Return of the Collective - 3/16/2006

As e-music suffers a slump, DJ collaborations are on the rise

By Dennis Romero

The idea of the postmodern DJ star was generated as much from resonant pairings and collectives as it was from self-promoters. By the time DJ Keoki had helped coin the term "superstar DJ" in the mid-'90s, Louie Vega and Kenny Dope, Sasha and John Digweed, San Francisco's Hardkiss crew, the Wicked DJs, and Funky Tekno Tribe were already playing records side-by-side for thousands of fans at a time. Making and performing music, after all, has always been a sharing experience.

Just as rappers spun off from hip-hop DJs in the '80s, the increasing popularity of a new subculture in the late '90s had house and techno jocks coming into their own singular stardom. Sasha and Digweed played separately, members of Hardkiss went their own ways, and DJ Dan broke out of the Funky Tekno Tribe to become "America's favorite DJ," as URB magazine put it. But 9/11, ecstasy burnout, and a wartime economy put the brakes on the scene's growth; today, raves have all but ceased, clubgoing throngs have thinned out, and e-music labels and distributors (the latest being Studio Distribution) have been going under.

Jocks are starting to team up again, realizing that, commercially and creatively, two (or more) is better than one. DJ Dan, for example, recently paired with trance star Christopher Lawrence for a national DJ tour. Progressive-house queen Sandra Collins recently joined forces with VJ king Vello Virkhaus to collaborate on music and video in a club-performance series they've titled "Interference." (Their next "Interference" event is scheduled for March 24 at Crobar in Miami, during that city's dance music conferences.) As Collins explains, she can spin audio and video on Pioneer DVX DVD decks while Virkhaus adds layers of images on top, including live-camera shots of her handiwork on the video turntables.

"It has been our goal to incorporate ideas from past art movements and bring the static images to life in a remixed way," Collins says. "We have also been experimenting with color and mood, in relation to the audience experience."

Focusing on audio explorations, DJs known as the Scumfrog, D:Fuse, and Skribble recently formed a disc-spinning supergroup called DJs Are Alive! (Myspace.com/djsarealive). The act was born last summer while the three waited for roadies to work out production kinks at the World Party festival in Dallas. As the trio downed shots of tequila and dreamed of a better way to perform dance music, they agreed that DJing had become pretty predictable.

"The myth of the skill that a DJ has is gone, because everyone in the audience has their own set of turntables," says the Scumfrog, a.k.a. Jesse Houk. "Mixing two records is to DJing today what playing a heavy-metal lick on your guitar was in the '80s."

Backstage at the Texas event, the combination of liquid courage and sound-system problems that ate into their time slots inspired the DJs to combine their shortened sets into one mishmash, and DJs Are Alive! was ... aliiiive!

"We're like, 'You know what, instead of doing 45 minutes each, let's go out on stage and jam together, with Skribble and D:Fuse doing live drums and me doing live vocals,'" says Houk. "It was so much fun, it lingered in our heads, and we decided to do something more serious."

The troupe now has vocalist Kristin W. and techno producer Static Revenger in the mix and has turned out its first single, the bombastic, loopy house number "Gimme Some Love." The quintet, which will perform March 21 at Miami club Mansion, is hoping to record some sets for a live album.

"It's really nice to be a part of a collective where not everything rests on your own shoulders, and you get to share things with your peers," says Houk. "It gets lonely out there as a DJ, doing everything by yourself."

Indeed, says Australian progressive-house spinner Phil K., who's been collaborating with countryman and producer Luke Chable for the last five years. However, they've only recently turned their home-studio sessions into something more than a 12-inch single: Their first full-length CD, Because We Can, is ready for a May 2 release via the Global Underground label. (The pair will wield laptops and turntables for an April 10 Monday Social performance at Nacional in Hollywood.) The album is an e-music opus complete with ambient interludes, string-fueled crescendos, and rock-steady breakbeats. Chable can play keyboards, and they have six computers between them for sequencing and making beats. The only rule is that all the music has to be made with both DJs in the room. None of this trading rough tracks via e-mail stuff.

"Technically," says Phil K., "I can make a record, but it's very sterile for me to be in a room by myself with this machine. For me, it's all about cracking jokes and having people around."

Music Is the MANTRA - 3/16/2006

Om Records' Chris Smith looks back on a decade's worth of future sounds

By Dennis Romero

Chris Smith likes to tell the story about the first days of Om, perhaps the West Coast's most influential dance-music label. The year was 1995. The place: San Francisco's Lower Haight. The business plan: none. The office was a small flat. People predicted the company wouldn't make it past year one. And, well, the naysayers should have been right. Partner Steve Gray opted out after that first year, citing stress. And Om hobbled along, barely, until its first sneaker success, 1997's Mushroom Jazz, an unusual compilation of down-tempo grooves mixed by up-tempo DJ Mark Farina.

"As a new label, nobody knew who we were, we had poor distribution, we didn't have money to promote, and we didn't know what we were doing," says cofounder Smith, 35. "It took us a while to figure it out."

But figure it out they did. Nowadays Om, wrapping up its 10th anniversary and looking forward to another decade of "future music," is a paradox of success. It's had great penetration with its anti-superstar-DJ music policy, serving as a reliable alternative to dance cheese - trance, Euro-jocks, and big-room elitism. And yet Om sells more records than most of the nation's top dance labels. At a time when DJ shops, distributors, and fellow labels are shutting their doors, in fact, 2005 was Om's best year, says Smith.

"We've been quick to embrace iTunes - we were one of the first 20 labels to sign up," he says. "We're doing a lot of download sales, selling CDs online, licensing music. We're doing a lot of business. And we're still selling a ton of CDs. We're selling more vinyl that we've ever sold. We have our market."

And, despite being an alternative to DJ worship, the label has certainly churned out its own mix-CD stars: Colette, who spun records on the red carpet before the recent Academy Awards ceremony; Mark Farina, now a staple of lounge-worthy down-tempo; and Kaskade, a house-lite crossover star in the making.

"Kaskade is a perfect example of an Om artist," Smith says. "He was my production assistant. We took that and grew that into what it is now. I think most of the music we put out has broad appeal. We're not just putting out tacky, banging stuff."

Indeed, Om is a rare dance label that's as well-known on dance floors as in office cubicles. Its soulful down-tempo (Om Lounge 10) and lullaby vocal house compilations (Om: Miami 2006, out Tuesday) often feel like digital smooth jazz, but have just enough bite and swing to move a crowd. Most of its artists stay around for the long term and often develop into icons - folks such as Los Angeles deep-house mainstay Marques Wyatt, Chicago house producers Iz & Diz, and indie hip-hop DJ J Boogie.

The original idea for the label was to tap into the West Coast's underground energy by signing leftfield hip-hop acts, acid-jazz artists, and deep-house heroes. Smith - a product of Mammoth, California - had spent 1991 and 1992 in Los Angeles, soaking up the city's rave heyday, taking in Doc Martin at warehouse parties. The next year he moved to San Francisco to study multimedia arts at the local state college.

"I just fell in love with the place," he says of the Bay Area. "The energy was amazing. The club scene that was going on was completely off the hook."

Soon, the idea of tapping that energy, and pairing it with burgeoning multimedia technology, stuck in Smith's head. Om's first release was an underground hip-hop compilation called Groove Active. It featured a CD-ROM of graffiti-art pictures and video clips. It was, of course, ahead of its time, and it wasn't until Mushroom Jazz two years later that Om's ball got really got rolling. "Mushroom Jazz" was a Monday-night party with Chicago-bred DJ Mark Farina at the decks. Smith was a fan and signed Farina to a deal. When the CD came out, sales were slow-but-steady, until one of the tracks Farina had chosen, Blue Boy's "Remember Me," became a hit in the U.K. and an underground anthem in the United States. Today, the funky, groovy Mushroom Jazz series is five volumes deep, and each vinyl version is eagerly sought by DJs (and the label is reissuing LPs to keep up with demand).

"We didn't really have any kind of concept of why it would be popular, but I felt like the music was great, and it was marketable," Smith says. "It happened slowly."

In the mid-'90s, Smith started traveling to Chicago to sign up its overlooked house-music legends. While the rest of the dance world was looking to Europe for The Next Big Thing, Om was tapping the well where it all started, signing up folks like Colette (who eventually moved to Los Angeles), DJ Sneak, Derrick Carter, Iz & Diz, and off-the-wall, underrated house-music band the Greenskeepers. While Colette, Kaskade, and West Coast house hunk Miguel Migs kept the music smooth and easy, Sneak, Derrick Carter, and Iz & Diz kept it real - and banging.

Still, if any labels are responsible for the smooth-dance phenomenon known as West Coast house, Om might as well stand up. Smith signed producer Jay Denes to compile a title called Naked Music NYC. It featured artists such as Migs and heavenly vocalist Lisa Shaw. The 2000 release launched a new sound for the left coast - ironically, since Denes was from New York - and preceded the launch of Denes's own iconic label, Naked Music. Om tapped into the sound too, unleashing its own Migs tracks and putting left coasters Andy Caldwell and Kaskade on the smooth-house map. Sure, easy-listening e-music grates on some critics' nerves. But there's no shame in Smith's game. When asked if he would mind crossing over to pop radio and the charts, he has a quick answer: "I pray for it. I hope for it all the time. We're not sitting here saying we want to stay underground."

Like we said, Om is a paradox, born of underground party culture, reaching for jazzy musicianship, and looking to stay relevant not just as a West Coast cultural institution, but as a business. Case in point: The label this year is spinning off an imprint, Om Hip-Hop, with indie-minded rap acts such as Strange Fruit Project, Colossus, and J Boogie working on new releases.

Could Om's success be duplicated, by some young dreamer, in 2006?

"I would say stay away, unless you had a really intense passion to do it and are willing to go to bat every day," Smith says. "It's 10 times harder today than it was 10 years ago. You really have to have some stamina. Most people who are attracted to the music business don't typically have that kind of sensibility." It may be a creative business, he points out, but you still have to do business. "I guess I always had that in me. I also enjoy making spreadsheets and dealing with budgets. I know how to do it, and it's rewarding to get the job done."

Moving Toward Unity - 3/30/2006

MIT professor connects house and hip-hop

By Dennis Romero

While thousands of clubgoers around the world were packing their bags for the house-fueled Miami heat of last week's dance-music conferences, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology theater arts and dance professor was staging a groundbreaking piece in cold New England. Miami's DJ-worshipping events have drawn hip-hop kings such as Diddy and celebrity queens such as Paris Hilton, despite house music's failure to really penetrate the charts. But MIT associate professor Thomas DeFrantz's show could radically change how house music is perceived and performed.

DeFrantz's "House Music Project" was intended to provoke thought about the black, gay roots of post-disco house music and the way the genre has been cast aside in American popular culture (only to be called off the bench now and then by Madonna, Madison Avenue, and Miami). But, on the road to an avant-garde performance, DeFrantz came across an ingenious way to communicate e-music. Software customized for the piece by MIT graduates Eto Oro and James Tolbert allows the professor to take center stage as a club dancer, controlling and cross-fading music samples and tracks via his body movement. Sensors on each wrist and ankle, along with two on his back, help send wireless signals to a computer that contains electronic music tracks.

"Through the piece I can adjust volume, tempo, forward or backward play, frequency, highs, lows," says DeFrantz, an expert in African American dance history. "I'm like a human equalizer. The point is to physicalize what house is."

He intended in part to critique the mainstream forces that have pushed house music underground while giving its close cousin hip-hop a ride to the top. But "unintentionally" is often how media evolves, and, in this case, the possible uses for the body sensors are intriguing. Videogames such as Dance Dance Revolution already rely on up-tempo dance music to fuel a step-mimicking program. Adding creative body movement could be, well, revolutionary. The sensors could also be used to make original music, control video, and even DJ via body moves. "That wasn't really my inspiration, but the commercial possibilities are huge," the professor acknowledges.

DeFrantz's five-movement show takes place in and around a house he had built and placed on stage at MIT's Kresge Little Theater in Cambridge. A DJ helps him keep the beat. A couple of hip-hop-oriented breakdancers work opposite more fluid house dancers, and the music becomes cacophonous when DeFrantz cross-fades the two genres.

"There's a basic story about disco and funk giving birth to hip-hop and house," he says, "even though the two new genres eye each other warily - hip-hop being excessively masculine and perhaps even rockist, and house being more feminine and welcoming and nurturing and a gay space if you will."

At the dawn of the '80s, the raw, beat-heavy sound of house provided voice and shelter to the repressed, and after-hours house scenes sometimes resembled boisterous gospel churches - hooting, hollering, and foot-stomping included. When house was mixed with the drug ecstasy on the Spanish isle of Ibiza in the mid-'80s, it became the soundtrack to raves and clubbing, and it continues to thrive in the global underground.

DeFrantz likes to contrast this development with hip-hop's. Rappers in the '70s and even '80s often adopted a feminized, tight-pants-and-sequined-suit-wearing stance familiar to disco and house fans, but the rap game grew homophobic, angry, and even sometimes loathingly gangster as it came to dominate much of mainstream music's non-black fan base.

"House was originally conceived as a place for queer folks to get together," DeFrantz says. "That's a lot of why it got shoved aside. Hip-hop fit with the times better. Black America needed a certain aggressiveness to understand itself under President Reagan. House is inclusive and spiritual, and it connects the people through movement. It might be back again."

In fact, one point of his show, which he hopes to take on a nationwide tour, "is that hip-hop and house have to figure out how to communicate," he says.

"At the end of the piece," he adds, "we invite the hip-hop and house dancers to groove together."

Junkie Rock - 4/13/2006

With 'Today,' the artist also known as Tom Holkenborg returns to himself

By Dennis Romero

Junkie XL is a rare electronic dance music artist who doesn't come from DJ culture and doesn't necessarily want to be a superstar spinner. His music often disregards the artificial boundaries of contemporary e-music - DJ-friendly song structures, unnecessary drum rolls, loopy synths - in favor of rock 'n' roll aggression, singer-songwriter introspection, and cinematic ambition. Yet, Junkie XL is a massive club star, his studio skills are worshipped by the remix generation, and his sound is rockin', bangin', and otherworldly.

On Today, due Tuesday, the artist also known as Tom Holkenborg pinches his guitar strings for bright, Bernard Sumner notes and also lets the pick fly for whirling, metallic bliss, à la Catherine Wheel. The beats play on, crisp and orderly, and the orbiting tracks are synched up digitally, but there's release, magic, and even a bit of that old "nostalgia for the future" in your headphones. When Billy Corgan tried to go electronic, this is what he must have had in mind. The record, Holkenborg admits, is as rocking as it is "melancholy," as sneeringly punk as it is romantic, as hand-raising as it is shoegazing. Songs such as "Drift Away" glow wistfully under the heat of an old flame, while "Yesterdays" flashes back across oceans of time, and the title track pogos forward in perfect, disco-punk syncopation. Longtime friend Lucas Banker helped write. Nathan Mader comes strong to the mike with subtle urgency. They make you want to pick up a skateboard and be an '80s kid again.

"I don't want to make the same record twice," says Holkenborg, 38. "I know it's done in the electronic world, when there's a successful formula. And I love a kick drum with some sounds. But I want to reinvent myself with every album."

Today is a breeze compared to Junkie XL's last full-length, 2004's Radio JXL: A Broadcast from the Computer Hell Cabin, a three-part (two discs, one downloadable section) progressive-house manifesto that had Gary Numan, Dave Gahan, and Robert Smith, among others, lending fresh vocals to blazingly upbeat grooves. It was the album that contained "A Little Less Conversation," the Elvis-sampling, shimmy-shaking, Euro-chart-capping theme to NBC's Las Vegas. And it had Holkenborg essentially saying he could do super-club music bigger and better than superstar DJs, and get some of postpunk's brightest stars to join him.

The year before, KCRW (89.9 FM) DJ and Matrix franchise music supervisor Jason Bentley had persuaded the former industrial-rocker to move to California from Holland to work on film scores. He learned something that proved useful in making Today. "Instead of going all over the place, you focus, or you lose the story," he says. "I only spent three months on the album. Every day we just sat down and played riffs." Most of the songs were written on guitar, and then he programmed the beats. "It makes it more direct and from the heart. I just wrote 10 tracks, and that's what ended up on the album. It's refreshing."

Indeed, blink and Today is gone, swept away like a vapor trail against a Pacific sunset, leaving a wisp of enchantment in your heart. The collection is as paradoxical as modern e-music, which has created some of the era's best hip-hop (Chemical Brothers' Grammy-winning "Galvanize"), classic rock (Deep Dish featuring Stevie Nicks' "Dreams" redux), and alt-rock (Today), while still remaining under the mainstream radar. To be sure, Today is not the stab at crossover success that Radio JXL was.

"For the last four or five years, I've been working on big projects with well known names, on my last album, on remixes for Coldplay and Britney, and on movies," Holkenborg says, "and I wanted to go back to myself and work on a personal record. I was definitely in a melancholic mood. It's about missing friends, missing home. That's the beauty of melancholy: You bend it to the left, it's sad, and to the right, there can be some joy."

He finds life is grand in Venice, within earshot of the sea, where he does what he loves every day on to-die-for home-studio gear (a five-figure Kyma sound-design system), including scoring music for the forthcoming game adaptation Dead or Alive.

"Today is where I am, here in Venice, and where I am musically in this moment," Holkenborg says. "I don't know if this is where I'll be tomorrow. But for now, this is it."

'Collected' Is Cool - 4/27/2006

Massive Attack's new best-of - and Coachella show - should win more U.S. fans

By Dennis Romero

Thanks, iPod. While the back catalogs of big acts are still gold mines for record labels, the singles-oriented MP3 generation is throwing a digital monkey wrench into the cash cow of greatest-hits compilations. What's the use of buying such collections when they're already out there in webland for the taking, when the dorm-room set has already downloaded its own mixtape versions of these precious vaults? Give it to the so-called suits in the electronic-music industry: They get it. It's called value.

Take the new best-of, Collected, by down-tempo pioneer Massive Attack. It gives you massive musical love, from a 14-track greatest-near-hits CD dating back to its 1991 debut, to a 10-track bonus disc of unreleased and under-played tunes, to a 16-video, flipside DVD, including director Michel Gondry's visual version of "Protection." It's so good, it will have you scratching your head, wondering why some of the bonus-disc tracks haven't seen more light of day ("I Want You," featuring Madonna; "Small Time Shoot 'Em Up," featuring Damon Albarn of Gorillaz).

"The reason we put out the double CD is because, at the end of the day, anybody can download and make their own play list," says Massive Attack's Daddy G., a.k.a. Grant Marshall.

There's no freshman mixtape compiler in the world who's going to duplicate the flow of disc one, which was put together with storytelling in mind by Marshall and Robert Del Naja. It starts with the eerie, Thriller-esque aura of "Safe From Harm" and eventually takes you down, down, down to the suspenseful "Angel," then on to the sweet delicacy of "Teardrop," and before you know it Tracey Thorn is all-timing it with her gorgeous, heartfelt "Protection." Disc one peaks with the singsong, symphonic shuffle of "Unfinished Sympathy," one of England's favorite songs of all time. When "Risingson" starts growling, you might find yourself wondering if this is the greatest hip-hop band America never had.

"We were thinking about making music you could sit down and think to," says Marshall, explaining the group's "Wild Bunch" genesis in Bristol, England, at the dawn of the '90s. "It wasn't dance music, it was listening music. That sparked people's imaginations. And that's why people use our music for documentaries and film."

Indeed, Massive Attack has had much success licensing its cinematic sound to the domestic cinema business. (Is it even possible to stage a showdown without "Angel"?) And Collected, released earlier this month, has already had a run at the top of the U.K. album chart. Yet, the sometime collective has had a hard time cracking the American musical consciousness. Of course, the rise of the Attack happened when hip-hop was tapping into an increasingly outlandish and violent modus - pleasing white fans, appeasing the chart gods, but sometimes bypassing the art of music for more upfront communiqués. Massive Attack, on the other hand, used the urgency of hip-hop's sampladelic grooves, but maintained a shroud of artistic subtlety and simmering inner strength with its symphonic strings and tricky (and sometimes Tricky) lyrics. It's like the on-screen difference between Jean-Claude Van Damme talking tough, and Robert De Niro showing it without a word. But the brooding and sometimes sensitive style of Massive Attack never really penetrated U.S. charts or airwaves.

"We've never done as well as we thought we should have in America," says Marshall, 46. "Of course it bothers us. If there's one market you want to be in, this is it. It's maybe our image, and the music is hard to pigeonhole."

Perhaps the band's next album, Weather Underground, due early next year, will break through. Marshall says the crew has already recorded 15 tracks, with TV on the Radio and Albarn contributing, and the possibility that David Bowie and Hope Sandoval will step in later.

"I'm not good at labels," Marshall says. "It's Massive Attack music. We've always got like drums and guitars and all the instruments. And we bring in other band members to interpret ideas we have. We're trying to keep it as organic as possible so it's easily transferable to the stage."

He's also hoping that the group's time on stage at Coachella on Sunday, which will include a band of nine and two 30-foot-tall LED screens, will at least help convince some of America's critical establishment that Massive Attack is here to stay.

"People say if you're going to do one festival in America, this is the one," Marshall says. "This gives us another bite at the cherry."

A SONIC SMACK - 5/11/2006

Spank Rock gives hip-hop a dance-infused slap upside the head

By Dennis Romero

While hip-hop of late has come to epitomize modern black youth, or sometimes a caricature thereof, the truth is that innovation in rap, dance, pop, and rock has almost always come from the mixing, juxtaposition, and contrasting of black and white, alt and mainstream, inner-city and suburban. Fifties rock, '60s Motown, '70s hip-hop and disco, and '80s Detroit techno were all products of American cultural dichotomy - giving voice to those somewhere between poverty and affluenza, racism and envy. But as hip-hop has shed much of the diversity that sparked its invention, some of the freshest sounds in urban music are now coming from the British grime scene - where race, class, and subculture melt like jack in a quesadilla. Grime standouts ranging from the Streets (who's white) to Dizzee Rascal (black) to Lady Sovereign (white) defy ghettoization as much as they embrace it.

The stateside answer to grime is one of the freshest acts to shake up hip-hop since the Pharcyde. Baltimore-bred Spank Rock (re-)infuses the genre with geek-boy antics, bleep-crazed beats, and sex, sex, sex. The interracial duo's up-tempo, bass-driven rhythms roll forward with synthetic tweakery as likely to be found in electronic dance music as in the Durty South. And it's no accident: The two are heavily influenced by the digital rap-and-roll momentum of British grime as well as U.S. production heroes.

"I thought what Dizzee Rascal was doing was really cool - fast and dancey and a little electro," says Spank Rock's XXXChange, a.k.a. 27-year-old Alex Epton.

Spank Rock's debut, YoYoYoYoYo (Big Dada), hit an enthusiastic blogosphere last month like a bold pimp slap to hip-hop's dogmatic, collar-popping blingism. Of course, the release could be overshadowed by the hype storm surrounding Gnarls Barkley's well-promoted St. Elsewhere CD, out this week, but not for lack of feel-good sounds. YoYoYoYoYo kicks off with pop-locking fury on "Backyard Betty," moves on to British accents with "What It Look Like," eventually gets to the spaced-out tribute "Rick Rubin," and, finally, at the back of the disc, arrives at a virtual strip-club VIP room, where a bespectacled MC Spank Rock, a.k.a. Naeem Juwan, assumes the role of come-hither gamer. "Honey honey see me/Behind my game boy/I got game girl/It comes easy/Let go your shoulders/My popsicle is so sweet see," he raps on "Bump." (Later, Philadelphia rapper Amanda Blank joins in: "I keep it dirty/Not like Fergie/Ain't the Black Eyed Peas/This shit ain't happy/I'm a treachy boastful bitch MC.") Like the character Louis says in Revenge of the Nerds: "Jocks only think about sports, nerds only think about sex."

Well, nerds also think about beats (witness the Neptunes/N.E.R.D.). Producer Epton and 24-year-old MC Juwan knew each other since attending nearby high schools in Baltimore and always dreamed of making a record. Epton moved to New York seven years ago to study music at NYU. In 2001, he interned at a noted dance-punk label.

"I didn't really care for dance music too much until I moved to New York and started interning at DFA Records, which did the Rapture and LCD Soundsystem," Epton says. "I said, OK, there is good dance music."

Juwan moved to Philadelphia six years ago and traveled to the Big Apple often, visits that resulted in Spank Rock, the duo. He sounds a little like Q-Tip, with quick couplets and word flips that get grime-esque. Epton's musical style was inspired by the "Baltimore bass," indie rap, British hip-hop, house, and the Philly-based Plastic Little rap crew. YoYoYoYoYo was composed almost entirely with software such as Pro Tools and Logic, with intricate percussion samples taking a back seat to original, synth, and pad-based sounds, layered atmospherically and punctuated with videogame artillery.

The duo's flow really comes out in its performances, where two DJs bang out originals and other 12-inches for a live rap stream. In a recent BBC appearance, Juwan rhymed over eclectic bangers, by artists ranging from Snoop Dogg to the Beach Boys.

"It's a little confusing for people at the label," Epton says. "They're like, 'When does the show start? You guys are DJing, so when's the performance start?'"

Spank Rock meets hip-hop where the up-tempo, bass-crazed Durty South leaves off and the more scientific sounds of club culture begin. Despite the duo's schoolboy look, its sound is indie without being flavorless - backpack-free and very bottom-heavy. After all, Baltimore is below the Mason-Dixon Line.

Marathon Man - 5/25/2006

Veteran DJ Danny Tenaglia will go the distance in a rare set

By Dennis Romero

As Danny Tenaglia drives around the Big Apple, the sounds of taxicabs, traffic cops, and tooting horns fill the spring air. Even on a mobile phone, 2,500 miles from Los Angeles, the world's greatest living club DJ is spinning a yarn and taking us on a telephonic journey. He's headed to the pharmacy to pick up an antibiotic prescription from his dentist, "a bedroom DJ who plays house music while he's doing my teeth."

"I'm all for the music," Tenaglia says.

Like his dentist, Tenaglia uses sound as transport - taking disparate listeners away to Ibizan sunrises, Gotham after hours, or Miami sunset soirées by the sea. At 45, and three decades into his career, he's become the ultimate DJ's DJ, the benchmark of stamina and soul, sizzle and sleaze. Indoctrinated in the cradle of club-DJ culture, New York's '80s-era Paradise Garage, Tenaglia came into his own in the '90s with residencies in Miami and Manhattan, top-charted remixes, and legendary sets during South Beach's annual DJ retreat, the Winter Music Conference. He took home the DanceStar Lifetime Achievement Award in 2002, the same year he was nominated in the Grammy Awards' Best Remixed Recording category. Wary of millennial trance and cheese, clubgoers around the world have warmed up to Tenaglia's deep-crate style, digging the shape-shifting grooves that accelerate from the most spiritual vocal house to the dirtiest tribal and bubbliest techno. On Friday, it's L.A.'s turn to buckle up, as he pilots Avalon Hollywood for the first time. It will be a rare Southern California appearance.

"As a New Yorker, born and raised, I had residencies in my own city that lasted every week for nine years," he says. "I had been to L.A. maybe three times. I remember the earlier years being much more fun before it got all 'global' for me - playing with Marques Wyatt at Does Your Mama Know before all the cameras and people in your face."

These days, he has a Miami condo and a Long Island city loft with Manhattan views and a 30,000-watt sound system that used to fuel a super-club. It's no wonder he doesn't want to get out of the house. The last time he was in L.A. - gigging at the Mayan while hoping to collect that 2002 Grammy - was a disaster.

"I remember it like it was yesterday," he says of the show. "We were told we'd have a 5 a.m. stop. At 4, all the house lights went on and the music stopped, and they just pulled the plug on me. I was like, 'What the hell happened?' I'm very respectful to venues. If they want to stop at 4, at 10 minutes to 4 I'll bring it down and let them know I have one more track to play. The security guards were acting like beasts, shoving my personal friends, people who came to assist me. I was there with egg on my face. I'm like, 'Fuck this, I will never, ever return to the Mayan again.'

Still, Tenaglia's no diva. While his music is indeed "global" - his Global Underground: London, with its aeronautic sense of blast-off, is one of the greatest club mixes of all time - his message is human: "Be yourself" and let loose on the dance floor, no matter if you're gay or straight, rich or poor. He's renowned for defining the 12-hour "marathon set"; helping to create the dark, drum-heavy tribal sound of New York (for the labels Twisted and Tribal America); mashing up tracks before it was trendy (One Phat Deeva's "In and Out of My Life" vs. Fatboy Slim's "Right Here, Right Now"); and the less-is-more remix (his rare take on Ananda Project's "Cascades of Colour"). But Tenaglia's perhaps best known for being a down-to-earth, true-blue music fanatic. He's an avid vinyl collector, plays CDs for convenience, and is considering a move to laptop DJing because it allows for on-the-fly remixing. He's thoroughly hyped about the techno resurgence (as in the Kompakt label). And, while some top dance acts are pimping film scores, Tenaglia is most excited about a 12-inch single, "Dibiza," he recently released via Spanish label Stereo.

"I have more energy and enthusiasm than ever," Tenaglia says. "I embrace change and technology. I love the dance music that's around today. I feel like I'm 45 going on 26. There's no way you can't say it's better than 10 years ago. It's life."

The Avalon Sound - 6/08/2006

Why the club's customized system is the best in town

By Dennis Romero

Los Angeles is many things - one of the world's most ethnically diverse cities, the globe's entertainment-media mecca, a geographic wonder of mountains and sea, a youth culture spigot of surf and street - but clubbing capital it is not. When it comes to nightlife, you can travel to New York, London, Miami, or even San Diego and find more quantity and quality. You can partly blame Hollywood for that. Industry haunts are the stuff of exclusivity, surface, and transience - red carpets, tealight candles, pop DJs, cheap interiors, and even cheaper P.A. components.

For nearly three years, Avalon Hollywood has been the area's outpost for genuine club-heads, people used to diverse crowds, solid underground music, and high-quality frequencies. It's the only venue in Los Angeles that can be mentioned in the same breath as New York's Crobar, Miami's Mansion, or even London's Fabric - serious adult playgrounds with the proper tools to rock your world. Perhaps it's why the 1,400-capacity Avalon was the first L.A. venue to really attract world-class DJ residencies from such overseas spinners as Sasha, Ferry Corsten, and Danny Howells. In a word, it's the sound.

"Sound-wise, it's up there with the best," says England's Sasha, who, on June 24, will record an unprecedented Instant Live mix-CD at the club, which will available for purchase after the gig.

"Avalon is one of the premier venues in North America and one of my favorite places to play."

"Avalon's System is clear as crystal and makes even bad [music] productions sound great," adds trance star Ferry Corsten, an Avalon resident who has an album, L.E.F. (Loud Electronic Ferocious), due August 8. "It's an amazing system."

Just as chef-owners are what separate fine dining establishments from gastronomic poseur fests, Avalon co-owner John Lyons is a sound designer who put his blueprints to the test. The venue's Eastern Audio Works speakers bear Avalon's branding because Lyons designed them specifically to work in dance clubs. EAW Avalon speakers also grace Tao and Hard Rock in Las Vegas, Ruby Skye in San Francisco, Fur in Washington, D.C., and, of course, Avalon clubs in Boston and New York. At the heart of Avalon Hollywood's sound are sixteen DCS2 subwoofers sitting low along the dance floor and six DC1 loudspeakers hung above it. (Separate EAW speakers are moved into place for live shows.) The result is rumble and roll with no pain.

"I believe that certain frequencies have a physical effect on the body - they can make you nauseous or fatigued," says Lyons, 50. "I always want to build systems that sound loud but that aren't fatiguing. You want to be able to have a conversation on the dance floor."

Lyons explains that many club systems have "long throw" sound, projecting waves far and loud, concert-style. He realized this didn't jibe with a captive audience on the dance floor. "You can do serious damage to someone if their head is near the speaker," he says.

His showcase main room at Avalon has little direct lambasting of a customer's ear. His speakers don't throw out so far, giving more of a "near field" effect. "I wanted to have it work like a waterfall," Lyons says.

Additionally, he did a good amount of acoustical remodeling to the 1927 building that used to be the Palace, including spraying three-inch-thick layers of K13 absorbing cellulose high along back walls and stage walls. Special DJs get special production. New York's Danny Tenaglia recently spun atop a larger-than-life boombox, on a stage decorated with mock subway cars. Dutch trance king Tiesto was outfitted with a "turbo" foot pedal that allowed him to boost the bass at key moments. Deep Dish played beneath an artist's rendering of Family Guy cartoon character Stewie mixing on two turntables. The result is an unprecedented experience for Los Angeles. Competition - Circus Disco, with an EAW Avalon system, and the Vanguard, with a British Funktion One rig - isn't in the same league. And you can forget about those hip-hop-posturing industry haunts down Hollywood Boulevard. They're not in the same universe, sonically.

"It seems like they build places they don't expect to be around for long," Lyons says of social Hollywood. "For me, I think the music is the reason people are here 99 percent of the time. You're selling alcohol and music. If you don't have cold beer, you're doing something wrong. Likewise, the music's gotta be right. It's not that complicated."

Eye on Dabrye - 6/22/2006

Detroit beat maker creates a genre-busting rap album - for a techno label

By Dennis Romero

Hip-hop is going back to its beat-centric roots. In the early '80s, as the genre first reared its head above mainstream waters, the DJ was supplanted by frontmen MCs, eager to boast and soak up the light. Now, once reclusive producers, many of whom got their starts spinning records, are elbowing for the spotlight again. Witness the rise of the Neptunes, Timbaland, and Danger Mouse. The increased currency of sometimes nerdy beat makers has had a side effect of helping to raise the profile of indie hip-hop, which has always been a breeding ground for major-label rap.

The return of the mad-scientist producer also means hip-hop is not limited to the gangsta archetype, allowing more diverse characters to represent. Indie hip-hop, which has grown from a backpack-toting trickle to a marketing storm (Scion, anyone?), has seen Asian Americans (Chad Hugo, Dan Nakamura), Latinos (2 Mex), interracial crews (Spank Rock), and, of course, plenty of white folks come back to the table. Of the last group, the Detroit area's Dabrye has launched a decidedly Afro-futuristic assault on the status quo with his latest, Two/Three, released last week on techno label Ghostly International. Yes, Dabrye has not only produced a genre-busting rap album for a techno label, but he's also a techno kid of sorts. He included some of the underground's illest MCs on the project, including Vast Aire, Danger Mouse collaborator Doom, and the late Jay Dee (a.k.a. J. Dilla).

"I think hip-hop is rooted in dance music," says Dabrye, a.k.a. Tadd Mullinix, 27. "Hip-hop has been bouncing off dance music in its evolution. In a way, we're talking about black music. So they've been intertwined throughout their evolution."

But if you're expecting fast, four-on-the-floor rhythms from the man who has recorded techno under the alias James T. Cotton, you'd better step back. Two/Three is stripped-to-the-bone, down-tempo space bass that reopens the door to conscious rap. It's the kind of hip-hop album that some critics have only dreamed about - icy and composed, far-out and forward-thinking, street tough and intellectual. "Machines Pt. 1" has echoes of Schoolly D's "PSK," with its time-bomb syncopation. "Encoded Flow" rolls along on an evil, feedback-like buzz as the KRS One-like Kadence puts it down: "Can a rapper be socio-philosophical and still effect y'all/Is it possible?" The sustained Nord Lead synth line on "Jorgy" (featuring Waajeed) is a dead ringer for an ominous score movement in Scarface, every rapper's favorite movie. And if you think indie equals soft, think again. On "Special," Guilty Simpson spits that he's "Live as fuck, with a big-ass gun/Who want to size me up/I got a 40 cal chillin' right beside my nuts/Rap shit helps me monopolize my bucks."

The ominously titled "Game Over" brings Phat Kat and Jay Dee to the mike, where the latter barks, "How the fuck you sound?/Detroit make the world go round." Jay Dee, who had worked with Busta Rhymes, De La Soul, and A Tribe Called Quest, died in Los Angeles last February from complications related to lupus. Recording "Game Over" in 2004, Jay Dee "was in the zone," Dabrye says.

Working with a legend like Jay Dee - they met through a mutual friend, and Jay Dee said he actually had purchased a Dabrye album before - is a long way from Dabrye's childhood on the Gulf of Mexico. He was born in Florida, living in a trailer in Hudson with his family until age nine, when they all moved to the Detroit area.

"My mom's records were Brian Eno and Talking Heads and Gary Numan and stuff like that," he recalls. "The first record I bought was Erik B & Rakim's 'Let the Rhythm Hit 'Em.'"

Still, he's always been moved by the synthetic emo of electronic music, from Kraftwerk to Philip Glass, kraut rock to Karlheinz Stockhausen. In 1997, Dabrye began making music - techno, acid house, and hip-hop breaks, all genres circulated via Midwestern radio airwaves. In the early '00s, he started to gain fame as a multi-genre beat maker, putting out Instrmntl on Prefuse 73's label, and One/Three on Ghostly.

He doesn't necessarily think indie hip-hop is the Next Big Thing, but "at least in the mainstream, people are finally noticing," he says. Of Two/Three, he adds, "I just was trying to create the mystery record I always wanted to find."

Anarchy in the S.C. - 7/06/2006

Heard in 'Wassup Rockers,' South L.A. punks make a new movement from an old sound

By Dennis Romero

When Johnny Rotten sneered "no future, no future" on the Sex Pistols' 1977 fuck-all, "God Save the Queen," he seemed to mean it, maaan. When modern-day South Los Angeles punk band Defiance chants "there ain't no future, and there ain't no hope" on its derivative "No Future, No Hope," you can't even begin to imagine it's sincere. The high school group's tune is pounding with promise, roiling with energy, and aloft with adolescent optimism. The mind-blowing upshot is that, 30 years and 5,500 miles away from punk's London heyday, Defiance and other Latino backyard bands are constructing the new sound of contemporary South "Central" Los Angeles, going toe-to-toe with rap, reggaeton, and Mexican regional music for a piece of the cacophonous ambience around the Figueroa corridor.

"S.C. punk," as its adherents call it, is a joyous revelation, a beacon to the pop world that Los Angeles once again is on the map with a movement that's indigenous, fresh, and far from manufactured.

"This sure feels, smells, and tastes like the original thing," says longtime punk fan Jeff Wells, the 45-year-old music supervisor for Larry Clark's South L.A. skate-punk film Wassup Rockers, which expands to screens citywide this weekend. Wells also rounded up local punk groups for the Wassup Rockers soundtrack, due September 12 on the Record Collection label. "After the punk explosion on MTV," he adds, "there's still some real kids in the backyard stomping dirt."

The scene is a product of the changing dynamics of South L.A., a place now populated by the skateboard-toting children of Latino immigrants. Most of the teenaged participants in S.C. punk were barely in kindergarten when the rage-, class-, and gang-fueled riots of 1992 hit. But, while original punk was more than agit-pop - it was a call to arms that sometimes drew shady characters and created anarchic situations - the S.C. version is a refuge from the violence of ghetto indoctrination.

"South Central is home," says Wells. "They don't know any different. They don't feel they're oppressed or underprivileged. They're good kids. They just don't want to go on with the norm. They don't care about 24-inch rims and diamond chains. The diamonds are in their hearts."

Gilbert Lindsay Park, near racially troubled Jefferson High School in South Los Angeles, is just such a refuge. Latino skaters take advantage of ramps set up by the city. Semiannual skate jams organized by Venice Skateboarding Association founder Ger-I Lewis feature local bands that sometimes blur the lines between banda, cumbia, and punk rock. Local gangs cruise in bass-fueled lowriders along the borders of the park, in an area that was once the jazz capital of the West Coast. Further south, "one-light-bulb backyard parties," as Wells describes them, draw up to 300 kids, who pay $3 a head to mosh, thrash, and stomp to two-minute songs.

"The passion is so evident," Wells says. "It's loud, it's fast, and it's hard."

Near Watts, the backyard of brothers Jonathan and Eddie Velasquez, costars of Wassup Rockers, has become a clubhouse for their band, the Revolts. On a recent summer day, the group - sporting skate-label T-shirts, stovepipe jeans, long hair, and bleached streaks - hung out in the 90-degree heat as reggaeton wafted from the salmon-colored stucco home. The neighborhood is a musical smorgasbord.

We're not against hip-hop, but we're just showing our own colors," says Revolts guitarist Louie Rojas, 18. "Everyone shows their colors, so we're showing ours."

Scene-watchers estimate there are as many as 30 Latino punk-rock bands in South L.A. and nearby communities such as Compton, home to Public Assault. They often point to the Retaliates as the founder of S.C. punk. Other acts include 77 Stitches, Sacraficer, and Dirty Pit Kids. Many don't last, moving, dividing, and multiplying like cellular organisms. The lucky ones featured on the Wassup Rockers soundtrack include the Remains, the Revolts, the Retaliates, South Central Riot Squad, and Defiance. Moral Decay, often cited as an S.C. punk standout, is also on the soundtrack, but the group broke up long ago.

"A lot of these bands have never played outside South Central," Wells says. "It harkens back to the days of the Germs and Darby Crash. It's punk rock that's unadulterated."

Local S.C. punk band members describe being turned on to punk around the millennium, when candy pop and blingy hip-hop strangled the airwaves. Mixtapes in CD format circulated in the neighborhoods and featured icons ranging from the Ramones, the Misfits, and Black Flag to the Casualties, A Global Threat, and Virus. The explosion in skate videos accelerated the neo-punk juggernaut in this corner of teen America.

"I heard it in skateboarding videos and stuff, and I would look for it online, and I would download it," says Revolts member Carlos Ramirez, 18. (And here we must pause to assume that the Recording Industry Association of America isn't calculating the value of a genre's rebirth in its estimates of the costs of piracy.)

The S.C. sound is "street," as Wells describes it - "kind of thrashy, kind of punk core, but not enough of any of those things to be compared to them." On some numbers, you can hear the influence of snare-fueled Mexican music. But you can also hear faux British accents and plenty of chants of "oi." South Central Riot Squad's "SC Drunx" proclaims, "We're the fucking Riot Squad/We're South Central fucking punks/We're South Central fucking drunks/Oi-oi-oi-oi-oi." On "It's My Life," the Retaliates yell the lyrics mostly in Spanish. In "War on Society," the Remains declare, "War on society/fuck them all/War on society/Kill them all." On Moral Decay's "Unfinished Story," the lead singer says "Punk ain't dead, and that's a fact" before urging his fans to "never surrender" and "keep on fighting."

Keep on fighting against what? It's a welcome put-on. After all, these kids are the fortunate ones. They have hopes, dreams, and endless energy. They're streetwise. And they've found a vibrant voice in punk rock.

"We're trying to say that there's another way for younger kids," says Revolts vocalist Jonathan Velasquez, 18. "They don't have to be about gangs and drugs and jail and all that shit. You can do a lot more things, even though you live here."

Passion for the 'Record' - 7/20/2006

Dance documentarist Jason Rem gets caught up in the music

By Dennis Romero

Dance-music documentaries have been a disappointing lot - either sponsor-driven, overly star-struck, or low-tech enough to make you wonder if your 12-year-old nephew made it on his mobile phone and posted it on YouTube. The DVD version of Put the Needle on the Record, recently released online and headed for stores in September, is a refreshingly slick, sober, and balanced look at electronic dance music.

Perhaps Needle gets it right because it was written and directed by a club-scene outsider with a small-screen pedigree, former ESPN producer Jason Rem. In 2002, he was looking for a topic for a first film when friend and soon-to-be Needle coproducer Shahin Amirpour suggested he check out the Winter Music Conference, the dance industry's annual retreat in Miami. More than a business-card-swapping soiree, the weeklong conference and related events comprise an adult spring break that draws the world's top DJs and electronic bands to perform at parties that happen 24/7 every March. South Beach's "dance music week" has grown to include massive concerts, super-club gigs, and sponsorship events. (Playboy, PlayStation, and Pioneer are but a few brands that have set up shop or sponsored happenings.) It's been estimated that as many as 30,000 industry insiders and outsiders come from around the world to rub shoulders with dance music's elite.

"I was inspired by the passion people had for the music," says Rem. He also spied a no-brainer opportunity to catch the world's dance-music brain trust in one place, during one week. The 2003 conference ended up serving as a common thread for Needle, which is essentially the story of how dance music became a massive subculture while still remaining under the radar of radio, magazines, and MTV.

"This goes back to my sports background," Rem says. "Going to the Super Bowl, it's easy to get interviews with all these football stars. The conference is the same way. There's a vast wealth of knowledge."

And so Needle gets house pioneer Jesse Saunders delineating house music's origins; drum 'n' bass star Dieselboy talking drum 'n' bass; radio DJs Jason Bentley and Liquid Todd illuminating the state of e-music on the air, and producers such as Dave Ralph discussing how technology constantly pushes the scene forward. Ralph celebrates the laptop-music revolution, saying a contemporary DJ can produce a track on her computer and end up playing it at a club the same night. Living legend François K, who's been spinning vinyl since the days of disco, counters that emotion, however, saying that technology is overshadowing musicality in the scene.

The film itself was a technological feat. Helicopters swoop down Miami's Ocean Drive as partygoers fill the side streets. Booties jiggle in high resolution. Hands are raised to house music. Needle gets a real aesthetic feel for the community, sexuality, and inspiration that drive people toward club culture.

"Those five days, we were doing 45 interviews," Rem says of filming in '03. "[DJ] Donald Glaude we chased the entire week. We had three Beta cameras going for 18 hours a day. We had a crew come on maybe about 11-to-3, then afternoon and early night parties, then an 11-to-5 crew."

Most of the subjects - interviewed at the beach, poolside, and parties - are introspective and open. (At one point, radio jock Todd describes how he learned to beat-match records on air, concluding, "I sucked.") Dance-music tourists explain what attracts them to the circus. And DJs give a universal thumbs-down to the legions of new kids who think mixing records is a cheap ticket to stardom. Dieselboy tells the tale of how he started getting gigs by calling the numbers on party flyers and offering his services free. Jesse Saunders says that, when he started, "I used to play in a closet for like 25 people the whole night."

Rem was moved by the dedication he witnessed. He's now an avid dance-music fan, even as the film did its job, opening doors for more documentaries and possibly even a feature under his company, Rem Entertainment. It's also doing a good deed for dance music, showing how it is with nary a glow stick, big head, or drug-face in sight.

"I've learned that this scene is about more than just kids going out and partying," he says. "I started playing the music, and I was like, 'Oh, I get it.'"

Super-Club Superiority - 8/03/2006

With its detailed attention to music and vibe, Avaland rules Hollywood

By Dennis Romero

The notion of a super-club in Los Angeles was still an abstract concept when Avalon Hollywood came around in the fall of 2003. Before that, the city's idea of a big-room experience included a handful of aging venues with fly-by-night promotions: Circus Disco, a '70s-era warehouse of a place; the 1927 Mayan Theater, a classic but well-worn venue in need of a decent sound system; and the '80s-era Los Angeles Entertainment Center downtown, an edgy white box available to nearly any party promoter off the street. The proper super-club evolved mostly in England, the Midwest, and the East Coast in the 1990s. Venues such as London's Ministry of Sound, Avalon Boston, Chicago's Crobar, New York's Twilo, and the Club at Firestone in Orlando, Florida, helped set the pace. Club-conscious architecture, proper bottom-heavy sound, and in-house nights often distinguished these places.

When Avalon launched officially in October 2003, its owners unleashed a new experience for L.A., one in which a venue and its promoters were in sync about the music and vibe. Although Avalon was a remodel of the Mayan-era Palace Theater in Hollywood, its proprietors had a build-it-and-they-will-come strategy that worked. Million-dollar sound, acoustic alchemy, and VIP nooks and crannies helped the club surpass the competition. While superstar-DJ culture was clearly a hard sell with other area club owners, there was no doubt that Avalon's John Lyons and Steve Adelman, who fostered DJ nights throughout much of the 1990s at their Boston venue, got it. In 2004, the duo adjusted their flagship Saturday-night events in L.A. by bringing on promoter Wired L.A. and putting it and promoter Giant under an in-house umbrella, calling the party Avaland, after the Boston night of the same name.

Last week, Avaland in Hollywood celebrated its second anniversary. In a town filled with hip-hop nights, trendy mash-up parties, and "celebrity DJs" who can't even mix, Avaland is clearly the real best club night in L.A.

"It's too easy to book a DJ and that's it," explains Adelman. "It's a lazy man's way of doing something."

And so he began to give Saturdays more oversight in 2004, bringing the booking and production in-house while using promoters to get the word out. The idea was to make every Saturday an event, regardless of the person behind the decks. Even though big clubs have become very dependent on who's playing records inside, the better venues are consistent destinations no matter who's manning the tunes.

"That's how you build a night, with different things for different people," Adelman says. "If you're going to build a nightclub out of one DJ booking, what do you do the other 51 weeks in the year?"

Of course, Avaland isn't shy about bringing in the kind of DJs that will sell a place out with little promotion. Major residencies at the weekly party have been held down by Sasha, Ferry Corsten, and Danny Howells. And when Avaland hosts a big-name DJ, it does so properly. Trance king Tiesto was outfitted with a one-of-a-kind bass pedal that allowed him to test the limits of the venue's EAW sound system at will. New York house legend Danny Tenaglia got an artful stage set, complete with a subway-car façade and a boom-box-shaped podium on which to spin. On top of that, "there are always dancers, visuals, the whole nine yards," Adelman says.

He got his start as the director of the Roxy in New York in the early 1990s, helping to orchestrate over-the-top gay theme nights that set the template for the modern super-club experience. While other venues were worried about DJs' contract riders, the Roxy was obsessing about décor, the guest list, and the crowd mix. In 1996, that sense of celebration was brought to the fledgling DJ scene at Avalon Boston, where resident John Debo was bringing some of the U.K.'s best spinners to play progressive house. That year, Avaland was born, and a few years later Adelman joined the company. With L.A. and New York venues being added to the Avalon family in recent years, Avaland "has been going in three cities with over a million people coming through over the last 10 years," Adelman says.

And so, in a Hollywood nightlife scene obsessed with $250 bottles of scotch, starlet standoffs du jour, and music that makes you want to cut your ears off, Avaland brings a refreshing sense of super-clubbing to the West Coast, one where diverse crowds, top DJs, and a showtime aesthetic greet Saturday night. As Adelman puts it: "You gotta keep evolving."

A Darker Ferry Tale - 8/17/2006

Dutch super-DJ's new album

By Dennis Romero

If any music video captures the go-go optimism of the late '90s, it's System F's 1999 trance single "Out of the Blue." The camera takes you to a snow-covered Berlin, where time-lapse cranes are robotically building a city of the future, two gloved clubbers are (shall vee) dancing with angular motions, and the glassy, curvilinear architecture of contemporary, reunited Germany is displayed like the glorious conquest of a bitter past. It's a capital that's ready to be plugged in, wired, and Wi-Fi'd. Indeed, the post-Cold War Western world was cresting on a wave of dot-com promise, Berlin's annual Loveparade was a million-strong rave-stock of fuzzy happiness, and it was still cool to have a sunny outlook.

Fast-forward to 2006, and System F is recording under his birth name, Ferry Corsten, the world is on the brink of Middle East catastrophe, the dot-com revolution has taken two steps back, the Loveparade is half its former self, and trance music has become a relic of an overly hopeful time. You would think that, similarly, all has been lost on the dance floor, but Corsten still carries a torch for eternal good times, even if he's older and much more aggro. His latest album, L.E.F., released last week, fits the times with its theme of "Loud, Electronic, Ferocious." Where trance had become a critic's piñata, with its symphonic loopiness and spiky-haired followers (the '90s equivalent of the white-suited disco citizens of the '70s), L.E.F. is a buzz saw of aggression and pumped-up motion, like steroids versus ecstasy.

"Personally, the album was something I needed," says Corsten, 32. "I needed to broaden my horizons again."

L.E.F. starts with "Are You Ready," a twisted, swirling, Roland V-Synth-driven track that could have come straight out of Jacques Lu Cont's studio. (Lu Cont, a.k.a. Stuart Price, is perhaps best known as Madonna's producer du jour. His sound is loopy, compressed, and digitally guttural.) "Fire" finds Duran Duran's Simon LeBon on vocals, sounding like a siren calling out from a mountain peak made of incendiary wavelengths. On other tracks ("L.E.F," "Forever"), Corsten introduces crunchy, electro, '80s elements to his crisp, momentous, and melodic production. Guru of Gang Starr guest raps on a muscular breakbeat number, "Junk." A redux of 808 State's 1990 classic "Cubik" (once heard on KROQ, if you can believe it) appears, only this time faster and more furious. Finally, there's Corsten's high-flying, on-the-run theme for Fox's TV drama Prison Break.

"There are a lot of different new styles coming up," Corsten says of his inspiration. "The typical arpeggiated trance sounds with the big riffs are already seven, eight years old."

Corsten formed his first band as a teenager in the late '80s and by the mid-'90s was producing European "clubhouse" and trance hits. It wasn't until "Out of the Blue," however, that the Rotterdam native would become an international club sensation, helping to define the trance wave. Along with his fellow Dutch super-DJs (Tiesto, with whom he once worked, and the younger Armin Van Buuren), Corsten has continually been noted as one of the world's most popular spinners. The early-'00s backlash against trance - critics have called it cheesy and perhaps too upbeat for dark times - didn't quash the scene's enthusiasm for the Dutchmen, who continue to command five-figure paydays and marquee status at the planet's largest clubs. This year, Corsten undertook a bicoastal L.E.F.-themed DJ residency at Avalon Hollywood and New York's Crobar. Next month, he plans to launch a tour supporting the new album.

Reflecting on his muscled-up sound and his L.A.-to-New-York residency, Corsten says he "was looking for the ferocious part of L.E.F." Ironically, he found it in the subtler-but-more-instinctual groove of house music. "Trance and house are coming together," he says.

It would have been blasphemy to entertain the thought of a trance-house détente only five years ago, what with trance representing the consumerist ego and house representing the soulful id of clubland. But, after years of shooting off into dozens of directions, club music is melding like a giant mash-up of decades, styles, and technological techniques. While Corsten and fellow Dutch trance kings have been toning down their emo-trance in favor of dark, rockist, and tribal-house elements, deep-house dons such as San Francisco's Kaskade are now making pop-flavored dance tracks that feature uplifting, flowery traces of trance.

"Sound," Corsten says, "is evolving."

The Sonic Surfer - 8/24/2006

DJ and music supervisor Liza Richardson stays ahead by going with the flow

By Dennis Romero

This city of stars is a place of many unheralded DJ heroes, from techno artisan John Tejada to veteran house head Terrance Toy to nearly the entire KCRW (89.9 FM) roster, which, for reasons unknown, gets much less attention in this town than such sometime spinners as actor Danny Masterson and rocker Tommy Lee. One of the more overlooked KCRW dance jocks is Liza Richardson, who hosts a choice DJ mix-show called The Drop, Saturdays from 9 p.m. to midnight.

The program usually starts with eclectic, rock- reggae- and world-flavored down-tempo, but by hour two it's marching forward in full force, swirling, interlocking, and revolving unstoppably like a flywheel at 6,000 rpm. Richardson's tech-house grooves are as cutting as they get - more in line with what one might hear on the radio late at night in Berlin. Yet the bubbly oceanic pulses, bell-bottom kinetics, and countercultural futurism of her four-on-the-floor sets somehow seem right at home in our four-lane biosphere.

"I go on these long techno excursions, which I love," says the Brentwood resident and avid surfer, who paddles out almost daily. "You try to feel your DJ sets, like you try to feel any kind of wave in your life. You're inspired by the next song you're playing. I just go with the flow. I don't plan out my sets."

Among her five surfboards is a rare Tony Alva (Craig Hollingsworth-shaped) model. She worked with the former Dogtown skater on the Lords of Dogtown movie - Richardson as music supervisor, Alva as consultant and sometime stunt stand-in. Despite her low profile, Richardson is perhaps the most Hollywood-connected of KCRW's serious dance spinners. Her disparate experience and vast music library (both hard copy and in her headspace) have made her a shoo-in as an expert matchmaker of songs and scenes. Maybe you've seen the iconic silhouette-iPod commercials featuring Jet's "Are You Gonna Be My Girl" and the Black Eyed Peas' "Hey Mama." She chose the music.

These days, Richardson is hard at work handpicking tracks for the fall debut of NBC's football-flick adaptation, Friday Night Lights, her first primetime network gig. And she's finishing music supervisor work on Surf's Up, an animated "mockumentary" about surfing due from Sony next year. Her song selections have also graced such films as the recent Jack Black box-office hit Nacho Libre, and the aforementioned Dogtown, last year's set-in-the-'70s skateboarding flick, which was close to her heart.

"I'm from the '70s, so I definitely had a reference for it," she says of Lords. "It's definitely from my soul. I did so much research, it was unbelievable: Going through albums, trying to find cool cuts that maybe I missed or didn't know about; finding out what charted a certain month of a certain year. There were 40 songs in that movie."

While her heart currently thumps to the beat of dance music, she's also done shows focused on spoken word, alt-country, jazz, rock, and reggae during her more than 15 years in public radio. Richardson grew up in Phoenix and went to music camp as a child. As a Dallas college student in the 1980s, she started attending rock shows at Deep Ellum, a warehouse of a club, and listening to public radio, soon landing at a community station with a show based on eclectic tastes. (Her audition tape featured Bob Marley and the Butthole Surfers in one set.) A DJ named Chris Douridas got her a job at NPR affiliate KERA-FM, and when Douridas went to KCRW to take over as music director in 1991, he brought Richardson along.

At KCRW, she dabbled in alt-country (Rancho Loco) and spoken word (Man on the Moon), the latter of which paved the way for her to consult on the PBS documentary United States of Poetry. In the late '90s, she took her Dallas turntables and started DJing house and techno, putting her newfound love for electronic dance music on-air Saturday nights in the form of The Drop. At the same time, Hollywood beckoned, and in 2001 Y Tu Mamá También became her surprise breakthrough as a music supervisor. The film's soundtrack was nominated for a Grammy Award.

Richardson says she feels like she leads a double life - dance-music DJ versus deep-vault Hollywood music supervisor, serious audiophile versus the drop-everything surfer. Her massive vinyl and CD collection "is one of the only things in my life that weighs me down," she says. It's an enviable life, surfing the sound waves under the stars.

Lofty Ideals - 8/31/2006

Veteran NYC spinner David Mancuso brings his song-centric style to SoCal

By Dennis Romero

DJs' choices of mixing consoles are windows to their souls. It's sort of like talking Fender versus Gibson with guitar folks, or digital versus analog with keyboardists. The mixer is the heart of the DJ system - the Penn Station that helps the musical trains groove in time as a new song greets the one playing. So, whether you like rotary knobs (old school, smooth and easy), cross-faders (hip-hop cut-and-paste), or digitally enhanced controllers (new school, forever in-the-mix), your preferred mixer says a lot about your spinning style. The godfather of modern club culture, 61-year-old New York legend David Mancuso, recently discussed his preference.

"I don't use a mixer at all," he says. "I switch between phono 1 and phono 2 on a preamp. I try to make it as smooth as possible. The experience is so good on its own, what does it matter if there's a space of a second or two and you're adding this electricity? I don't mix - I leave that to the musicians."

The revelation says as much about how DJing has evolved as it does about how things have come full circle. Mancuso is credited with creating the concept of the modern trance-dance party more than 35 years ago, and today he's revered as a shaman of '70s up-tempo soul. He prefers the term "musical host" to DJ.

"An hour of the same beat? I've had it," says Mancuso, who will spin Sunday on the Queen Mary. "I'm just like, why? It doesn't work for me. If you're really committed, you try to understand where the artist comes from. I'm not trying to be a DJ by today's standards."

When Mancuso officially kicked off his legendary downtown loft parties in 1970, the idea was to cover his rent, show off his audiophile-approved Klipschorn speakers, and play some of his favorite tunes for friends. The invitations stated "Love Saves the Day," and, decades later, the phrase served as the title of Tim Lawrence's loving book about the origins of New York's underground dance scene. The book's '70s subject matter, Mancuso, and "The Loft" have all had major post-millennial comebacks as a new generation of clubbers raised on jackrabbit beats searched for deeper climes. The lucky ones have found Mancuso's revived East Village events, still invitation-only and still rooted in come-as-you-are '60s idealism.

"The more you have an environment that is socially progressive, the better things are going to be," Mancuso says. "I'm trying to stay out of the whole club scene. I'm rebelling against it."

While the postmodern club culture emphasizes the DJ as a performer, and often views dance tracks as primary colors to be mixed, "The Loft" aesthetic is about the beauty of song, unmolested. A podcast of a Mancuso set recorded last year in Japan showcases his conductor-like orchestration as he spins Stevie Wonder's "As," allows a few seconds for applause, then moves on to a conga-fueled, violin-garnished disco floor-burner. The return of this kind of musical reverence in clubland coincides with the rise of single-song-leaning iTunes, "indie DJs" who play pop tunes un-mixed, and dance-rock outfits (LCD Soundsystem) that emphasize song structure over rhythm.

"There was a period of time in the late '90s dance scene when the message in the music was getting lost," Mancuso says. "If I'm putting on an Aretha Franklin record, to take the DJ above that recording is crazy. The DJ didn't write the music, he didn't produce it, so why is he the star? Music is bigger than all of us."

Nevertheless, the shadow Mancuso cast in the '70s still looms today. He's credited with helping to break 1972's "Soul Makossa," by Manu Dibango, believed the first chart hit to have come directly from the DJ-driven club scene. Mancuso and his generation of New York spinners - he estimates there were about 30 in the early '70s - also showcased orchestral Philadelphia International soul that laid the ground for disco. Ironically, it was the backlash against subsequent, cookie-cutter disco that helped give birth to the loop-crazed underground dance music of today, its head rebelliously buried in the speakers.

Nowadays, the song is back.

"I think the DJ has the responsibility and the duty to respect the music that is given to him as a gift, and I'm not just talking about promo copies," Mancuso says. "When you hear a song that you truly love, it's unconditional."

'Mysterious' Ways - 9/14/2006

Kaskade's new album aims to enchant the masses with sweet/tart trance

By Dennis Romero

When the trance genre began to really break into dancefloor consciousness in the mid-to-late '90s, the sound was tuneful, pop-friendly, and lush. Breakthrough artists included BT, with his Ima album, Robert Miles, whose "Children" piano line resonates to this day, and ATB, whose club hit "9 PM" was simplistic and accessible. Their sound was, in fact, a halfway point between soul and technology.

The tidal changes on the beaches of clubland, from the almost innocent era of "Children" to the subsequent, fuck-faced madness of ecstasy-crazed Dutch trance, coincided with the times - the go-go expectations of the '90s, the dot-com burst of 2000, the bleak, drop-roll-and-snort excess of post-millennial clubland. After 9/11, dance music got dark, as dirty, percussive, tribal house swept the scene. Five years later, there's been a clear return to the more romantic sounds of the recent past. In fact, 35-year-old Kaskade is the hottest thing in dance music, and his flavor is as sweet and tart as fresh pineapple. Is it too soon?

"I'm not sure if my music really fits the times or not," says Kaskade, born Ryan Raddon. "Mine is a very kind of uplifting, artistic sound. Ninety-five percent of the dance music out there is mindless, more so than ever. Somewhere along the line, dance music has become more dance, and less music. What happened to playing songs - stuff that people can sing along to?"

With his September 26 major-distribution debut, Love Mysterious, the San Francisco house artist brings back that once-successful cross-fade of thumping underground beats and sing-along dreamscapes. Using looped guitars, ethereal synth pads, and crisp, clean percussion - not to mention angel-winged vocals (by contributors Marcus Bentley, Joslyn, and Becky Jean Williams) - Kaskade is one of the first contemporary house artists to really reach out to both the soul-aligned house nation and the candy-crazed trance generation.

"The album is more epic sounding, which is very much a trance thing, but I still feel it's a lot more organic," he says.

While trance artists such as Tiesto, Ferry Corsten, and Armin Van Buuren have been moving into house-pop territory, Kaskade has until recently been aligned more with West Coast vocal house artists such as Miguel Migs, Lisa Shaw, and Colette. Yet Love Mysterious sounds like it could be on the shelf next to the melodious trance of today and yesterday. On the Spanish-guitar-driven "In This Life," Joslyn sings, "So sweet, so fine/Sunshine" as copies of her voice, atomized, fly through the ether of your headspace. On "Sometimes," Bentley sings in a sultry, smooth voice over crunchy, Moroder-esque loops. "Never Ending" is a bass-line-driven ode to love.

"Part of the sound of this record was that I was on the road so much when I was writing it," Kaskade says. "I was on my laptop, using a lot more software synthesizers. When it came time to replace tracks with live musicians, I was, 'No, I'm digging more of a synthetic feel.'"

Kaskade says that younger trance kids give him props.

"One kid was like, 'Man, my favorite DJ is Tiesto, and you're No. 2,'" he says. "I've had girls coming to me saying they play my music for their mothers."

It's been a long, strange trip for Kaskade, indeed. A Chicago-raised Mormon, he went to college in Salt Lake City, where he started DJing and working in a vinyl shop. After graduation, he moved to San Francisco to pursue his dancefloor dreams and soon found himself in the enviable position of production assistant for the head of the West Coast's largest dance label, Om. The gig allowed him to make his own music on the side, and by 2003 he was putting out some of the label's best-selling music, including his debut, It's You It's Me. Last year, after shopping around a couple of fresh tracks, Kaskade inked a deal with the larger New York-based Ultra, which is distributed by Warner Music Group's Alternative Distribution Alliance. It means Kaskade has a chance to cross over with more than just trance and house kids.

"I had been with Om for five years, and I was ready to try something new," Kaskade says. "[Ultra has] a bigger machine and can get me out there more. It made me feel like, man, I have been truly blessed to be in the right place at the right time, and I have to take advantage of it."

The DJ Is a Model - 9/28/2006

But Miss Nine's not just another doll behind the decks

By Dennis Romero

During the '90s rave-o-lution, some sensed that the digitized psychedelia of electronic dance music could finally fuel the kind of global love-in that the '60s fell short of providing. It was hoped that bell-bottom raving and DayGlo optimism would level the playing field, or at least the dance floor. Of course, just as '60s idealism faded away, rave culture OD'd on its own drug-fueled excesses.

It's against this backdrop of hope and disappointment that women ventured into the anarchic environment of clubland, hoping to take advantage of the do-it-yourself accessibility of DJing, but wanting to make it without being patronized (or photographed by Playboy). Most of the pioneers - DJ Irene, DJ Rap, Sandra Collins, and Kemistry & Storm, for example - made it by playing harder, faster, and better than the boys. But a new genre of female spinners has found an easier route to the spotlight: Call them pin-up DJs.

Ever since the April 2004 issue of Playboy featured a nude pictorial on eight women who spin (most of whom were virtual unknowns on the super-club circuit), more and more young women have been promoting themselves as dolls behind the decks - feasts of mammary more than music. MySpace, where half-dressed go-go girls posing behind turntables have become instant sensations, accelerated the phenomenon.

It must be tricky, then, to be DJ Miss Nine. The jock possesses attributes of the take-no-prisoners pioneers and the use-what-you-got new girls. She's a globetrotting runway stepper, represented by Elite Model Management (once home to Cindy Crawford, Iman, and Cameron Diaz), who has made a rare transition to the turf of superstar DJs. She can mix, but she clearly doesn't mind being photographed.

"I think it's easier" to start out in DJing as a female, says the 22-year-old. "But at the same time it is harder, because we have to prove ourselves more." She doesn't begrudge the pin-up brigades, but she doesn't want to join them, either. "They have to decide what works best for them," Miss Nine says. "I have my own way to become better, and I have my own goals. This is working for me."

Even as she continues to model professionally, German-bred, Amsterdam-based Miss Nine has a serious DJ pedigree: She's represented by Bullitt Bookings, the Elite of DJ agencies; is touring with Sharam Tayebi, one half of star DJ duo Deep Dish; and has a new mix-CD, Yoshitoshi Ibiza, out next month on Deep Dish's Yoshitoshi label. The CD captures her time as a resident spinner at club Pacha on the Spanish party isle of Ibiza - the Mecca of DJ culture. She produced one track, "Everlasting," that appears on Yoshitoshi Ibiza, and she's working on a followup.

Born Kristin Schrot, Miss Nine got her start in modeling at age 16 and soon caught the DJing bug from a boyfriend. She took on the name Miss Nine because she was born on the ninth of March. Miss Nine's been spinning for more than a few years now, having started out at Amsterdam's lauded Motion parties and later, in 2003, moving on to overseas gigs, in between modeling shoots for the likes of Elle magazine, Tommy Hilfiger, and Pepe Jeans.

"Some people like to judge me without knowing exactly what I do and what I play," she says. "But I don't really care."

Her CD, compiled mostly from Yoshitoshi's vaults, is a crowd-pleaser, even if self-consciously so, moving properly from the vocal depths of house (Sultan feat. Zara's "No Why") to the psychotropic buzz of after-hours bacchanalia (PQM's "You Are Sleeping") to the breezy, silver clouds of tech-house (Sam Perez & Dariush's "Across the Ocean"). Though lacking surprises, her debut DJ journey is shining and ballsy - a sure thing for nightlife denizens warming up for the weekend.

"I tried to do something that I would also do in a DJ set," Miss Nine says. "I did it over and over again 'til I was completely satisfied." She worked long and hard on Yoshitoshi Ibiza, mixing with her favored Pioneer CDJ decks and then meticulously marking and editing the recording using Ableton Live software.

"It is a lot of work," she says, "but it was all worth it."

The Music Is the Movie - 10/26/2006

Breakbeat duo Hybrid's epic new album takes its cues from film scoring

By Dennis Romero

This is shaping up to be the year of thinking outside the record box in electronic dance music. The cult of the DJ had already been knocked down a peg by the mash-up artist, the live e-music act, and the VJ. But 2006 really put the nail in the turntable coffin. Trance pioneer BT served up an ambient symphony with his ambitious This Binary Universe. A motley array of club artists - including the Scumfrog, D:Fuse, Static Revenger, DJ Skribble, and Kristine W. - formed a live crew called DJs Are Alive. Song-spinning software from Ableton Live to Serato Scratch stormed clubland. And now Wales-based breakbeat duo Hybrid has reached out to a rock star, a Hollywood film composer, and a big-city orchestra to produce one of the finest electronic dance albums of the year, I Choose Noise, due in stores next month (and available now from iTunes).

The record is like IMAX for your ears, surrounding you with broad, elegant, and shocking emotional visions, all the while staying composed and organized around the mechanized, frenetic structure of e-music. While it has a little something for everyone - block-rockin' frat-rock, nu-skool breaks, ethereal mood music - I Choose Noise also has a beginning-to-end cohesion that is epic, progressive, and metaphysical. Hybrid's Mike Truman and Chris Healings have clearly been influenced by the part-time life they lead in Los Angeles, producing music for movies (Man on Fire, the forthcoming Déjà Vu).

"The stuff we've done for film, we've come in knowing no boundaries," says Healings, sitting in a Venice Circle studio that's a "home away from home" for the duo. Truman chimes in: "A lot of stuff in Hollywood is sound-effect or sound-design driven, and that really influences us. When it's atmospheric, that's what appeals to us. It can be different to put those textures against something that's aggressive, like a breakbeat. It's not the normal kind of architecture."

The pair frequently works for film composer Harry Gregson-Williams (The Chronicles of Narnia, Shrek, Phone Booth), and the score-meister returned the favor, helping to organize movements recorded for I Choose Noise by the 36-piece Seattle Orchestra. Pal Perry Farrell, who the Hybrid boys met backstage at the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival a few years ago, often drops by the Venice studio after breakwater surfing sessions. Perhaps more urgently than ever, the Jane's Addiction leader contributes lyrics and his telltale raspy vocals to the moving, cathartic break-rock number "Dogstar." Farrell brought along fellow Porno for Pyros alum Peter DiStefano, who added some simpatico guitar chords. Dance family royals Kirsty Hawkshaw (of BT fame) and John Graham (a.k.a. remixer Quivver) also lent a hand (on "Just for Today" and "Until Tomorrow," respectively) on the new album. And thus, from the baggy-jeans b-boy breaks of their younger days as super-club heroes, the men from Hybrid have evolved into pop visionaries.

"We've been very lucky," says Truman. "We've snuck in the back door of Hollywood to work on some really cool projects. It's the more esoteric use of orchestral sounds that excite us. Philip Glass excites us - using things in tonal ways."

Hybrid got its big break when DJ Sasha picked up its "Symphony" for the influential Northern Exposure mix-CD nearly 10 years ago. Since then, the duo has been a staple of the remix scene (taking on Alanis Morissette, Radiohead, and Sarah McLachlan, to name a few) and the hip-hop-on-speed "nu skool" breaks genre, where the name of the game is "my break is bigger than yours," says Truman. This might explain the rockist flavorings of I Choose Noise, but it doesn't explain the expanse and imagination of the Hybrid tech-opera. The pair has always reached higher, producing two long-players (1999's Wide Angle and 2003's Morning Sci-Fi) that bounced off the dance floors and onto the airwaves of college and public radio. They give credit to the rolling, pastoral moorlands of their native Wales, and to the progressive notion of sonic storytelling they picked up as fixtures of global DJ culture. As they get deeper into film work (they showed us a chase scene in the forthcoming Déjà Vu, agonizing over transitions unperceivable to the amateur ear), they get further from the DJ booth.

"With electronic music, you have to use the hard drive as the main machine," says Healings. Truman adds, "It's about taking the best of both worlds, digital and live, and combining them. It's important to have a live input - it gives spark and magic."

Jocking for Position - 11/09/2006

'DJ Magazine' ranks spinners in a popular annual poll. But is it really the tops?

By Dennis Romero

So, did your vote count this year? Not if you were voting for the world's "top" DJ.

The royal court of superstar spinners is the U.K.-based DJ Magazine's annual Top 100 DJs "poll," which this week released its full list of honorees. Being in the top 10 can lead to sponsorships, sweeter record deals, and bigger paydays at the club. Says longtime L.A. booker George Bennitez: "If you have a DJ in the top 10, that's a big negotiating point with management."

For dance-industry insiders, the DJ Magazine poll is a holy grail. The No. 1 spot is a grand prize indeed, as big-room appearance fees for the top three jocks start at $10,000. That's quite a boost when some top 30 DJs are getting a grand or two for similar performances. It's serious business, the American Idol of the dance floor. "This poll is done to serve the labels, the DJs, and the managers," argues Bennitez, who runs Sorted Promotions.

And if you think the DJ Magazine ranking is reflective of the true crowd-drawing power one DJ has over another, you're sorely mistaken. The annual list is based on votes the magazine receives on its website, with 217,000 reportedly cast this year. In an interesting twist, the publication says a plurality of votes this time came from the United States, with Los Angeles-based figures Christopher Lawrence and DJ Dan ranking an eyebrow-raising fourth and fifth, respectively. Paul Van Dyk took the top spot for the second year in a row. Lawrence, who unleashed one compilation in the last two years, spins his high ranking via his website: "Christopher is now considered one of the top 5 DJs in the world."

But it's an opt-in, unscientific ranking of which spinners (and their managers and labels) are better at whipping up online support. "Top" implies popularity. But this popularity poll is not a scientific survey of random DJ fans throughout the world that's analyzed using statistical methods. It's Junk Science, to invoke the name of an album by top 10 DJ duo Deep Dish. Take as an example DJ Dan's first appearance in the top 10. For the last two years, Dan was No. 24, and even the magazine indicated last year that his star didn't seem to be rising. This year he released one compilation. He is indeed a critical favorite. URB magazine once called him "America's most beloved DJ," and even before that we proclaimed his skills and presence behind the decks sorely underrated. But his No. 5 showing seems out of place compared to, say, No. 14 Paul Oakenfold, who has sold manifold more records, recently opened for Madonna in Europe, and famously touted and remixed Paris Hilton. But there's one thing Oakenfold hasn't done: launched a massive online marketing campaign to get fans to vote in the poll.

The months leading up to each year's DJ Magazine poll are abuzz with mass e-mails from spinners begging fans to please, please, please vote for them. Besides being unscientific, the poll has no outside checks and balances to ensure it doesn't manipulate the rankings, and not much prevents someone with a little techspertise (and multiple e-mail addresses, computers, and IP addresses, for example) from voting more than once. Even DJ Magazine acknowledges that the poll, which will celebrate its tenth anniversary next year, is flawed.

"We've been discussing at the magazine ways to improve the Top 100 so that it accurately reflects the scene's best DJs, rather than just representing those jocks who have managed to mobilize their fans, or indeed those who have cheated," says news/online editor Terry Church in a gracious response to a CityBeat query.

Unfortunately, the dance industry is quite insular and provincial. It clearly cares more about this random horse race than it does about the relatively new Grammy Awards dance album category, which exposes the cutting-edge sounds of e-music to a much wider audience instead of preaching to the converted about who's maybe slightly more popular than whom. But if we really need a DJ hierarchy, somebody should stand up and conduct a scientific survey of DJ peers, industry insiders, and dance journalists and publish the results. It would be more reliable. Dan could trump Oakenfold without a doubt. And we could call it the Delectronic Eance Dusic poll, in honor of rock critic Robert Christgau.

Betting on Beatport - 12/07/2006

The DRM-free download site could be music distribution's future

By Dennis Romero

Beatport CEO Jonas Tempel has a dilemma. He wants to expand dance music's most popular digital retail site in an obviously profitable direction: hip-hop.

"There's amazing growth in hip-hop's digital DJing phenomenon," says the 37-year-old entrepreneur. "The problem is, all the music they play is off the major labels. There are DJs who want to play digital music, and they have to steal it."

Tempel is talking about how most of the major labels, which control mainstream hip-hop, are essentially unleashing only limited-use forms of their songs online. It's called "digital rights management," and it can restrict how you use music, the kinds of devices you use it on, and how many times you burn it to CD. While that might be fine for iTunes customers who enjoy tunage on the synergistic iPod, it's a tough sell for DJs, who want to edit and loop their sound waves (virtually impossible with iTunes), play their music on laptops and CD decks, and burn it at will (as in, 30 minutes before the show). Ableton Live laptop performance software, for example, will not play iTunes files. Therefore the DRM system, Tempel argues, actually encourages illicit file sharing. Why pay for an impenetrable shell when you can have the nut for free? Ironically, DJs usually have no problem throwing down a few bucks for a digital download. It's a steal compared to the $10 12-inch singles of just a few years ago.

For the electronic dance music faithful, at least, Tempel's house-, techno-, and trance-focused Beatport service (Beatport.com) has been a godsend. The three-year-old site - this year presented in an intuitive, browser-like version 3.0 - serves up music from nearly 4,000 labels, boasts 200,000 regular users, and offers unrestricted, CD-quality .wav files for a dollar more than the regular price of $1.99 to $2.49 per DRM-free MP3.

Sound expensive?

"Our philosophy is that DJs were used to paying up to $20 for a full vinyl album when they only wanted one mix off a release," Tempel says. "They also believe there's a premium to be paid for upfront, premium-encoded content."

Indeed, Beatport has taken the mystery, and perhaps some of the mystique, out of dance music. Only five years ago, DJs begged for limited releases. Now the 500-pressing "promo" is a relic, and unlimited, cutting-edge dance music from the likes of Booka Shade, 16 Bit Lolitas, and Plump DJs rolls out almost daily. Beatport encourages users to use partner Native Instruments' Traktor digital DJing software, while most digital hip-hop jocks seem to gravitate toward the Serato Scratch program. But mainly, spinners still prefer to burn to CD (yeah, vinyl's that dead). Beatport even peddles raw loops and a cappellas. Register, preview, buy, and download.

The site was conceived in 2002, when friend-of-Tempel Eloy Lopez came to him with a problem. Lopez had just purchased a digital DJing interface called Final Scratch but found that, in order to play dance music via MP3, he had to transfer vinyl to his hard drive, because downloads of choice e-music were few and far between. It seemed backward, because the tracks had usually started life as digital files. Tempel, CEO of Denver's Factory Design Labs (a "brand development agency" with clients such as Sony Pictures), gathered three other tech entrepreneurs and established Beatport in the Factory offices the next year. His biggest hurdle was convincing record labels to give him music unrestricted - essentially digital masters. Of course, it worked (with a majority digital dance market share, Tempel says), and Beatport gives its labels 60 percent of the take.

Now, does Beatport's unrestricted product line-up offer a model for the future of music distribution?

"DRM-free files are ideal for consumers," says music industry blogger Glenn Coolfer, founder and editor of widely read Coolfer.com. "DRM is something that had to be used while digital music is in its formative years. Labels needed some assurance that going online was not going to add to their piracy problems." Still, it's a wait-and-see situation right now. "Change will be gradual, and that frustrates a lot of people," Coolfer says. "Labels are starting to slightly ease up and experiment with DRM-free tracks (at Yahoo! Music, for example). It will take one successful experiment at a time if labels are ever to embrace open formats."

Until then, we'll stick with Beatport - and we'll edit, spin, and burn to our heart's content. Even if we have to avoid hip-hop.