Where electronic music is right now in America...

Or not.

Momus I had you down as a Big Beat type.

That is not to say our charts are all dance or anything, but the house beat seems fairly well engrained.

It seems to me, from reading here mainly, that dance music in America has not found a middleground between raver and writer, or just between dancing/partying and being a muso. I mean, there seems to be absolutely no market for this middleground, at least I never see any on here from the Americans.

I guess I'm saying that the idea that you can be intelligent and consider parties or raves to be what electronic music is about doesn't seem to have fully resonated or been reflected by tastes in America, cf the seeming non existence of non tasteful dance music.

electronica is just not on the map for the dance massive in nyc. practically the only songs that have crossed over are "lady", "one more time", and "music sounds better with you".

when 'electronica' hit nyc, it seemed to me like an out-of-towner thing. not sure how true that really is, but surely when electronica was hot - it was able to draw some of the young hipster flock. guess that's not happening now?

The problem is over fidelity to the scene as a lifestyle choice as opposed to a broader understanding. And what are the terms of the broader understanding? I am not sure. It might have something to do with the fact that electronic music in general, encompassing everything from microhouse to rave to pop music is somehow more in tune with the way the world actually is or will be(mass urbanization, impact/infiltration of technology on daily life, the plurality of different ideas that one is exposed to in ones life, etc.).

I have been reading Generation Ecstacy by Reynolds and it has definitely changed my views on certain things. I really don't care for the UK hardcore continuum and I think his head is up his ass regarding a lot of things(especially Jeff Mills and mid-west rave), but he does paint an exciting picture of UK rave. In my youth, nearly ten years ago(HAHAHA), I believed strongly in techno. I loved dance music the way Fundamentalist Christians love Jesus.

One thing I remember about the old rave days was the gigantic sense of purpose, direction, and community that existed. The music got better every year, every year there were new producers from new cities; everything was growing and it seemed like there would be a point where the US musical situation might shift. When I say community, I don't mean in a lame loved-up glowstick PLUR sort of way, but community in the sense that in all the larger metropolitan regions in the midwest and in the smaller pockets outside the cities, you knew that there was a gig going off at the same time. You were not isolated and marginal, you were going to the best possible gigs to hear the best possible music and you felt bad for everybody who wasn't there because they were missing out on a situation that was never going to happen again.

In my young, naive mind, Detroit was the center of the universe and thank God we were losing our mind at the Packard Plant or the GI forum, or random warehouses off of Jefferson, or near the New Center area. I can remember dancing in dark, dirty ass warehouses with nothing but a strobe light and Mike Fotias' banging ass Burst Soundsystem thinking of how there was no other place on the planet that I wanted to be. That there was no wish that could be granted that would top that particular moment. And no, it was not the drugs talking, because I was never into pills.

This was as good as any scene you read about in music mags. Of course I am infinitely more cynical these days, but then it was something special. I was never a candy raver, I was just this weird kid who religiously showed up at gigs because I genuinely loved the music. I never felt part of a rave massif, and the clique I ran with never approved of the more populist dance genres and fashions. Snare drum rolls and pacifiers were abhorant. There were the other characters who had the same beliefs and opinions, and those were the people who made it all worth while.

How much of it was the times, how much of it was just turing 18 at the right time in the right place, how much of it was the music, how much of it was novelty, how much of it was the community of people involved? I really don't know the answer, if I did I would have a book deal and a house in Oakland county.

Dance music is always a social music, and I am not sure how I would feel if I still felt a part of that community. When I go out now, I really cannot identify with it anymore. Do you want to be one of those oldsters who are still clubbing? Do you try and slot into the younger generation and their thing which you are just not a part of anymore? At this point in my life, I feel like I have hung around in enough to have the general idea down pat. It just isn't interesting to me anymore. I enjoy certain aspects of the music, and I still listen to it privately, but it seems more like a relic of a lost age rather than a truly vital facilitator of a communal experience.

I have other things to say about this, but I will save it for a later date.

i think the revival of older styles of dance music ultimately bodes well for the "dance scene". hopefully it will help strip away several layers of useless rhetoric (futurism, progression, PLUR etc) that generally turn people off the music.

I wish I understood it. The same drugs the same music, but in most cases completely different reactions.

People, people, calm down and hear me out! Thank you. It seems to me that the opposition between electronic dance and rock is entirely false and contrived. Rather, electronics has a way of stealing up behind a long-lived genre and, er, taking it from behind. It did it to disco (house & techno), to funk (electro and hip hop) and to old school arty ambience (er, new school arty ambience). Only rock survives. It is the wild west for electronics. Rock is begging, BEGGING, to be reborn in an electronic production uiverse.

A nameless, but brilliant, ILM'er sent me an email regarding this thread and his disappointment with not being involved in dance music earlier in the 90's. To me his perspective is really interesting, he is a journo that is highly involved with the new school digital dance and he has been on top of some very serious recent history.

For me, and I assume a lot of others, 9/11 and the implosion of the dance music record industry really changed a lot of things for me. In the 90's there was a sense of hope, of progress. The records really were getting better, we had 2nd wave Detroit and Berlin tracks, Missile Records, Pump Panel, Woody McBride then Edinburgh and Saetiva Records blew up, Vogel, Si Begg, Neil Landstrumm, also Finnish techno was hot Dum Records, Sahko, Panasonic, OHM, Detroit Diesel...next you started getting the very beggining of hard techno and Millsian'bangers(and reynolds is out of his fucking mind is he thinks Purpose Maker records are reserved and anti-body), Purpose Maker, Gymnastics by Regis, Female, Surgeon, Function, Ratio, Umek's very first tracks on Audio Zet, Blueprint Records that was followed by the pump-tech and house of Stockholm, Adam Beyer, Thomas Krome, Jesper Dhalback, on Primate, Planet Rhythm, Drumcode, Svek...the next thing you know Ambient, IDM and Cologne starts happening, you get Studio One/Kompakt/Profan... Berlin and minimalism start getting real tasty too, Pole, Arovane, Maurzio, Basic Channel/Chain Reaction at 33rpm at -16, Deep Chord, Thomas Koner, Robert Henke, Lustmorde, Gas, Eno. Klang Elektronik is the shit. This is back in 99 when I was doing abstract minimal techno nights at a little coffeehouse in downtown Detroit called the Io. My resident DJ Carlos Souffront was massively ahead of the gestalt. When you read me snidely dismiss Kompakt as an old hat in the ILM KOMPAKT uber-thread it is because by 2000 Kompakt really was an old hat. Those records were cained in Detroit from day one. We were showcasing all the threads that eventually would turn abstract minimal techno into microhouse. Eventually I dropped out of the hyper minimal thing and start going back to old school detroit techno, Early Carl Craig, Kenny Larkin, Kevin Saunderson, UR, Derrick May, Indio/John Beltran, Detroit Escalator Company, Aril Brikha, Model 500, Mike Grant and so on and so forth. I started doing a radio show called Current playing old school Detroit classics, plus NU-Detroit knock off labels like Keynote, Delsin, Digital Soul, as well as Downlow, plus Japan, Thomas Leer, New Order, Kleine and MBO, I-F, Alexander Robotnik and a bunch of weird experimential ambient and IDM throw in for good measure.

After the show I was a tired, jaded, cynical, burned-out post-techno character. I unsubbed from the 313 list and bought a guitar and listened to old rock for a year. I drifted for awhile, and eventually ended up here. The disco-punk records and the Disco-Not Disco comps eventually dragged me back kick and screaming by way of Arthur Russell and then old Chicago house. I went to a few gigs and figured out that things were really rotten, and that I had missed nothing.

and that leaves me here, and I imagine that I am not the only one in my situation. I listen to more good stuff now that I ever did in the past. There is a lot of music I enjoy from a variety of eras and genres. The only problem is that I really have no social connection to this music anymore. If I want to hear something I Download it, if I want to buy it, I order it online and have it delivered. I don't really play it for anyone just because I assume people are not interested in electronic music anymore. There are very few gigs I attend anymore, the acts I want to see do not tour the US like they used to back in 98-01, and when they do come though they are not fun because everybody is a bitter, old, jaded, serious post-techno scenester(just like me).

The economics of it just don't work out anymore. Records do not sell like they used to, and people don't go out like they used to. The social aspect has just fallen apart. At best you can do non-dance events at bars, which are never as good because of alcohol culture. Coffee Houses do not really exist in Detroit anymore, so that is an avenue that is closed. You can run a label, but the market is so glutted by wack hobby labels that it is very hard to get ahead. It is a really stark time for electronic music in America.

So finally you have to make a decision, do you drop out completely and have a normal life and a career, or do you dig in and go for it even though it is probably an act of financial mentalism? It is a good question, I still haven't decided.

Right now is no better, or worse, than any other time; it just presents a different set of problems.

I have run the same although slightly different road. The social aspect just seems to be gone, although I do find myself making mix comps for myself and only myself now, like I used to when I was a kid. Just tons of different but somehow similar songs of all different generes one right after another with no mixing and somehow that makes me feel good again.

Its kind of nice in a way because although I used to DJ for myself when I played I was still constrained in some ways by the expectations of the audience and now I feel a little more free although not as connected as I used to.

I think its still possible to have a life and career and dig in although not as deeply as I used to.

and it is nice to listen to all those old tunes

The point I am trying to get to is that there was a point where it seemed like the most intense rebellious thing ever. As time passed it got commericalized and routine. At this point, it just seems so routine and ritualized. There is a stable industry for distributing the records, an industry that specially makes tools for "dance music"
production, a circuit to play the records out, to promote them...

In many ways it is a mature industry that is running smoothly. The spark of people taking things to the next level seems to be gone. It seems careerist now. The energy and excitement are gone; like Reynold's says in GE, it is just a leisure industry, not a form of spontainious youth culture.

Where are they? Either quit your job, or become a single parent, then you too will be a freaky geek, and it is inevitable you will meet them.

T'was ever thus, says Mr Natural.

When you consider that most tradional forms of media in the US are locked to independant electronic arts, and regional media is too dispursed to make a real impact, touring is the only option. Xii can probably tell you a few things about trying to set up a national tour for independant artists. I have to imagine it is a huge headache, with low attendance, long drives, and shite venues that are set up only to sell liquor and barely accomodate a rock group. Even outside of the dance context, there are not a lot of avenues for the promotion of electronics.

The other thing is that the US has very little government support of the electronic arts, and what little patronage that does exist comes from academic instituions that are completely unconcerned with effecting mass culture. Our public media is __WAY__ behind other nations in it's support of innovative electronic arts. Forget the ARS Electronica festival in Austria, Canada's CBC television and radio networks are miles ahead of ours. I really have to commend the Canadian government for allowing digital media shows like Zed to be broadcast to the public. I am sure anyone who is lucky enough to be within broadcast range of CBC2 will have nothing but good things to say about Brave New Waves.

first off, i think the whole "scene" thing is being misinterpreted in that my problem is that there are too many microscenes, its too pluralistic. i want to broaden. I can't think of anything better for music then the lack of a unified scene but there are a lot of little ones, that is what i am getting at... the smaller any scene gets, i think, the more complacent it gets, the more "proper", etc. then the producers start making music that only appeals to their little group.

re: d&B... i have only seen it played out a few times, at more rave-y style events, which meant that there were a lot of teenagers on K sitting down. i think a more d&b centric event would probably be better, and so i will seek one out.

next: why does techno have to be rock's bitch? another problem with rockism (not accusing you colin) is that every music is only viewed in its importance to rock music. even blues and jazz suffer under this. as if coltrane would not be any good if he hadnt inspired roger mcguinn or santana or the dead, or as if kind of blue would somehow be less of an album if Duane Allman wasnt mentioned in the liner notes to the reissue and how he learned to improvise from that album. (grammar is bad tonight!)

Thanks Mike for your long posts. I tend to sympathize with the anon emailer in that i greww up listening to the music but not being able to go out and hear it in a club, mostly due to geographic isolation and a tiny bit of shyness. i just remember poring over mixmag and seeing all the fun that was being had and wanting desperately to participate but now that i can i find i dont know where to go.

furthering my naive unity ideals, i would really like to see more dialog between club owners. as mike noted above, not enough people are going out here in the states, and i think that this is a problem that transcends genre in that its not as important what is being heard as much it is important that something is being heard at all. i always read magazine articles or message board posts (not here) about how DJs are stealing customers from rock venues and putting "real" musicians out of jobs. there are enough people in any metropolitan area to pack the clubs that exist and create the demand for more if only people would get out, and getting out, whether to see music, or a movie, or anything, is fundamentally important, because really, being outside, in the public sphere, engaging people, or even just seeing them, is really just a part of citizenship, of democracy.

None taken Aaron. I see it more as rock being techno's, er, bitch actually. Techno has moved in on every other genre and turned it electronic, so why not rock too? It could be fun. For what it's worth, I'm techno techno techno to my very core of being. Rock music is the one thing I never bought in my youth. Why? Becuaase I saw it as the enemy. I think that's a fairly common prejudice among techno people. A prejudice with no logical foundation.

I can't think why I absorbed that prejudice. I may have simply been defending my territory, as I saw it, but not really grasping what the fundamental nature of that territory actually was. Now I believe that territory is not genre based: I can take genres or leave them according to my tastes that day, much as most of us treat food. I champoin creative use of new technology, but not as an end in itself. I enjoy venturing into the unknown and unexplored. Technology serves to refresh form.

rock + techno... i dont know if it will work almost because the two are so similar. i think SR mentioned in GE that rock was diff than jazz blues etc because the record (including the PRODUCTION) was the unit of currency instead of the song or improvisation or whatever. the fact that the two are so close almost seems to compel some to argue their differences more voiciferously.

Pulling back the perspective a little, I would like to say that, as always, actions speak louder than words. Beyond the simple pleasures of argument, what is actually coming into being (as opposed to slowly passing away) is, from the creative perspective, the thing of primary interest. Perhaps that's something we can all agree on.

But the problem is, I'm 20!

I think the key thing to remember here is that just because you have discovered and lived with electronic music for 10 years or so, this doesn't mean the world has or the next generation has.

I am still astounded at parties and clubs and raves even in this so called era of commercialism, the fact is that NOTHING can prepare most 17/18/19 year olds for the shock of a few thousand people going mad to electronic music. The idea that dance just becomes a leisure pursuit only works on some kind of social class level, ie middle class and above means the scene is shit. The differences between raves now and raves then may be numerous, regulated clubs, less dangerous atmosphere but that's in the mind anyway, the music (totally and utterly relative), but I would argue that the greatest pull factor for raves and clubs and the thing which intrigued Mike and Simon R back in the day is the simple fact that as an evenings entertainment, people going nuts to music all night is like nothing on earth.

In Europe and certainly in my experience, drugs are a major part of this, but I don't think that devalues it. I don't think back to the best nights of my life with some false sheen over them because I was on drugs, I just think they were the best nights of my life.

Whatever about what it does to you medically or chemically, ecstacy's effects, ie a feeling of happiness/love etc are amplifications of feelings you have hopefully had regularly, and most people without an interest in the music lose interest in it quickly enough anyway. My point is good times are good times, on drugs or not, I don't think drugs cheapen anything generally.

But the main point I'll reiterate is that even with all this crap about a "sanitised club environment" or "pre-packaged evening" I still go to clubs in London or Dublin, walk in the door, and am fucking blown away by the volume of music and the amount of people. When a club is booming and full of people as you walk in, it is a visceral shock to the system, and it always will be.

I mean, honestly, prepackaged yadda yadda, what do MOST

what do MOST people do on a night out, go and get pissing drunk and chat up women, grab a burger on the way home, these are your images of what socialising is for your whole life until you discover clubbing. No one talks about it, until I was 16 or 17 I think I thought E was something people took long considerations about doing, or came across once in a while and thought why not.

Nothing, I repeat, NOTHING, can prepare people for what clubbing is, and I don't see any signs of that changing.

people dancing to repetetive music for 9 and 10 hours a night is ridiculous!

Sorry, just being cheeky now.

i have to agree with aaron's emphasis on wanting "community",i mean i listen to a lot of techno and associated music at home,but its really all about dancing to it,being on the dancefloor when you first hear some great track rather than finishing downloading it off slsk and hearing it while you're checking your email...
i'm always going on about this on ilm,but i really think that events that break free from the restrictions of normal clubs are one of the best ways of fostering a sense of community,as well as allowing more diverse music and crucially,in ireland,being able to dance all night...
its weird cause ronan goes out clubbing in dublin all the time,and so do i,(although not much recently,for various reasons)but our paths never really seem to cross,and we focus on different things that we find good about the "scene" in dublin
i mean,i think by far and away the best events in dublin are the free parties,although i can see how they would tend to have less of the type of music that ronan's into
for myself,though,i love being outdoors,and even if i'm not hugely into the type of music that's being played,the experience of being out in the country with a huge variety of people all doing their own time,rather than in the strictly regulated atmosphere of a club,really adds to the experience of going out...
i mean,i do go to clubs,but a lot of the time i don't enjoy it as much as i should-i love jeff mills,but seeing him in a huge sweatbox of a venue with no room to dance and no air for 30 euro or whatever doesn't compare to a few hundred people on a beach with a couple of rigs,each playing a different type of music...
some friends of mine went to see him play at a lost party in london,which i'd love to do,but in general clubs can be quite a lot of hassle...
i had lots more to say but i've forgotten and i'm off to make a cup of tea,but i'll probably post more later/tomorrow

When I heard Philip describe the Narod Niki performance in his column, my jaw dropped; here was a small glimpse into the future of techno. Though I've never seen Luciano live, I'd always envisioned him as this mischievous prankster based on his music. By performing live in this context, I suspect that the whole Luciano persona unfolds and invites a kind of curiousity that is normally warranted for pop stars. I feel similarly about Luomo and Villalobos, both of whom exhibit a similar kind of vitality and energy: they've got great names, hail from exotic (to me anyhow!) locales, look like rock stars, and make music that pulses with dynamism. If anyone is going to attract new listeners and be key in creating/resurrecting a/the scene, it'll be this crew. (I'd mention Matthew Dear as well cos he's American, but don't really know enough about him...)

do we need another Trent Reznor?

if anyone is a writer or would like to contribute pieces for my website explodingplastic.com i am looking for electronic and dance music material to publish on the internet. i can compensate with money if need be.

and no we dont need another trent reznor, but we also dont need things to always remain as they are, and the opposite of crossover is a diminished fanbase, which is less pleasant to me.

It's a bit like someone coming along and saying, 'word processors, computers, email, weblogs!' and being hit with a barrage of naysayers chorusing, 'Yeah, yeah, seen it all before, typewriters, televisions, telephones', letters, diaries'. You gotta remember people: the more things stay the same, the more they change.

No offence to Mr Reznor of course. I'm sure when he was conceptualising his thing back in the late 80's everyone was saying to him, 'Huh! More Throbbing Gristle and Front 242 you mean'. But he had his own unique slant, and the results don't sound like either of those two except in terms of ancestry.

So: let the concepts remain concepts, rather than automatically devolving to historical personages. There is no doubt whatsoever that rock, folk and other acoustic forms of music could become a lot more electronci, and thereby be refreshed.

Yeah, the visuals at techno things generally blow. When Monolake came to Wellington at the end of last year the laser was being operated by someone who actually knew vaguely what they were doing - watching the pattern pulse in time to the music was quite an engaging experience...

.. on the subject of visuals, when I play back music that I've written I like to pop up the Battery UI and watch the coloured lights flashing... each pad pulses with light when it's triggered so I can /see/ the rhythm in visual form. I want to sync up something I've written to some kind of script-driven Maya scene so that each element in the music has a visual counterpart - a bit like that Chemical Brothers video for Star Guitar only far more abstract and thus more like the visual experience that's going on in my head... like the Battery UI experience only far better.

On the topic of where electronic music's headed, I'd like to see a return to what for me is the defining characteristic of the Detroit sound - rhythms that are funky as hell and chug chakka chug chakka bounce backwards and forwards like nothing else. Autechre and co are free to blitz and spasticate all they want but if it loses its basic rhythmic integrity then to be honest I'm not interested...

anyway the music of Sutekh makes me happy (particularly Incest but Fell's pretty damn good too), as does Herbert when he's being rhythmically odd (there are more than a few tracks on his Secondhand Sounds CD that are excellent)... taking an anything-goes approach to writing rhythms out of samples rather than just sampling a drum kit or something. Personally I don't have access to a drum kit (or a drummer for that matter) so all my rhythms use samples of random things taken from field recordings, and often from accidental artefacts taken from these recordings... but I always try to emphasise the strongly rhythmical aspects of everything..

Me too.

It gets way funky.

I am a daft punk!

Look at our history of general fear of technology and our strange pride in that(John Henry anyone?).

Of course within (or without, perhaps) that there will be a certain audience and, with time, a certain adaptation (in this regard the triumph that is Hip-hop has always struck me dumb), but when it comes to it the electro scene just ain't 'merican.

noise, trash, celuloid pop? thats fine. but a purely electronic dream we aint havin'.

(but suddenly i wonder how disney did it, but that a whole different type of wax)

With the exception of the top tier of US cities, it's almost necessary to have a car to have useful transportation! It's a proven fact that 73% of all electronic music sounds best in a car, anyway. That's why the primary venue for listening is car commercials.

So this is about music, right? Electronic music came from the underground and went back to the underground. It was a scene almost consciously devised to avoid "stardom," although of course the marketing bots managed to circumvent this aspect briefly. That's my domestic perspective, and as for why it was so big in Europe, I'm not really sure. Was it really big outside the UK? It seems like Britain is such a small country that word of mouth had a lot to do with it. Electronic music mostly deveoped as a soundtrack for partying, and that's usually where I hear it now, beyond my iPod. Right now, I am hearing a real lack of innovation in the music which may bode badly for the scene as a whole.

they did some good things too, mind...but im in full favor of banning private cars from urban areas.

PAVE TEH MARIN HEADLANDS

Yeah, and if the government stopped tacitly subsizing automobiles by way of building and maintaining an immense network of freeways...

xxpost

The problem everywhere is land. I don't want to see subdivisions metastatizing all over the landscape, no matter where they are. The problem in the Bay Area is single-family homes everywhere, not to mention restrictions on density of urban development. There are vacant lots in downtown Oakland. There are parking lots all over the place. Stack them up. Build housing on top of them.

Of course, the other solution I came up with is if lots of people would just conveniently die, there would be a lot more housing.

i find myself caring less and less about electronic music's heroic fate, but maybe that's because i left the US. it's still popular on a large niche scale, which is to say, perhaps, on the level of indie rock before its recent resurgence, throughout western europe, particularly in germany and spain. but yeah you're right, it began underground and i think largely that's where it's headed again, and i have no problem with that. not everything needs to be annexed by lifestyle glossies. and the innovation is definitely there - read any number of ILM threads for leads!