John Shima - “Clatter”

Stiver-“Bergamo”

There has been much written about the boom and bust cycles of dance music ( i.e. when is the edm bubble going to burst?). The boom happens when certain strands of dance music attract wider “pop” audiences and bring new listeners into dance communities. During this time, audiences swell, more records are sold, and it is “cool” to be associated with that music community. Much like other “pop” fads, these boom-time periods always come to an end. The bust of a cycle results when the luster of dance music fades and many of those new listeners abandoning dance communities. We are entering what appears to be the tail end of one of these boom periods (Its debatable I suppose), and a lot of keystrokes have been spent trying to decide what is going to happen. The resounding answer people give is that it is natural that dance scenes ebb and flow in popularity, but their survival is not in jeopardy.  The problem is that writers often stop there and don’t explain why dance scenes will survive. Looking to how our Columbus scene has weathered these boom/bust cycles in the past provides one way to provide an answer to this question. By drawing on my conversations about our local scene’s recent history, I want to argue that dance music persists in columbus because there is an underlying infrastructure that is kept alive by the people who continue to use the music, ideas, and traditions we all share even when dance music culture is not popular.

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“[T]he world let down a lot of good musicians” Sun Ra

Sun Ra — “There Are Other Worlds (They Have Not Told You Of)”<br

Extant by OH/EX/OH

Just picked up one of 500 limited edition 180g vinyl copies of the first full length release by OH/EX/OH. It is a truly beautiful and haunting piece of music. Give it a listen today!

Charlatan - Isolatarium by _type

Brad Roses’ Charlatan Project is another top notch release on type records. 

The Infrastructure of Columbus Dance/Experimental Music

Tell your Friends… or just slightly glance at this and make a mental note! (HA) This weekend I actually write something for Local Autonomy and I will not just publish other people’s thoughts! I will be writing publishing a piece on the organization/infrastructure of Columbus dance and experimental music centered around the question: Why will the scene exist even after we disengage?

Much has been written and discussed about the Boom/Bust cycle of dance/experimental music. I use some of my background in organizational sociology to show you why our scene has persisted and why it will continue to persist. A big part of this will be delving into the overhaul I did of the links on my sidebar. I will use this as a base to discuss how I think all the crews, record labels, record stores, radio shows, non-profits, and performance spaces are interviewed into a scene infrastructure. I will even delve into some of our routines and traditions that tie us all together.

“[The laptop] can do things that no other instrument has ever been able to do, and I also think that it’s the most personal instrument that the world has ever seen. So that’s when I first became obsessed with it. And then the conversational naturally goes to, what is computer music performance? And at the time people were saying all electronic music performance is disembodied and disengaging, so I started thinking about how to really kind of hammer home the embodied experience of laptop performance, and probably the most obvious way to show that was through the human voice. So that’s how it started, and it’s just been incredibly fulfilling. I like to process my own voice but I also like to write for other vocalists as well and I want to continue to do that for sure.”

Holly Herndon interview with FACT magazine

“A thing a lot of people got wrong about us – when we did it the first time, a whole lot of what we were about was joy. We tried to make heavy music, joyously. Times were heavy but the party line was everything was OK. There were a lot of bands that reacted to that by making moaning “heavy” music that rang false. We hated that music, we hated that privileging of individual angst, we wanted to make music like Ornette’s Friends and Neighbours, a joyous, difficult noise that acknowledged the current predicament but dismissed it at the same time. A music about all of us together or not at all. We hated that we got characterised as a bummer thing. But we knew that was other people’s baggage. For us every tune started with the blues but pointed to heaven near the end, because how could you find heaven without acknowledging the current blues, right?”

Godspeed You! Black Emperor

Love this mix OH/EX/OH did for The Geography Trip Label. Sublime Ambience, Drone, and Beatlessness.

You know I love Halo. Looks to be a track for a new Hyperdub EP.