From the Front Lines: The Detroit Electronic Music Festival, pt 1
Posted by: admin in Reviews, Culture, music From the Front Lines: The Detroit Electronic Music Festival, pt 1
TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
-Willam Butler Yeats
Destinations are often a surprise to the destined.
-Neil Gaiman
From the Front Lines: The Detroit Electronic Music Festival
A tale of two coasts
I have spent my life exploring the western half of the United States. Growing up in New Mexico, and traveling every year across the mountains of Arizona and deserts of California to the west coast, I have never known anything but small rural towns, massive, open spaces, incredible growth, and bustling mega cities that didn’t exist fifty years ago. I am a child of the west. The west always offers a new day, a new hope for something better and bigger, a idealized life that anyone could win through hard work or luck. This is what my country has offered me for my entire life. Purple Mountains, endless beaches, epic skies, safety, security, and hope.
Music, always took up the assumptive cloak of speaking towards that bright future we are all guaranteed, that pursuit of happiness that was laid before us with every desert sunrise, every new toy or idea or beat that accompanied it. Its an inevitable march forward towards the brighter tomorrow, escaping the dark past and the things that haunted it.
Traveling to the eastern half of this country came as both a culture shock and eye opener as to what this entire country is all about. Of course I’d seen it all on TV and in movies about the situation parts of this country has been in for the past thirty or forty years, but you don’t really get to understand it until you’ve actually been there, just how desperate and depressing of a place many of the cities of the east have fallen into. A false bravado, still trying to charm the remaining unlucky and unmotivated fills the air, covers the stink and decay rotting away underneath.
Music, then, became something i could have never realized it was speaking. Techno beats that once were heard by these ears in places dark, middle of the night and shrouded by mist, leading us to somewhere new, somewhere just below the bright level of reality to a slightly skewed version, telling our collective tail of hardship that is the price to pay for our sunny, better tomorrow, became the tail of the collective woe, the realization that we have become dependent on the machine, abdicating our creative rights for a paycheck, sucking the masters dick for just a little bit more money until we have to pay the rent, get our next fix, gamble away our future.
The music wasn’t a tail of joy anymore, rather, its become a tail of woe. Of decay. Of the false face on the rotting interior, the truth that in many places in this country like many places across this planet, people sold their humanity and in return got the fake front of a better tomorrow. Instead of speaking towards a beat that leads us in a new direction, revitalizing the core thing that is within all of us that makes each day better than the last, its speaking the same, tired beat that many musical genres have repeated; the realization that we have conformed to the machine, that we have yielded our hearts to the mechanical dryness because our hearts were to heavy a thing to burden our minds with any more. Instead of embracing the fact that our hearts burn with as much pain as they do with joy, we lobotomized the pain away and told our minds that the joy was in the repetition, the machine.
