gabriel
11-15-2003, 07:54 AM
<http://www.bouldernews.com/bdc/music/article/0,1713,BDC_2468_2426547,00.html>
DJs choose new paths as electronica goes back underground
By Jennie Dorris, For the Camera
November 14, 2003
It's a freezing cold night, and a Boulder Theater security guard weaves through the sparse crowd to peer at the flyer announcing the act for that night: Mark Farina.
"Who's that?" he asks.
"Some electronica guy, I think," says another worker.
Five years ago that question never would have been asked — Farina was a resident DJ at ultra-hip Boulder night spot Soma, and there were lines around the corner to see him. Since then electronic music has faded from the national spotlight, and Boulder reflected the trend with the closing of Soma last May.
The electronica scene isn't totally dead; Farina's Oct. 30 show sold more than 500 tickets out of a possible 1,000, and Boulder Theater publicist Lisa Lamun says the show probably would have sold out were it not the day before Halloween.
"The scene's still alive, it's just smaller and more underground," says Colin Chapman, a local DJ who showed up to see Farina spin. "It's a relief to have the scene back to people who are in it for the music."
The Next Big Thing
It was only five years ago that young record executives and writers at music magazines like Spin and Rolling Stone had a different take on things — they were busy creating the buzz that rock 'n' roll was dead.
It was the late '90s. Grunge had peaked, and boy bands were on the rise. But the crack in between the genres was big enough that the industry needed to step in and name the Next Big Thing.
Tomorrow's rock stars, they claimed, were the faceless DJs spinning records in warehouses and lofts. And the hype began. Moby was signed to Mute Records and Elektra Records on two separate contracts in 1991, and was on tour with Lollapalooza in 1995. Columbia took a chance on electronica producers Hardkiss. "X-Files" actress Gillian Anderson teamed with Virgin Records to lend her vocals to British techno group Hal in 1997. And Brit Paul Oakenfold celebrated in 1998 when he was voted "Best DJ in the World" by DJ magazine after the successful release of his first full-length album in the U.S. On MTV, videos by the Prodigy and Fatboy Slim were in heavy rotation.
The rise of electronica did more than make superstars out of the spinners. It brought the culture of the rave — the large, low jeans, glow sticks and candy accessories — into the mainstream. A subculture that had existed underground for more than 10 years became a playground for media attention and mainstream attendance.
But a look around at today's club scene reveals precious little of the electronica culture. Electronic music venues have closed, the baggy "rave pants" are out, and lines around a corner to a club comprise people hoping to catch one of their favorite Top 40 songs, not to hear creative mixing and sampling over a thumping bass beat.
Big in Boulder
No one would have seen it coming in the late '90s, when Boulder was not just following the national trends — it was setting records with small downtown nightclub Soma, which was attracting the top DJs — including DJ Greyboy, King Britt and Christopher Lawrence — at the height of the electronic movement. Another local club, Millennium, was turning 18-and- over clubgoers on to electronica around the same time, making Boulder arguably the hippest town between Chicago and Los Angeles.
"We decided to open up Soma not because of what was going on nationally, we just wanted that kind of establishment in this town. It was the kind of place we wanted to go to," says Hardy Kalisher, one of the club's former owners.
Soon after Soma opened in 1998 there were lines out the door nearly every night. Then DJ-culture bible URB magazine named Kalisher one of the nation's best club promoters. Then DJs from France and England were talking about the next time they would get to play Soma.
"People would come because they wanted to see DJs spin at Soma — it wasn't just Boulder, it became part of the national and international scene," says Kalisher, who still organizes local shows at clubs like The Church in Denver. And Soma was equally friendly to the local up-and-comers: "If you were a local DJ, you probably played Soma," Kalisher says.
Local performer Orange Peel Moses, editor of electronic music magazine Egen, was a Soma regular in 2000. "There would be a ridiculous line around the block for Soma's new hip-hop nights or for visiting DJs," he says.
At the national level, the scene still was growing quickly at the turn of the century, though signs of the slowdown were beginning to appear. Major record labels snatched up no-name DJs, but records weren't selling as successfully as they hoped. Dan Cohen, publicity director of the electronic label Astralwerks, was quoted in Wired Magazine saying, "There's a feeding frenzy for artists, and then only four of them will sell more than 300,000 (copies). The bad side is that you're spending a lot of money on something that isn't necessarily going to make a lot of money." While the driving bass beats worked great in a club atmosphere, the music wasn't necessarily what people wanted to buy to listen to at home or in their cars.
But low record sales weren't going to sink the scene. Money still was coming in from tours and parties, which were expanding rapidly. Promoters who were used to putting on parties in warehouses now rented venues like the Denver Coliseum for raves.
But as the rave culture grew in numbers, the club drug ecstasy also was growing more popular. And when the death toll reached 15 for ecstasy- related deaths across the United States in 2001, the media went into a frenzy linking electronica and drug use. In Boulder County, 16-year-old Monarch High School student Brittney Chambers died of water intoxication in 2001, after taking ecstasy. The incident wasn't club-related, but it added to a growing perception that ecstasy — and by extension, the electronic music scene — was growing more dangerous.
"People started getting hurt, which is bound to happen when you put thousands of people in one place for a night. And there was always a stigma with the rave culture — it just took a few incidents before they clamped down," Kalisher says.
Beginning of the end
Most people in the scene agree that electronica's death knell was sounded with the passing of the RAVE (Reducing Americans' Vulnerability to Ecstasy) Act earlier this year. Introduced in June 2002 and sponsored by Sen. Joseph Biden, a Democrat from Delaware, and Sen. Charles Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, the act stated that promoters and owners were liable for any drug-related activities on their premises, citing penalties of up to 20 years in prison and fines of up to $500,000. Denver's annual electronica- fest Rave on the Rocks was renamed the "Global Dance Festival" by its new promoter, and it lost Denver radio station KTCL (93.3 FM) as a sponsor, the station's program director telling the Camera earlier this year it was "because of the recent nationwide legal crackdown on events involving electronic music."
Longtime DJ Farina agrees the RAVE Act had a lot to do with the end of the scene. "I think we had a lot of parents afraid that their kids were going to be overdosing on ecstasy. And we also had promoters that didn't want to deal with red tape," he said. "It's all a lot of bad press, but I hope promoters are willing to mutate a bit and that the scene will spring back."
As the raves and tours ground to a halt, the poor record sales caught up with DJs, and many were dropped from major labels. Earlier this year, Soma reflected the trends by quietly closing its doors, and after being touted as rock's latest superstars, suddenly DJs everywhere were out of a job.
"And the scene is pretty quiet," Kalisher says.
That's because DJs have gone one of two places. The DJs who wanted to keep the club gigs traded house for hip-hop. And the DJs who wanted to stay electronic went right back where they were before the whole scene exploded — underground.
Back to the warehouse
Tony Dematteo and Aaron Chutz run Harmonic Motion, a small record shop on the Hill that carries obscure vinyl records used by electronica DJs. It's also the place to go to get news on upcoming underground shows, which mainly are promoted through flyers, e-mails, and word of mouth.
"The clubs closing pushed everything back to a DIY (do-it-yourself) approach. It's all about the black-and-white flyer again," Dematteo says.
The warehouse parties are fairly frequent — while Boulder hosts one a month (usually at a different location each time), Denver hosts around three to four a week. Attendance generally ranges from 100 to 200 people. Chutz and Dematteo help keep the scene going by lending DJs equipment and helping set up and tear down speakers. The DJs themselves are fronting the cost for the warehouse — one of the few ways they can get a venue is to rent a space, make their own flyers, and absorb any extra costs. It's a far cry from the superstar image DJs enjoyed just a few years ago. But true electronica fans appreciate the more humble approach.
"DJs who have the whole rock-star image think they're doing something important. They need to have a reality check. I mean, they're playing other people's records," Chutz says.
And while the retreat of electronica into the underground takes a lot more work, Chutz and Dematteo appreciate the return of the scene to its roots. And so do its fans.
"Now it's all about the music," says Chapman. "Everybody in the scene is true to the music and we're finding the right crowd again."
The rise of hip-hop
As electronica's thumping bass beats retreated to the underground, hip-hop DJs embraced the genre's newfound popularity in Boulder and stepped up to mix up the tunes that are topping the charts nationally and are starting to be played at local bars. (Just walk past the Player's Club on the Hill on a Tuesday night to hear some Jay-Z and 50 Cent.)
The Fox Theatre is slowly turning into one of the country's premier hip-hop venues, regularly attracting huge crowds to see national artists such as Blackalicious, Snoop Dogg and members of the Wu Tang Clan.
"We've been doing hip-hop for a few years now, and the progression has been great. The younger kids totally dig it," says Fox assistant manager John Caprio.
DJ Petey (Petey Helm), a Boulder-based hip-hop DJ, spins five nights a week, four of those in Boulder. With a big following at the Foundry, he denies the notion that the death of raves brought the death of DJs.
"Even Soma closing didn't really affect me — there are definitely a lot of DJs out here and all of them want work, and this has always been the case. It's always been very competitive," Petey says.
With weekly nights devoted to hip-hop music at Boulder clubs the Attic, Round Midnight and the Players Club, the Boulder market is getting nothing but more friendly to DJs like Petey.
A.J. Sandoval, a bouncer at the Attic on its Thursday hip-hop night, says the event has gotten huge since its promotion earlier this fall. "I see the bling-bling-wearing white college kids, but I also see a lot of people coming up from Denver to hear the music," he says.
The Players Club now devotes two nights (Tuesday and Saturday) to hip-hop music. "Those are our most popular nights, they're really getting huge," says bartender Gillian Olson.
And the change from electronic to hip-hop doesn't mean the same DJs spinning different music — the change in genre brings in a whole new set of artists.
"Hip-hop is a different kind of DJing. Techno DJ producers would look for the rarest and best records and would actually mix at the club — they would probably say they were 'making music,'" Petey says. " (Hip-hop DJs) take existing albums and change them through scratching them — trying to make it something you've never heard before."
Hip-hop might be huge right now, but Petey knows his success might not last forever; after all, it was the death of the last genre that gave his success in DJing a rise.
"I think it'd be overconfident to say I'd survive anything that came my way," he says. "But I definitely work every hour of every day to try to be prepared."
DJs choose new paths as electronica goes back underground
By Jennie Dorris, For the Camera
November 14, 2003
It's a freezing cold night, and a Boulder Theater security guard weaves through the sparse crowd to peer at the flyer announcing the act for that night: Mark Farina.
"Who's that?" he asks.
"Some electronica guy, I think," says another worker.
Five years ago that question never would have been asked — Farina was a resident DJ at ultra-hip Boulder night spot Soma, and there were lines around the corner to see him. Since then electronic music has faded from the national spotlight, and Boulder reflected the trend with the closing of Soma last May.
The electronica scene isn't totally dead; Farina's Oct. 30 show sold more than 500 tickets out of a possible 1,000, and Boulder Theater publicist Lisa Lamun says the show probably would have sold out were it not the day before Halloween.
"The scene's still alive, it's just smaller and more underground," says Colin Chapman, a local DJ who showed up to see Farina spin. "It's a relief to have the scene back to people who are in it for the music."
The Next Big Thing
It was only five years ago that young record executives and writers at music magazines like Spin and Rolling Stone had a different take on things — they were busy creating the buzz that rock 'n' roll was dead.
It was the late '90s. Grunge had peaked, and boy bands were on the rise. But the crack in between the genres was big enough that the industry needed to step in and name the Next Big Thing.
Tomorrow's rock stars, they claimed, were the faceless DJs spinning records in warehouses and lofts. And the hype began. Moby was signed to Mute Records and Elektra Records on two separate contracts in 1991, and was on tour with Lollapalooza in 1995. Columbia took a chance on electronica producers Hardkiss. "X-Files" actress Gillian Anderson teamed with Virgin Records to lend her vocals to British techno group Hal in 1997. And Brit Paul Oakenfold celebrated in 1998 when he was voted "Best DJ in the World" by DJ magazine after the successful release of his first full-length album in the U.S. On MTV, videos by the Prodigy and Fatboy Slim were in heavy rotation.
The rise of electronica did more than make superstars out of the spinners. It brought the culture of the rave — the large, low jeans, glow sticks and candy accessories — into the mainstream. A subculture that had existed underground for more than 10 years became a playground for media attention and mainstream attendance.
But a look around at today's club scene reveals precious little of the electronica culture. Electronic music venues have closed, the baggy "rave pants" are out, and lines around a corner to a club comprise people hoping to catch one of their favorite Top 40 songs, not to hear creative mixing and sampling over a thumping bass beat.
Big in Boulder
No one would have seen it coming in the late '90s, when Boulder was not just following the national trends — it was setting records with small downtown nightclub Soma, which was attracting the top DJs — including DJ Greyboy, King Britt and Christopher Lawrence — at the height of the electronic movement. Another local club, Millennium, was turning 18-and- over clubgoers on to electronica around the same time, making Boulder arguably the hippest town between Chicago and Los Angeles.
"We decided to open up Soma not because of what was going on nationally, we just wanted that kind of establishment in this town. It was the kind of place we wanted to go to," says Hardy Kalisher, one of the club's former owners.
Soon after Soma opened in 1998 there were lines out the door nearly every night. Then DJ-culture bible URB magazine named Kalisher one of the nation's best club promoters. Then DJs from France and England were talking about the next time they would get to play Soma.
"People would come because they wanted to see DJs spin at Soma — it wasn't just Boulder, it became part of the national and international scene," says Kalisher, who still organizes local shows at clubs like The Church in Denver. And Soma was equally friendly to the local up-and-comers: "If you were a local DJ, you probably played Soma," Kalisher says.
Local performer Orange Peel Moses, editor of electronic music magazine Egen, was a Soma regular in 2000. "There would be a ridiculous line around the block for Soma's new hip-hop nights or for visiting DJs," he says.
At the national level, the scene still was growing quickly at the turn of the century, though signs of the slowdown were beginning to appear. Major record labels snatched up no-name DJs, but records weren't selling as successfully as they hoped. Dan Cohen, publicity director of the electronic label Astralwerks, was quoted in Wired Magazine saying, "There's a feeding frenzy for artists, and then only four of them will sell more than 300,000 (copies). The bad side is that you're spending a lot of money on something that isn't necessarily going to make a lot of money." While the driving bass beats worked great in a club atmosphere, the music wasn't necessarily what people wanted to buy to listen to at home or in their cars.
But low record sales weren't going to sink the scene. Money still was coming in from tours and parties, which were expanding rapidly. Promoters who were used to putting on parties in warehouses now rented venues like the Denver Coliseum for raves.
But as the rave culture grew in numbers, the club drug ecstasy also was growing more popular. And when the death toll reached 15 for ecstasy- related deaths across the United States in 2001, the media went into a frenzy linking electronica and drug use. In Boulder County, 16-year-old Monarch High School student Brittney Chambers died of water intoxication in 2001, after taking ecstasy. The incident wasn't club-related, but it added to a growing perception that ecstasy — and by extension, the electronic music scene — was growing more dangerous.
"People started getting hurt, which is bound to happen when you put thousands of people in one place for a night. And there was always a stigma with the rave culture — it just took a few incidents before they clamped down," Kalisher says.
Beginning of the end
Most people in the scene agree that electronica's death knell was sounded with the passing of the RAVE (Reducing Americans' Vulnerability to Ecstasy) Act earlier this year. Introduced in June 2002 and sponsored by Sen. Joseph Biden, a Democrat from Delaware, and Sen. Charles Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, the act stated that promoters and owners were liable for any drug-related activities on their premises, citing penalties of up to 20 years in prison and fines of up to $500,000. Denver's annual electronica- fest Rave on the Rocks was renamed the "Global Dance Festival" by its new promoter, and it lost Denver radio station KTCL (93.3 FM) as a sponsor, the station's program director telling the Camera earlier this year it was "because of the recent nationwide legal crackdown on events involving electronic music."
Longtime DJ Farina agrees the RAVE Act had a lot to do with the end of the scene. "I think we had a lot of parents afraid that their kids were going to be overdosing on ecstasy. And we also had promoters that didn't want to deal with red tape," he said. "It's all a lot of bad press, but I hope promoters are willing to mutate a bit and that the scene will spring back."
As the raves and tours ground to a halt, the poor record sales caught up with DJs, and many were dropped from major labels. Earlier this year, Soma reflected the trends by quietly closing its doors, and after being touted as rock's latest superstars, suddenly DJs everywhere were out of a job.
"And the scene is pretty quiet," Kalisher says.
That's because DJs have gone one of two places. The DJs who wanted to keep the club gigs traded house for hip-hop. And the DJs who wanted to stay electronic went right back where they were before the whole scene exploded — underground.
Back to the warehouse
Tony Dematteo and Aaron Chutz run Harmonic Motion, a small record shop on the Hill that carries obscure vinyl records used by electronica DJs. It's also the place to go to get news on upcoming underground shows, which mainly are promoted through flyers, e-mails, and word of mouth.
"The clubs closing pushed everything back to a DIY (do-it-yourself) approach. It's all about the black-and-white flyer again," Dematteo says.
The warehouse parties are fairly frequent — while Boulder hosts one a month (usually at a different location each time), Denver hosts around three to four a week. Attendance generally ranges from 100 to 200 people. Chutz and Dematteo help keep the scene going by lending DJs equipment and helping set up and tear down speakers. The DJs themselves are fronting the cost for the warehouse — one of the few ways they can get a venue is to rent a space, make their own flyers, and absorb any extra costs. It's a far cry from the superstar image DJs enjoyed just a few years ago. But true electronica fans appreciate the more humble approach.
"DJs who have the whole rock-star image think they're doing something important. They need to have a reality check. I mean, they're playing other people's records," Chutz says.
And while the retreat of electronica into the underground takes a lot more work, Chutz and Dematteo appreciate the return of the scene to its roots. And so do its fans.
"Now it's all about the music," says Chapman. "Everybody in the scene is true to the music and we're finding the right crowd again."
The rise of hip-hop
As electronica's thumping bass beats retreated to the underground, hip-hop DJs embraced the genre's newfound popularity in Boulder and stepped up to mix up the tunes that are topping the charts nationally and are starting to be played at local bars. (Just walk past the Player's Club on the Hill on a Tuesday night to hear some Jay-Z and 50 Cent.)
The Fox Theatre is slowly turning into one of the country's premier hip-hop venues, regularly attracting huge crowds to see national artists such as Blackalicious, Snoop Dogg and members of the Wu Tang Clan.
"We've been doing hip-hop for a few years now, and the progression has been great. The younger kids totally dig it," says Fox assistant manager John Caprio.
DJ Petey (Petey Helm), a Boulder-based hip-hop DJ, spins five nights a week, four of those in Boulder. With a big following at the Foundry, he denies the notion that the death of raves brought the death of DJs.
"Even Soma closing didn't really affect me — there are definitely a lot of DJs out here and all of them want work, and this has always been the case. It's always been very competitive," Petey says.
With weekly nights devoted to hip-hop music at Boulder clubs the Attic, Round Midnight and the Players Club, the Boulder market is getting nothing but more friendly to DJs like Petey.
A.J. Sandoval, a bouncer at the Attic on its Thursday hip-hop night, says the event has gotten huge since its promotion earlier this fall. "I see the bling-bling-wearing white college kids, but I also see a lot of people coming up from Denver to hear the music," he says.
The Players Club now devotes two nights (Tuesday and Saturday) to hip-hop music. "Those are our most popular nights, they're really getting huge," says bartender Gillian Olson.
And the change from electronic to hip-hop doesn't mean the same DJs spinning different music — the change in genre brings in a whole new set of artists.
"Hip-hop is a different kind of DJing. Techno DJ producers would look for the rarest and best records and would actually mix at the club — they would probably say they were 'making music,'" Petey says. " (Hip-hop DJs) take existing albums and change them through scratching them — trying to make it something you've never heard before."
Hip-hop might be huge right now, but Petey knows his success might not last forever; after all, it was the death of the last genre that gave his success in DJing a rise.
"I think it'd be overconfident to say I'd survive anything that came my way," he says. "But I definitely work every hour of every day to try to be prepared."