Going Places: DJ Cassy presents her Fabric mix

“It just takes a little more confidence and a little more patience.” Reflecting on the honing of her DJing style over the years, Catherine Britton, better known as Cassy, speaks with the quiet conviction of an artist who has found her own rhythm and begun to fully revel in taking her own approach. With the release of a mixed compilation for influential London-based club and label Fabric last month, Britton has further established herself as one of the most respected DJs around – not that she wasn’t a considerable presence already.

Resident at Berlin’s famed Panorama Bar since 2006, and also finding time to take up regular slots at the similarly revered Rex Club in Paris and Amsterdam’s Trouw, Cassy is a name which has long appeared in the most credible rankings of the top DJs in the world. It seems only fitting that she can now add a prized release for the British clubbing institution to her list of accolades.  

“I think it completes something in my DJ life”, she admits. “We tried to find a time when I could have done it before so, now that I’ve finally done it, it feels really good. It means a lot to me because I’ve played in the club for many years and Craig [Richards] and Judy [Griffith] mean a lot to me, as do the people who come to club. The whole thing is something special because it’s so incredible how a big, commercial club can have so many people playing such amazing music. It’s really just about music and nothing else and that’s always been something that’s really touched me about Fabric.”

Never short of options in the mix, whether playing to huge rooms in Ibiza or to intimate gatherings of discerning clubbers in underground clubs across the world, you would expect Cassy to be well-attuned to getting the vibe right. Yet, one wonders if the task of whittling down her considerable music collection, for the purposes of producing a mix of just over an hour, poses any selection problems. “It comes together more easily in the end,” she explains. “You are doing it for a particular label or a club or for an occasion, so that kind of narrows down the pool a little bit. The background of Fabric is music. So it’s really cool, you can actually dig really deep and choose pieces you might not be able to choose for anything else.”

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“Life tried to make me settle down but it couldn't” – DJ Cassy

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The mix itself, the 71^st in a long-running and varied series, finds Cassy at first delving into rich, meditative house in the form of opener, Tune In by Arttu, and the Late Night Creeper remix of Norm Talley’s Tell Me. More robust cuts from the likes of Basic Soul Unit, Affie Yusuf and Losoul follow, bringing a steady progression in intensity over the course of the hour. There are also a few moments of blinding atmosphere – Benjamin Damage’s 010x in particular seems perfectly suited to the kind of moment in Panorama Bar, around early afternoon, when the window shutters flicker open, flooding the dancefloor with concentrated shards of natural light.       

That her recorded mixes almost feel like condensed versions, snapshots of the kind of extended club set Cassy has mastered in her time in residence at Panorama Bar, is no coincidence. Both the club and its atmosphere have no doubt been central to Britton’s development. “It’s a very exceptional club and a very exceptional situation,” she says. “It’s the perfect party place for a bit more of a grown up raving public.

“As a DJ, the most important thing you can have is a residency in a club and a dancefloor; a space that you keep on returning to. If you have that, you know how you sound in a room; you know how to build things up. You get a completely different feel for DJing because you are returning to a place and you have control over what you’re doing. Your choice will become different and your style of playing will develop. After many years, such a place is in your body and in your system. It’s a great feeling and it gives you a lot of confidence as a DJ. I guess Panorama Bar done that for me and helped me be the DJ I am today. So I have a really strong connection with the club and the people.

“At the same time, it’s in a place that I lived in and had a life in. I was married in Berlin and I left all of that behind. So, the city is in my past, in a sense. But the club is still in my life. When I go to Berlin, I go to Panorama Bar. Even when I wasn’t feeling at home in Berlin at all anymore, the club was still my home.”

Born in Kingston-Upon-Thames before moving with her parents to Vienna in Austria, Cassy’s career has seen her continue to travel all over the world – though one suspects she would find a way to do so under any set of circumstances. Having lived short spells in London, Berlin and Vienna, with summer life spent in Ibiza, Cassy seems to revel as much in travelling as she does in exploring music of all varieties. Speaking to us from Paris, her satisfaction with the path she has taken is palpable. “I think it’s something that I can be extremely grateful for,” she reflects.

“It makes me really happy to listen to as much different music as possible and to travel to as many different places as possible, eat different food, see different people, just to constantly remind myself that the world is a big place and that we’re all different. It just energises me; I get back a lot of creative energy and just energy in general. I would hate to be in one place all the time – I would probably die! Life tried to make me settle down but it couldn’t, so now I just give in to the fact that I have to go wherever I have to go.”

There is a restlessness at the heart of Britton, keeping her on the move and interacting with a world of new stimuli all the time. You might expect her to be a fidgety or over-animated character. Yet, in conversation and as a DJ, Cassy conducts herself with noteable grace and poise. She takes time in expressing herself and transmits a placid enthusiasm which is difficult not to warm to. Her strength behind the decks lies in her ability to select carefully and her mixes are allowed to blossom, uncluttered by flashy effects and unimpaired by rushed transitions. “I have found my own way of expressing myself for the dancefloor," she says. “When it comes to music and records, I think you can’t get any better. Effects and so on are not going to make the track better and it’s not going to make the music reach out to people more. On the contrary, it actually limits what the music can tell people.”

Though she has made her name primarily as a touring DJ, Cassy has also amassed a considerable back catalogue of her own productions. She has released tracks for the likes of Perlon and Uzuri, as well as on her own self-titled imprint. But with her most recent record being released in 2010, it would seem her desire to be on the move has somewhat slowed the pace of her output, temporarily at least. With upcoming plans involving starting her own party in London in November, spending time in Switzerland with friends and preparing for yet another move, one wonders if we are likely to hear more of her own music any time soon. “As soon as I have a place that I’m going to be spending a little bit more time in, I’ll have my own little studio somewhere,” she says. “It’s just not the time for that yet. I started working on music this summer in Ibiza actually, and even before, so I guess... we’re going somewhere, yeah."