Finally, some new long form content! After experimenting with condensation of bigger takes on Twitter the past couple of weeks (and struggling in a bit of a writer’s roadblock in the months leading up to it), it’s finally time to try out the audio format for a more spontaneous collection of arguments. Early in August, Jaeger Oslo dropped a pretty doomer-esque wrap up of where dance music is currently headed as a scene. It seemingly wants to shield decades-old conceptions from capital-induced mutations, and there are many arguments to make and questions to ask in its wake. Let’s get into some of them.
Transcript
Hello everyone, this is Hellweg for Dream City Turmoil, and for this Substack entry, I've decided to give the audio format a try. There's a reason for this. The article I'm going to cover here deals with many philosophical issues and points of tension within electronic music that, to an extent, have already been discussed on Dream City Turmoil. So, instead of mulling over these things again with several thousand written words, I thought I'd try to formulate a more spontaneous collection of oral arguments instead. There might just be a different kind of insight to be gained in this manner, and I felt this would be worth switching up the format for.
So, today we're discussing an article by the writer Mischa Mathys. He is a writer I, admittedly, do not know that much about. However, he does write a lot for of one of the most high-profile venues for house and techno in Oslo, which is called Jaeger. Earlier in August, he dropped about 4000 words on their website that deal with current trajectory of a global techno community, and it starts with a review of an event with... Jeff Mills. Again. About 35 years after Mills first enraptured audiences in Detroit with unmatched turntable dexterity as The Wizard, and after about 35 years of a scene more or less revering Mills as a kind of techno demigod or techno icon, even as his material on Axis shifted further and further away from the kind of “techno scene” Mathys has such reverence for in his article (or, at least, what such a scene would traditionally sound like). We've come to expect and love Jeff Mills for beating the crap out of dancefloors with releases such as Waveform Transmissions 1-3. Others love him for experimentation with modern classical on releases such as Blue Potential. Yet others just enjoy the spectacle of him throwing his records around during his DJ sets, such as Live At Liquid Room in Tokyo. And then, when you've gone through all that, you start to realize that the man is almost 60 years old, and he has been the object of the aforementioned reverence by an entire scene for more than half that time! From this angle, Mills represents one of many points of tension or schisms in techno, namely the schism between having a deserved cult of personality because you're so damn good at what you do, and, on the other hand, nurturing a sort of disdain of industry celebrity, when said knowledge of how good you are leads to your ego spinning out of control. Such divides are emblematic for the article in its entirety. It suffers from wanting to maintain a highly specific and decidedly retro idea of a scene, but without providing sufficient justification for the prescription of said scene's structure and aesthetics to the people you'd ideally want to populate it. As it turns out, drawing a distinction between “scene” and “industry” in order to save one from the other is not quite as intuitive as it seems.
At the outset of the article, Mathys wants us to simply accept that an event with Jeff Mills headlining should be a “rareified” experience and momentous occasion. It should be really special and carry a level of uniqueness that you just won't get anywhere else, even among a huge variety in a scene that is now becoming bigger. The argument is that because of this explosive development in dance music and the amount of big headliner-filled events that dominate the global techno festival circuit, the kind of niche events described at the outset of the article have now been devalued, and they are not getting the degree of attention and appreciation that they deserve. The question is: Is this really the case, though? Is this really the kind of development that is taking place? For one, it's interesting that the term “rareified” is used here. Let's look at a definition of this. A bog standard dictionary definition of said term reads as follows:
distant from the lives and concerns of ordinary people; esoteric.
"rarefied scholarly pursuits"
Now, the description of the Thursday night event that follows in this article does fall under that definition. Detroit techno tends to be filled with archetypal sounds and tropes, which can be realized more fully if you have a specific set of knowledge, or if you have a specific set of experience with techno as a whole. The people with said knowledge and experience, those who fancy themselves as a Detroit techno or underground techno vanguard, are usually the ones who try to curate a scene with more individuals of the same aesthetic mindset. The problem here, of course, is that you're trying to extrapolate these aesthetic guidelines to a scene that crosses over to the industry at some point. According to Mathys, the scene has become “so ubiquitous, dictated by social media trends and an increasingly institutionalised music industry, It not only undermines the significance of the event, but has completely killed any possibility of a virile, localised scene to exist.” Certainly, techno as an art form is not immune to dilution, deenergizing or defanging when faced with the force of capital. You only need to look at the Love Parade, and how it slowly but surely spiraled out of control and into self-destruction the more commercial actors that came into the fold to propel its growth. Now, clearly, it's not going to do much good to resist and shield people from the forces of the industry, when your artistic and subcultural prescriptions are so “rareified” that these “normies” can go just about anywhere else than to you to find a different subcultural techno framework that works for them. They will need one that immediately makes sense to them in their current environment. Adding to that, the briefly mentioned distinction between “scene” and “industry” relies on the task of drawing a pretty hard line in the sand between “rareified” and “social media dictated”. In order to do so, we need some kind of meaningful way in which to determine when an event, a scene or an artist crosses over from “scene” to “industry” or “rareified” to “social media dictated”. Mathys doesn't really give us that. When is an event too big to be part of the “scene”? When are producers and DJs too big for the scene's overall good? How much money are you allowed to inject into the “scene” via various channels before you are an industry monster that must be defeated? Another aspect is that it is also hopeless to try and sever ties to and minimize the influence of social media and other “industry” stages for socializing in some kind of attempt to maintain the rareified status. After all, both “scene” and “industry” are overwhelmingly reliant upon the same social media and “industry” stages to bring both normies and fans of the rarefied to the table in the first place. Finally, there's another thing I've been playing with. Has anyone really provided a compelling argument as to why a 21 year old should view a Jeff Mills event as such a momentous occasion? Could you play them a record like The Clairvoyant and And Then There Was Light, and would this be something that you could structure a scene around at a tiny venue like Jaeger, halfway across the globe from Detroit? Do these records and this kind of music speak to the impact and form of stressors that a 21 year old is facing on a daily basis? This isn't my attempt to bag on Jeff Mills and call him an old, outdated or irrelevant guy in techno. What I am asking for is some kind of effort to re-contextualize Jeff Mills' music for younger generations, underlining the elements and tropes that could still resolve some kind of deeper meaning for them.
Let's move on a bit here. Mathys struggles to find justification for what role today's DJ is supposed to play. The arguments themselves are familiar enough: through the advent of the CDJ and DJing software, the playing field for DJs has been widened so much and caused such a great inflation of the value of mixing that the pioneers, or the “true” DJs who follow the true Paradise Garage M.O. for their craft, will be pushed out of the limelight and replaced by industry juggernauts, who only use DJing as a stepping stone on the way to something else. For those who do not know what Paradise Garage was, well, to make a long story short (and save you the regurgitation of about fifteen other articles): it was the prototype venue for the Warehouse Party™ seen all around the globe. It laid the foundations for what we would normally associate a club night with for any form of dance music in modern times. Paradise Garage was also hosted by one of the first superstar DJs ever, Larry Levan, who Mathys references later on in this article. To crystallize Paradise Garage's importance, I will read a quote from an article published by Red Bull Music Academy:
There was nothing particularly special about the Paradise Garage. As the latter half of its name indicates, it was housed in a non-descript parking garage at 84 King Street in Manhattan. However, Levan treated the club as a temple to music. This complete devotion to music, to dancing, to the party, could be seen in every element of the club. The sound system, the mirror balls, and even the garbage cans were treated with reverence by both the club goers and Garage employees. And this relationship extended to the dance floor, where Levan was able to foster the kind of beloved community of which legends and myths are made.
Pioneer DJs like Levan were ultimately placed in the foreground or background of an event according to the current social climate and material conditions. At the Garage, Levan's simultaneous role as tastemaker, sound tech engineer, club designer and general dancefloor puppeteer was unprecedented for its time. His meticulous approach to every minute detail of the club's interior, his efforts to tweak and develop the sound system DURING PEAK TIME, his pioneering efforts in transitioning garage to house music via low frequency dominance and employing dub influences, the nature of Paradise Garage as an LGBT+ space in a 1980s, when New York was ravaged by street crime and suffering heavily under Reaganomics: all of it reflected the nature and surroundings of a nascent, metropolitan subculture that was just beginning to find its bearings.
Paradise Garage was far from immune to the tendencies of cult of personality and/or celebrity worship that Mathys considers to be choking out foundational community initiatives. We can go back to the article and look at a statement from David DePino, who opened for Levan on numerous occasions. According to him, club goers would eventually start to speak of Levan's “dancefloor evangelism”, how Larry “spoke to them specifically” via records and how he directed his personal attention to them as well:
“Larry was a puppeteer,” says DePino. “He controlled the dancers. There were times Larry would … like five, six o’clock in the morning Larry would see a little group that would start to get their coats from the coat room, bring them to their other two or three friends and start to put their coats on and say goodnight to people. And then Larry would go, ‘Watch this.’ And he put on a record that he knew that little group loved and as they were just kissing each other goodbye to the rest of their friends and start to walk, they’d look up and they wave their fists at him like, ‘You son of a bitch, Larry!’”
In summary, there is little utility in continuously holding up Paradise Garage as some kind of utopian ideal in 2021, considering that so many of the factors that coalesced around Larry Levan and the Garage to make it what it was, have changed radically over the course of several decades. What Levan and Paradise Garage can teach us, however, is that the framework of a dance music event and scene is extremely malleable. While the previously mentioned widening of the playing field for DJs and producers sets higher requirements than ever before in terms of curation and quality control, it also makes available more energy and potential than ever before. Via the same “corrupted” social media and technology, you can at the same time generate and find small spaces where the “outcasts” are developing new paths forward. I would go so far as to say that this is exactly where the re-configuration of our scene needs to take place. Are scene actors performing, curating and organizing at a level that is up to date and fit for purpose to create a thriving community in their specific local surroundings? Are DJs revising the approach they take to their craft in time with technological progress and social stressors? Are producers keeping a level head and standing up a bit to the pressure of intense genre compartmentalization, which thriving in a scene requires you to stand up to?
I agree with Mathys that the bifurcation of the DJ profession between on-the-ground club grafters and big stadium climax dispensers is becoming increasingly pervasive in time with the democratization of the profession itself. However, where Mathys necessarily sees this as an opportunity-robbing dynamic, I would argue that said bifurcation makes it easier than ever to spot which motivations people have for being in a scene to begin with. First, their skill sets will be different. If you are mixing on CDJs to a concert-expecting stadium audience, it requires a radically different approach in terms of timing and dynamics than when you are in a small club playing to an intimate environment and audience. Furthermore, the way DJs present themselves will be very different as well. You can take a look at any typical “headliner-filled event”, the PR material and posters for such an event, and then compare it to the kind of rareified experience Mischa Mathys is arguing for. You'll see that there are different aesthetics, different ways to promote yourself and different things that are emphasized in the promotion of your particular approach. Finally, the solidarity with like-minded actors will be different as well. I can draw on some personal anecdotes here: when I saw Posthuman perform at Kafé Hærverk in 2019, he admitted that he wanted the gig despite the slim chances of actually making a profit on this gig. This is clearly an example of how it is possible to find more like-minded people who attach value to something that isn't as immediately monetizable. The mentioned effects of a hierarchical marketplace are unavoidable for a dance music scene, but there is a seemingly simple solution to this: market yourself, your events and your community to DJs, producers and club goers who also find value in the aspects of a techno subculture that aren't covered on Instagram or at a stadium with 10 000 people. However, the real question is whether the heads-down, journeying event with similarly catering DJs still maintains its luster in 2021 vs. the all-out stadium euphoria that so many dance music events are morphing into on a global scale. What are PR agencies selling that manages to so deftly out-compete and destroy the “wholesome” clubbing community experience? Where is that value coming from?
And now we come to the old chestnut of defining what “underground” is. This is always a fun debate. Mathys believes that the Internet is a sort of watershed moment that extinguishes all hope of ever sustaining a counter-culture. This is because it directs far too much attention and ego fuel in the direction of any scene seed currently germinating, smothering it in PR and drowning it in hype before any foundation can grow from it. However, a look at any origin history of techno and house shows that this has always been a tension that any sort of scene has to fight against since way before the Internet was a thing. From day one, house and techno have manifested as attempts to create a local economy for communities in need of one, and these economies will be subject to the same capitalist pressure and subsumption as any modern, music-centered subculture we've experienced so far. For a concrete example, we can look at any foundational dance music label, such as Dance Mania, which started as a music industry distribution engine in the 1980s through the work of Ray Barney. Barney came from a family of businessmen. He capitalized on the foundational structures of house music when he heard it on local radio, and this eventually produced the series of hits the label is known for in house music history. Once you look past the importance of said hits and the establishing of a house music foundation, however, it's still a fact that Dance Mania was a business first. It was not a scene head effort or a calculated move to create a scene that was distinct from whatever the idea of an industry was at the time. If you need further evidence of this, you can go to Chicago Reader and look at their in-depth article on Dance Mania's history:
Barney, now 55, grew up in the music industry. His father, Willie, founded his record store, originally called Barney’s Swing Shop, in 1953, and expanded into distribution in the 60s. When Barney returned to Chicago after graduating from Bradley University in Peoria in 1980, he went to work for his dad, taking over the distro side of the business, as well as the store, where he got the chance to interact with ordinary customers. “I used to have DJs coming over buying music all the time, and they started buying this house music,” he says. “I was very interested. It’s not like I was part of the scene—I wasn’t a big partier or anything like that. It started off as strictly business with me, and I just said, ‘I may as well jump in.'”
Returning to Europe, we have another handy example as well. Just look at Dimitri Hegemann, the mastermind behind Tresor Records, perhaps THE foundational European techno label. If he hadn't been an active music industry player as head for Interfisch Records in the years leading up to and during the unification of East and West Germany, Tresor wouldn't have come anywhere near the legendary status it has now (especially as a brand). Finally, let's not pretend that the influx of hype-seeking club goers pissing off the OGs wasn't a problem from day one. Also, let's not pretend that this split in the perception of what “underground” is was somehow brought to the very forefront with the advent of the Internet. It has always been a thing and a tension factor within dance music. You only need to look at Danny Rampling in a 2017 interview with Rolling Stone to see this, where he comments that it took about half a year before the combination of MDMA and Ibiza-styled balearic sounds blew the legendary club Shoom out of the small and dedicated community frame:
The whole scene exploded within a matter of three or four months. Word had got out. People cottoned on that there was something pretty amazing and revolutionary happening. The first night there was 100 people. Within two months, there was 300 people. And within month four there was about 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 people queuing to get into a small basement space.
One of the figureheads in the rave movement, Tony Colston-Hayter, came down to the club – he was a professional gambler at the time, one of these eighties characters who had a brick-type mobile phone, good suits from Savile Row, public-school accent. Tony was greatly inspired by Shoom. He said to me, “How about you come in as a partner? We’re going to take this massive. You can make millions of pounds.” I said, “Well, I don’t really want to make millions of pounds, because what I’ve got in this club here is worth more than anything that money can buy to me.”
On a personal note: After following dance music for about 25 years, I would STILL never be so foolish as to throw around a term like “truly underground”, as every single notable example of “underground” in dance music has struggled with and/or succumbed to the same capital-induced pressure, if we go by Mischa Mathys' metric. This source of tension in dance music hasn't changed. It's still there. It's just that the format and proliferation of said tension has changed a lot.
Sorry, Mischa. Your attempt at drawing up a hard distinction between scene and industry doesn't really hold up, because all of the scenes you're falling back on as an example of how to keep the industry at bay have relied on the industry from the very beginning. Even legendary late 80s/early 90s foundational dance music institutions have been motivated or run by the industry to some capacity, and all of the players within dance music are ultimately fueled by varying degrees of desire to harness capital for the satisfaction of their own needs. The next generations of scene inhabitants aren't going to be any more immune to this than the previous generation was. However, by drawing on the lessons from the efforts of collectives like FFWD in Copenhagen, HARDCORE TANO*C in Tokyo or Ute in Oslo (and if we avoid some of their excesses, such as surfing too close to pop culture and EDM or displaying too large of an affection for old school trance and techno tropes), it is absolutely possible to create new space and communities which can fulfill this rareified status that we are all searching for. We just need to ask ourselves one question: Are we ready to look far enough beyond the heroes and ideals of the past? Can we both learn from them and leave them behind to a sufficient degree to stay up to date and fit for purpose? It is only then that we can help to make the most of the energy within the industry/scene rift right now and create a brighter future.
Rejecting a black pill