic said over coffee in a quiet
Prenzlauer Berg park, almost one year later.
“It seemed completely nuts.”
Like the rest of Berlin’s DJs, the pandemic
changed the Frankfurt-born Paic’s life
almost overnight. The months leading up
to March last year were some of the busiest
of his career, thanks to a six-week South
American tour that took him to countries
like Brazil, Argentina and Peru. But with
a stream of cancellation emails from his
booking agent, it became clear that the
South American jaunt would be his last
tour for a while. “All my gigs until October
disappeared,” Paic remembers. “From one
week to the next, I was out of work.”
More than 40 job applications later,
Paic started his training on April 20 as a
customer service agent for a well-known US
e-commerce company with several offices
in Berlin. He’d left an industry on its knees
for one of the pandemic’s biggest winners:
online shopping. Amazon and eBay are
Germany’s most-visited internet retailers,
accounting for 40 percent of online
revenues. Both companies announced
record sales during the pandemic.
(Datenschutz rules mean he’s unable to
name his employer.)
It’s Paic’s first desk job in over 30 years,
a period that was full of constant touring,
digging for records and managing his label,
raum...musik. He now works from home
at the desk that once housed his home
studio; his modest MIDI and drum machine
collection replaced by his new work tools:
a keyboard, monitor and headset. “In the
first three months, I really wanted to die,”
Paic says. “It was so hard. To be able to
really work independently took around three
months, which is when you start to see the
same situations repeat themselves. Until
then, everything was new.”
The transition from DJ to office worker
isn’t a common one. Most of the music
scene’s casualties, whether DJs, booking
agents or bar workers, have ridden out
the pandemic on unemployment benefits,
scraping by on Arbeitslosengeld II and
Soforthilfe. But that wasn’t an option for
Paic, whose pre-corona booking fee ranged
between a few hundred euros and €3000.
You could describe his life as comfortably
middle class, paying €850 per month
for his Prenzlauer Berg apartment with
enough money to spare for savings and
a few nice meals per week. He wasn’t a
millionaire by the time corona hit, but he
was no starving artist. “I have savings, so I
wasn’t completely broke, but it didn’t make
sense to just sit around eating kebabs,”
Paic says. “I had it good before, so if life
is a bit stressful at the moment, or I don’t
have time to myself, then that’s just the
way it is – you have to adapt.” In his case,
adapting means five nine-hour shifts per
week, during which he often fields calls
from German-speaking customers deep into
the night. He works in a small team of eight,
all based remotely. And while he hasn’t
caught up with any new workmates socially,
at least one of them is a house music fan. “A
colleague recognised my name,” Paic laughs.
“He spent about an hour asking me about
DJing and my label.”
The last time Paic worked regular hours
was behind the booth in 2008, slinging
records to local DJs at Freebase, Frankfurt’s
former temple of house and techno vinyl.
Like standing behind the counter at that
record shop, DJing provided the buzz that
came with connecting with new cultures and
young music geeks, the things Paic misses
most about the touring life. But he says it’s
nice to be finished with the constant travel
– at least until his customer service contract
expires next April. “Before corona, I’d been
living off DJing for 12 years,” Paic says, “and
living off music for 30 years. I don’t know
many people who managed it over such a
long period.” T — Matthew Unicomb
In the first three
months, I really
wanted to die. It
was so hard.
JUNE 2021
17