Music

2006: The Year the Superstar DJ Died

Dinosaurs rule the dance floors no more

By Jean Carey 

For nearly a decade, the giants of electronic dance music, a cold-blooded cadre mostly from northern Europe, lumbered across the earth. Tiësto, Paul van Dyk, Paul Oakenfold, Seb Fontaine, Judge Jules, and Fatboy Slim dominated small suburban dance floors and Ibizan caverns with crafty disco assembled from chest-rattling bass lines and sampled treasures from earlier civilizations.

Suddenly, in 2006, like dinosaurs shuddering in the freezing contrail of a passing comet, the time of the superstar DJs ended. Today the big boys are gasping for space as overpaid nightclub hosts, while small, furry mammals named Busdriver, Ellen Allien, and Otto von Schirach have sprung forth to occupy their musical niche in the ecosystem.

The sad thing — one of the sad things — about the superstar DJs' looming extinction is that they didn't begin with Brontosaurus brains. IDM, or intelligent dance music, is the obviously and deliberately limiting terminology for electronica that isn't stupid. The expression dates back to a description of Coil's 1991 album The Snow, which set the IQ bar pretty high, and the artists who followed in the last decade of the century — the Orb, Autechre, Future Sound of London — kept apace.

By 2000, European electronic dance music evolved into dozens of microgenres from the various species of house music, techno, and EBM. Pioneering DJs such as Oakenfold and Fatboy Slim found they could press their popular discs and also attract respectable concert attendance numbers through careful marketing of their riveting live sets, which blended their own compositions with remixes of other artists' tracks. Meanwhile in the States, dance music factions were essentially limited to house and trance, a situation that continues today.

And why shouldn't it? Americans almost always muck up the nuance in the cultures we import, and dance music has proven no exception. While European DJs cultivated a humbly anonymous aesthetic, Americans reinvented the DJ as turntable-toting rock star. Thus today we enjoy the Crystal Method's relentless efforts to brand its members' faces on maximum party records, such as the cleverly named Tweekend and Legion of Boom. And this year, both the Crystal Method and tagger-along LCD Soundsystem produced 45-minute "workout mixes" in association with Nike.

But it is now clear that the DJ craze is on the wane in the United States. The huge throngs that once welcomed van Dyk, Carl Cox, and the ubiquitous Oakenfold have dried up, at least in the smaller major cities. Once people in places like Dallas and Atlanta figured out the headliner would show up at 3:00 a.m., play a twenty-minute set, and split, it was all over, and from then on, guys like that were forced to retreat to tried-and-true markets such as Miami, New York, and San Francisco for hosting duties at superclubs.

And the superstar DJ system never encouraged a farm team system, where beginners could earn their nightclub stripes in small markets and move up to larger ones. That role fell to the DJ music on MySpace and YouTube. But that system is far from perfect, or even viable. How many Optimo or Bugz in the Attic remixes by suburban Tulsa kids can anyone make it through?

Still, there were some outstanding offerings on the better sportswear floor of the dance music department store, and several of those were even from America.

Steve Lawler's Lights Out 3 (as well as the import Viva) reached our shores early in 2006, and the two-disc set featured some of the stalwart British producer's most symphonic work to date.

Trance music pioneer Brian Transeau, better known as BT, has been an amazingly prolific composer for years, and most of the songs he plays are originals, not remixes or compilations. His late-year release, This Binary Universe, continued the Marylander's exploration into mathematical and philosophical themes via the harmonically named (and sounding) "The Internal Locus" and "The Antikythera Mechanism." Plus BT dedicates the disc to his beloved pet dog, which died this year. All of this might seem precious, save for BT's long record of sincerity sans new-age ickiness. (BT is on tour right now with another IDM forefather, Thomas Dolby, who dropped his first record in years in December, The Sole Inhabitant, a collection of live performances and new material.)

"Burma," a trickily looped onslaught of deep progressive breaks from Australia's Lostep, leant itself to creative remixing by everyone from Sasha to Galaxy Girl, but the track was great on its own (as was the rest of the duo's cohesive album Because We Can). Perhaps a little Outback isolation is just what dance music needs.

Hybrid's I Choose Noise offered a good array of Mike Truman and Chris Healings's vast collection of regular collaborators, including Peter Hook, Judie Tzuke, and Quivver (John Graham). Strangely the atmospheric, dark tracks on I Choose Noise did not include "Space Manoeuvres Part 3," a Hybrid live set staple and one of the year's best Internet-disseminated singles. This remarkable, haunting number contains an overlay of Kiefer Sutherland (in character from Dark City) speaking the "First there was darkness ..." lines.

The Knife — Norwegian siblings Karin Dreijer Andersson and Olof Dreijer — made much of their unwillingness to show their faces or become conventional pop stars, but they shook up CMJ with a live performance that is already legend. For all its lyrical anguish, their Silent Shout, whose every track is worthwhile, came close to the outright synth-pop of Depeche Mode's Speak and Spell.

The Knife robbed the slightly superior Sissy — singer Johanne Williams and audio landscaper David Trusz — of some of the bouquets that Sissy's female-fueled reinvention of trip-hop album All Under deserved. Why single "In the Dark" was not a huge crossover hit as well as a dance-floor smash was difficult to explain, but All Under's remaining tracks of furious distortion ("Anyone but You" and "Can't Save You") were just as captivating.

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