Detroit native gadabout Marke B. hits Movement '08: Detroit's Electronic Music Festival with a handbag full of what-what. Read part one here.
The Techno Gods surely had a little laugh on the first (graciously sunny) day of the DEMF. Even though downtown's sprawling, reinvigorated Hart Plaza on the waterfront – nestled in the shadows of the new casinos pumping serious cash into bigshot pockets and directly opposite the infamous “fist” statue that socks across-the-river Windsor, CA, in the kisser – was brimming with suburban kids and roaming tribes of fun-furred and mohawked candy ravers (love those kids!), and even though Moby (!) headlined, and started his closing DJ set by playing one of his own songs (albeit a remix of his classic “Go”), the old soul of the Detroit underground shone through in quite a few places. (Clarification: Oops my E must have kicked in then. See comment below.)
Waiting for Moby
Underground, quite literally. This year, promoter Paxahau Events has reopened the huge concrete-walled basement of the plaza, and has installed the soulful house DJs there, rather than the traditional hardcore noise experimentalists. By two o'clock, heavily muscled dance crews had stripped off their shirts and were throwing down – headspins included – to the sounds of Detroit classicists like Reggie “Hotmix” Harrell and Minx. (That night, freaky Terrence “The Phone Man” Parker and tribal-soulist Stacey Pullen would turn the underground area into a sweaty mass of writhing gay and straight bodies.)
Upside-down to the morning beat
Terrence Parker hits
So much for the house – and notably missing so far this year have been the little independent DJ setups sprouting about the plaza like tiny laptop-vinyl mushrooms – what about the four other stages? What about the techno? The main, video-projected-upon VitaminWater stage, where Moby would later thrash about like a puggle to his electroclash-tinged pop-techno throwbacks, got a slowish start with way-cerebral live sub-dub fractal burbles from local DJ-band hybrid trio nospectacle, which included Jennifer A. Paull, one of the few female knob-twiddlers at the fest. (I went with my fabulous mom, who seemed to be briefly into it.) The stage didn't really seem to catch fire, though, until Canadian techno purist DBX aka Dan Bell hit the stage in the penultimate slot at 9pm.
What Detroit techno used to look like: DBX's “Electric Shock” from a TV dance show (I think “The Scene” in the late '80s)
DBX's brand of energetic-yet-careful modulation has been co-opted by the neominimal techno set, who repurpose it for a more homogenous, orchestral sound, and the pulsating Beatport tent was full all day of pounding bass and nifty little improvised tweeter effects that built themselves up at the back of the ear into almost-subconscious melodies, the hallmarks of neominimal. SF's Alland Byallo of the Kontrol monthly at the EndUp represented in the early afternoon, when it was apparent that Beatport's lineup was providing what the crowd was ravenous for. Minimal's still winning! Madrid cutie Alex Under closed the stage with one of the tightest, most hard-driving minimal sets I'd ever heard – the relentless globe-trotter never let up from the knobs, and everyone's hands unabashedly reached for the Intellibeams.
SF's Alland Byallo figures it out
Later that night, at an afterparty at St. Andrew's Hall, a legendary Detroit rock venue, minimalist progenitor Richie Hawtin blew a packed house of by-then-wobbly minds until 8am with his own brand of stripped-down beats, which often revealed a goofy sense of humor, verging between nitrous-inflated bass blasts on what a friend described as “clog-dancing with woodblocks.” (An adorable Parisian let me and said friend sneak in on his guestlist. Merci!)
I'd intended to go to disco-warper Moodymann's Soul Skate roller rink party, an annual blowout that draws hundreds to the hinterlands of Detroit's Northland area, but Detroit's a giant city built around the concept of driving everywhere, and I was way too inebriated to take the wheel (or roll on them) by then. I was glad I caught Richie at St. Andrew's though. That's where he got his start, and there was a fierce homecoming vibe that matched the venue's old-school rough-hewn stone architecture, a piece of old Detroit that left pebbles in my sneakers and dust in my lungs. It's all about the grit, darling.
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Comments (2)
Your report on Moby is bogus. He did not open his set with one of his own songs, he opened his set with Inner City's "Good Life", a Detroit techno classic. He actually didn't spin "Go" until a good 30 minutes into his set.
Posted by Dustedman | May 26, 2008 09:00 AM
You may be right about that Dusted Man -- although I remember Go as being what I first heard (admittedly I was wasted). Clarified above. I don't have any problem with playing your own songs during your set, either -- maybe I have a lot of reserved Moby aggression, I guess.
Posted by Marke B. | May 26, 2008 04:40 PM