James Murphy & 2ManyDJs bring vinyl-only Despacio soundsystem to London this week

Watch The Vinyl Factory’s mini documentary on the towering 50,000-watt speaker stack.

Premiered at this year’s Manchester International Festival, Despacio is James Murphy and 2ManyDJs experiment in pure sound; an old-school disco party powered by seven custom-built speaker stacks and 42 McIntosh amplifiers at £22,000 a piece, packing close to 50,000 watts and averaging 100db on the floor. Now, the trio are bringing what has been called “the biggest audiophile soundsystem in the world” to London for three nights of vinyl-only mayhem on the 19th, 20th and 21st December. Click here to find out more about the event.

In this short film from the Manchester event, we caught up with James Murphy and 2ManyDJs’ David and Stephen Dewaele to get the low down on Despacio, from concept to completion, and ruminate with them on the nature of contemporary DJ culture, the joys of playing vinyl and whether or not it matters to still be considered “cool”. We also asked DFA and Despacio engineer John Klett to illuminate (for the layman) just what is so special about these unique stacks.

You can read the extended interview transcript here.

Watch time-lapse footage of Despacio from the workshop at PBS Audio to dancefloor at Manchester International Festival below: