DANCE MUSIC OVERLOAD: Sonicnet column #1
Sonicnet, 2000
by Simon Reynolds
There's a record
store in downtown Manhattan that always strikes me as some kind of metaphor for
the state of dance music. The store is choked with vinyl, chock-a-block. The
wall-racks are so densely layered with 12 inch singles, the records overlap
so you can only see a narrow strip of
each sleeve's right side---the artist name and track titles are concealed, you can't just scan the walls to find what
you want, you have to peer up close at the price label, where the store has
helpfully printed the information in tiny type. The record bins are so tightly
crammed you can barely extract the discs from their sections, sleeves are torn
and vinyl scuffed. Underneath the shelves, there's an overflow of back stock
extending so far out into the aisles that customers have to put a foot up on
top of the vinyl sprawl just to get near the bins or the listening decks. And
at every deck, there's a tense-looking, sweaty kid in headphones with a fat
stack of new tunes, skipping through the tracks with the stylus and trying to
make judgement calls based on four seconds of intro/four seconds of groove/four
seconds of breakdown, all in the desperate attempt to keep up with dance
culture's Niagaran torrent of product.
This record store is
just about the only one left in New York
that still tries to stock every kind of
dance-floor oriented music, all the myriad subgenres of
house, techno, trance, drum and bass, and breakbeat. (Its one concession to
sanity: skimping on experimental electronica and CDs). Others Manhattan stores
have narrowed their focus to just hard techno, or just deep house, or just
jungle. But precisely because of this
particular store's valiant attempt to
encompass all the tributaries of the post-rave delta, it's getting harder to
use the place, so overcrowded is it with records and customers trying to get at
them. And that's where the metaphor bit comes in, because this mirrors the
increasingly challenging nature of
attempting to navigate the electronic dance music universe, with its
bewildering profusion of styles and its hyper-productivity.
Ten years ago, when rave first started to take off in North
America, it was still physically possible to monitor the best output of every
subgenre--a full time job, sure, but do-able if you were dedicated and
determined. There weren't that many scenes to check, after all--everything was
under the umbrella of house music back then, even techno. Today, it would
take all your time and energy to stay on
top of drum & bass, or minimal techno, or garage, or any single genre---such is the
high turnover of releases, the vast
number of independent labels and self-released records. This double whammy of
stylistic splintering combined with ever-increasing volume of releases is the
reason why people increasingly get on a
narrowcast track and become obsessed with just one kind of music. Take trance, for instance. Until a few years ago I'd always thought it
was a homogenous and basically unified genre, but all of sudden, that same Manhattan store had an entire wall of trance divided up into
a myriad micro-genres. Then I met this English psychedelic trance DJ and,
curious whether she checked out stuff outside the psy-trance ghetto, asked what
she thought of hardtrance warrior
Commander Tom, progressive trance god Paul Oakenfold, and others. She just
looked blank. Clearly, to be on top of
your shit as a psy-trance DJ, you have to have tunnel vision focus.
Diagnosing the dance vinyl glut, it's tempting to bandy
around phrases like "cultural overproduction" or "excess of
access." But it's not like the do-it-yourself boom is generating mountains of mediocrity that
are snowcapped with one percent brilliance. No, the problem is there's too much
good stuff out there-- well-made, intelligently conceived, tastefully executed,
and pretty deserving of your attention. The same cheap music-making technology
that causes the do-it-yourself phenomenon to
keep on mushrooming is also
allowing people to make studio-quality records at home. An unexpected side effect of all this
abundance, though, is a sort of optical illusion--the landmark records don't
stand out so starkly against the plains of lameness. It also means it's harder
for producers to make money, with average sales of a good (i.e. not a huge anthem)
12 inch in most genres hovering between 1000 and 2000 (and that's globally).
Many producers only make tracks to boost their profile as DJs (which is where
you can actually make some dough).
As demanding as it is
for consumers faced with dance music overload, there's no turning back the
clock -- the DIY genie is out of the bottle.
Ultimately, do-it-yourself/release-it-yourself, both as ideal
and as practice, has been fantastic for music. It just means that you
have to abandon the notion of keeping tabs on all the good stuff from across
the genrescape, accept that you're going to miss great records. One aspect of
the DJ's job--and almost a justification for the fat fees these guys charge-- is
their processing function: sifting through the pretty-decent stuff and finding
the nuggets of genius, stringing the pearls together as a stellar set or
slamming mix-CD. Well, that's how it's supposed to work anyway.
Meanwhile, the last time I went to that store, the
over-stuffed-racks were almost falling of the walls. I'm waiting to read about
the first record retail catastrophe: Aspiring Disc Jockey Crushed By Vinyl.
[inspired by this oral history of Liquid Sky, NYC techno record store / rave-wear boutique, and sudden fit of nostalgia for the dance record stores I frequented in the 90s and early 2000s - Breakbeat Science, Sonic Groove, Satellite, and one on 14th between 3rd and 2nd whose name escapes me (Drop?).
The scene was so healthy that it could afford to specialise and fragment - there was even on dedicated just to psychedelic trance, run by a couple of Israeli expatriates
What was interesting to me about these stores was that they were cultural hubs - not just places to buy music, but to pick up flyers for raves and clubs, to buy clothing (especially early on most of the store also had a boutique section to ensure sufficient revenue stream), or just hang out.
Satellite was the overcrowded store described in this piece - and funnily enough about a year after I wrote it, it moved to much larger premises further down Bowery, on the other side of Houston, where all the catering business equipment stores used to be. The new premises were dimly lit, roomy, great wide aisles, and lots and lots of turntables. Clearly the owners had realised it was at the point of utter dsyfunction in the old poky premises. Unfortunately the bottom fell out of the dance vinyl business, and they had closed down by the mid-2000s. But not before winning an "award" from Village Voice -
]
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