Published: 10/6/2010
Types: Music, Electronic
Aaron-Carl Ragland, who died with shocking suddenness last week from complications of lymphoma, shaped his musical career by challenging all boundaries and taking on enemies and friends with equal fury. He was diagnosed with the disease only days before he died. He was preparing for a European tou...[MORE]
Published: 9/29/2010
Types: Music, Electronic
ADULT. Husband-wife Detroiters Nicola Kuperus and Adam Lee Miller exploit a darkish mix of circuit-bending synths, beats, bass and berating vocals. In '08, ADULT. produced and performed the Decampment, a film and live soundtrack. In Toronto this year, they presented that alongside a version of its...[MORE]
Published: 8/11/2010
Types: Music, Electronic
It's hard to know real talent anymore. We're gorging on product that comes at us instantly and in abundance from, well, our front pockets, where we keep our phones. Lost in our personal electronics, drifting through increasingly noncritical space, we're unable to tell musical good from evil anymore...[MORE]
Published: 7/7/2010
Types: Music, Electronic
Christiaan Macdonald, Jennifer Paull and I are strolling through Corktown, meandering down leafy side streets that lead us from Mudgie's, where we had lunch, to Hello Records, in search of some Detroit heart and soul — on the ground, in the air, on vinyl. "This neighborhood's quite nice,...[MORE]
Published: 5/26/2010
Types: Music, Electronic
So many parties, so little time, to skewer an old cliché. Movement is organized insanity and then multiplied — but at least it's all taking place in one central location at Hart Plaza. The after-party scene is another animal entirely and even harder to tame. So we recommend you don't ev...[MORE]
By Walter Wasacz, Hobey Echlin
Published: 5/26/2010
Types: Music, Electronic
GABE REAL From: Detroit Sounds like: Solid, party-kid-tested Detroit techno from a mega-promoter turned meta-producer who knows how to throw a party (Sunday night's "I ©? You But I've Chosen Techno" afterparty at the Works with SF's Claude Vonstroke) as much as spin one, as his work on h...[MORE]
Published: 5/26/2010
Types: Music, Electronic
At least for five days and nights, the party doesn't end. Movement 2010 and all its associated events unofficially kick off a summer season of frolic in the sun after months of mid-north gloom; officially, it's a celebration of the music that snares the world with repetitive rhythms made expressly f...[MORE]
Published: 3/24/2010
Types: Music, Electronic
Perhaps no artist gets into the lows and highs of sound quite like Steve Goodman. When we say "low," we're talking the U.S. military and FBI "psychoacoustic correction" techniques used to root out Panamanian strongman-CIA stooge Manuel Noriega as well as David Koresh's Branch Dav...[MORE]
Published: 3/10/2010
Types: Music, Electronic
Paxahau Event Productions, producers of the Movement Electronic Music Festival, has announced a partial listing of performers and headliners, as well as ticket info for this year's festival — one of the largest in the world — which is celebrating its 10th anniversary this spring and will...[MORE]
Published: 2/24/2010
Types: Music, Electronic
It's not just anywhere that one can start the work day hanging out in the vinyl-cluttered home studio of techno trailblazer Anthony "Shake" Shakir, bump into an electro theorist-practitioner (that would be Brendan M Gillen of Ectomorph, who unexpectedly dropped by), and then end it dancing...[MORE]
Published: 1/27/2010
Types: Music, Electronic
Five years might as well be an eternity in the here today, gone tomorrow underworld of dance music culture. Raise your hands, clubbers and ravers — who can remember what made you sweat 'n' shout during the dark winter of '05? Well, if you were in Cologne, Berlin or Detroit, it was probably som...[MORE]
Published: 12/30/2009
Types: Music, Electronic
All signals — analog, digital, auditory, sensory — lead to and from Detroit. No other city remains as dedicated to the connectivity of mind, body and 4/4 beats. London? Berlin? Los Angeles? New York? Sure, those are all filled with sexy club life, we'll humbly grant that … and more! But ...[MORE]
Published: 11/25/2009
Types: Music, Electronic
When you're sick and tired of being sick and tired — that is, when folks in high places don't want you and me to enjoy ourselves — well, shit, Detroit dance music people, it's time to get off your asses and start thinking about a little revolution! That's exactly what Aaron-Carl did. Bu...[MORE]
Published: 10/28/2009
Types: Music, Electronic
Halloween in Detroit Dance City — quite distinct from "Detroit Rock City," which is another brat entirely — is Swingin' Time, Shindig, Hullabaloo, Soul Train, Kill the DJ, Optimo, Trash, Club Motherfucker, [Kontrol], Brainfeeder, the Bunker and all those other sick parties from...[MORE]
Published: 9/30/2009
Types: Music, Electronic
Living a long life in the spectral borderlands has its rewards. Since you're basically invisible to most of the rest of the world, you're free to test your inspirations and then transform them into art, music or political energy — and do it any way you prefer. Invent! Reinvent! Take risks. Fai...[MORE]
Published: 8/26/2009
Types: Music, Electronic
Summer '09 may best be remembered as the one that arrived anti-fashionably late. After the Movement Festival's impressive Memorial Day weekend intro to the season of sweat, a nuclear wintry chill descended upon the creative electronic dance scene in this post-Motor City. The hangover of global reces...[MORE]
Published: 8/5/2009
Types: Music, Electronic
And the gods shtupped ... Think of the serious dance party as a kind of liberation — a sweaty, primordial vacation from mundane, banal and ordinary life. It could include a temporary end to care and worry, ritual madness, even states of ecstasy and spiritual epiphany. Golly. That descriptio...[MORE]
Published: 5/20/2009
Types: Music, Electronic
Hello cruel world, welcome to the Detroit party. Forget all your troubles, lay down your cares, everything is waiting for you ... downtown. Recession? What recession? The global economy is contracting? You don't say. It's time again to put your money where it'll do you the most good: dancing to ...[MORE]
By Hobey Echlin, Monty Luke & Walter Wasacz
Published: 5/20/2009
Types: Music, Electronic
CARL COX FROM: East London SOUNDS LIKE Cox pioneered the use of a third turntable in the late '80s, which allowed him to layer tracks into a tribal take on house music transcendent enough to levitate dancefloors without resorting to the fluttery trance bollocks of his superstar DJ brethren. Co...[MORE]
Published: 5/20/2009
Types: Music, Electronic
So: A hard concrete rave with four stages, a marketplace featuring local and international labels and gearhead specialty vendors, clothing and accessory shopping options, a Noguchi-designed fountain to splash in, and the sensation of cool Detroit riverfront breezes to feel against your hot ski...[MORE]
Published: 5/20/2009
Types: Music, Electronic
Hey, club kiddies, technophiles, pro ravers, gearheads and other electro-fried insiders: this ain't for you. We know you've been techno-babbling about "BPM" and "EBM" in your sleep since at least '95, when you danced all night to Richie Hawtin and John Acquaviva in a field of corn somewh...[MORE]
Published: 3/25/2009
Types: Music, Electronic
Sound and vision aren't just words in one of David Bowie's best songs. Increasingly, that phrase has come to describe a typical night out of experiencing live digital fun.In the clubs, in the galleries and museums, in festivals around the world, varied artists are using electronics-based multi...[MORE]
Published: 2/25/2009
Types: Music, Electronic
So, did you hear the one about the gang that walked into a corner Hamtramck bar and then changed it, bitstream by itty bitstream, into a hotspot for Detroit techno, funky house and whatever else is bubbling below the surface on the global electronic dance scene?That same group then worked its ...[MORE]
Published: 1/7/2009
Types: Music, Electronic
Call me old-fashioned, but I actually like most of the music I write about. So compiling each year's "best-of" list is a delight, not a chore. Sure, there's lots of bad stuff out there — horrible shit, in fact. But the good work that makes it through the din of mediocrity makes it all wo...[MORE]
Published: 11/26/2008
Types: Music, Electronic
It's a grimy life. You spend way too much time in beer- and liquor-stained rooms, inhale plumes of smoke, get jostled and bumped by intoxicated geeks and freaks, expose your sensitive eardrums to some of the planet's most intense sustained sonic vibrations. Yes, it can get ugly down there in t...[MORE]
Published: 10/15/2008
Types: Music, Electronic
In the partisan politics of electronic dance music, it's historically been a case of techno vs. house vs. electro vs. drum 'n' bass vs. disco vs. experimental rock vs. whatever else is out there to which you can shake ass.But political wiggling in club culture has become largely irrelevant, gi...[MORE]
Published: 7/2/2008
Types: Music, Electronic
The techno-fab event of the summer wasn't the unveiling of Richie Hawtin's Cube, best described as puffy promotional hilarity that made a stop at the Minus afterparty during this year's Movement festival, and more recently made the rounds at Sonar in Barcelona; take a peek at a send-up, courtesy of ...[MORE]
By Carleton S. Gholz, Walter Wasacz
Published: 5/21/2008
Types: Music, Electronic
Here's a selective list of what we think are the best afterparties (of more than 50 scheduled) off the festival grounds. Sure, we've probably missed some good ones, but who cares? FRIDAY, MAY 23 Masters of the House: A Tribute to Ken Collier Featuring Delano Smith, Charles Hicks, Al Ester, Norm...[MORE]
Published: 5/21/2008
Types: Music, Electronic
Greetings techno lovers and haters; whiners and quibblers; ecstatic dancers and third millennium hippies; club crawlers and starry-eyed house heads; chin-scratching aesthetes and purists; assorted suburban high-school nerds; punkettes and furry ravers with angel wings and bunny ears. And hello ...[MORE]
By Walter Wasacz, Hobey Echlin
Published: 5/21/2008
Types: Music, Electronic
DAN "DBX" BELL From: Detroit/Windsor via Sacramento, Calif. What he's done lately: Well, see, that's the point: DBX is Bell's early '90s techno-tinged house moniker, back when he rolled with Richie Hawtin and other bald minimalists. So lately, he's lugging all his vintage gear onstag...[MORE]
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