ON THE FLOOR
Moodymann
Audion
Detroit hustles
harder One of the US’s longest running dance events, the Movement Electronic Music Festival casts a worthy spotlight on the city that birthed techno – and shows exactly how to balance America’s electronic music history with its contemporary scene...
T
he standard exit strategy for a festival is to leave after no sleep. But for once DJ Mag USA arrive at the airport in the same state, a late
night DJ set leaving just enough time to go home and change before our flight.
Fatigue takes second place though as it’s not everyday that you visit Detroit, the city whose musical reverberations have shaken the world, literally and metaphorically, since the earliest days of Motown. While Motown’s Hitsville U.S.A. studio rolled off stars, including Stevie Wonder, The Supremes and Edwin Starr, with the same efficiency as its then thriving motor industry, it was the machine funk of techno pioneers Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson and Derrick May that soundtracked its latter decline and encapsulated the metronomic beat of the city’s mechanical heart.
It was also the driving force behind the Movement Electronic Music Festival, which this
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year ran for three nights over Memorial Weekend. Founded in 2000 as a free event, Saunderson, May and second wave Detroit techno star Carl Craig have all been involved in the event’s organization. But after helping organise the Underground Stage in 2005, literally a concrete bunker beneath the site’s central Hart Plaza site, Detroit’s Paxahau Promotions Group now lead the way, building on a history of throwing parties that goes back to 1993.
As a first time visitor to the city there’s a mass of expectation to deal with, our driver confirming tales of falling house prices and widespread desertion since the global economy followed Detroit’s localized fortunes and took a turn for the worse.
At our hotel just a few blocks from the festival site though, the picture of doom and gloom often painted is largely absent. The sun is shining as we admire Detroit’s striking architecture and across the street a sound system is set up between a bar and a gardening project, the DJ dropping the glorious strains of Earth People’s ‘Dance’ and Funkanova’s ‘Wood, Brass & Steel’ as we sit and bask in the heat.
Walking to the site there are plenty of boarded up shopfronts, and some of our fellow street walkers display the outward signs of poverty, but this isn’t unusual for a metropolitan centre. What is though, perhaps, is the lack of people in general which makes these aspects so noticeable, wide streets almost empty, bar the neon stream flowing in the same direction as us.
It’s a different story in front of the Red Bull Music Academy Main Stage, a packed, colorful crowd filling the stone amphitheater steps and spacious dancefloor beneath the giant rows of hanging speakers to hear the deep, funk-infused stylings of D-town legend Moodymann. Wearing a panama hat with a scarf obscuring his face,
and backed by two looming compatriots, it’s an echo of the militant, faceless techno of Detroit’s Underground Resistance, the seminal label which also helped distribute KDJ’s first records in the ‘90s.
A few minutes walk away we dive into the sound of modern day USA at the bass-heavy Magic Forest stage which, in contrast to the grey concrete of much of the site, is indeed fronted by grass and a smattering of trees. Not that you can see much from the hordes of pogoing teens and 20-somethings. We have no idea who is playing but their dubstep mash-up of The Prodigy’s ‘Voodoo People’ and Skream’s ‘Midnight Request Line’ has people going understandably bananas. That’s before it turns into techno. And that’s before it speeds up into tearing drum and bass.
It’s this balancing of Detroit’s roots and the influence of modern day trends that Paxahau have had to negotiate and seems to have been achieved perfectly. For every neon bra-wearing candy raver there’s an older, more seasoned head wearing a ‘Detroit Hustles Harder’ tee. This is especially evident at the homegrown Made in Detroit stage where Al Ester is kicking out the soulful house jams watched by kids and peers alike.
If dubstep has been young America’s entry point into dance music, techno could well be their next stop judging from Nicole Moudaber’s set in the fully LEDed up Underground Stage. It’s been years since we’ve felt such resonant bass, every cell in our body vibrating to the point that we’re in danger of turning into a gas – or at the very least, judging by the amount of sweat, a liquid. Around us half-naked partiers are jumping up and down, clearly revelling in the knock-down volume. It makes Dave Clarke’s brutal assault on the main stage seem almost (though only almost) tame in comparison. Back over at Made In Detroit, Terrence Parker is
Pics:DOUGLAS WOJCIECHOWSKI / PAUL KELLEY
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