8Sided Blog

the scene celebrates itself

A Quick David Mancuso Memory

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It was the late nineties (I think, my memory is a little fuzzy) and I was wandering Manhattan with a couple friends hitting all the necessary record stores. One friend mentioned this new shop opened by a Japanese millionaire that specialized in hard-to-find jazzy disco type fare and Asian vinyl imports. Completely up for it, we made our way across town and into the shop which was compact, clean, and immaculate and we might have guessed a Japanese millionaire was involved if we didn’t already know. The only people in the store were us, the Japanese man behind the register, and a familiar figure in the corner set-up to play tunes for the shopkeeper and anyone who happened to enter. This guy apparently had the job to sit and play records all day, drawing from a combination of his collection and the store’s stock … we did see him pull something off the racks and place it on the turntable at one point. One of my friends leaned over and broke the mystery by whispering in my ear with awe: “That’s David Mancuso.” And we spent more time than planned in that small shop having a semi-private listen to Mancuso’s selections. Since then I’ve often wondered about the unique mix of notoriety and obscurity that would grant such an influential selector the day job of Manhattan record store atmosphere-maker.

The New York Times

David Mancuso, a self-described “musical host” who revolutionized night life in New York with weekly dance parties he gave at his downtown loft, beginning in 1970, died on Monday at his home in Manhattan. He was 72.

Mr. Mancuso brought to his Saturday night gatherings the values of the 1960s counterculture, an audiophile’s fascination with sound technology and a voracious appetite for all styles of music. The parties at the Loft, as Mr. Mancuso’s apartment came to be known, became a near-religious rite for the city’s underground.

A Mancuso party was a ’60s dream of peace, love and diversity: multiracial, gay and straight, young and old, well-to-do and down-at-heel, singles and couples, all mingling ecstatically in an egalitarian, commerce-free space.

Mr. Mancuso did not call himself a D.J. He shrank from the limelight. His goal was to disappear into the music and allow its power to transform the audience.

Apple Music and Dubset: Good News For SoundCloud?

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Billboard:

Apple has announced an agreement with Dubset Media Holdings that will allow Apple Music to stream remixes and DJ mixes that had previously been absent from licensed services due to copyright issues.

Dubset is a digital distributor that delivers content to digital music services. But unlike other digital distributors, Dubset will use a proprietary technology called MixBank to analyze a remix or long-form DJ mix file, identify recordings inside the file, and properly pay both record labels and music publishers.

Licensing remixes and DJ mixes, both based on original recordings, is incredibly complex. A single mix could have upward of 600 different rights holders. According to {Dubset} CEO Stephen White, a typical mix has 25 to 30 songs that require payments to 25 to 30 record labels and anywhere from two to ten publishers for each track. The licensing has been done in-house at Dubset. Thus far the company has agreements with over 14,000 labels and publishers.

*In many ways, Dubset is like any other distributor. The {streaming} service pays Dubset for the content. Dubset then figures out which label and publishers to pay. It retains a percentage of revenue for the service and pays the creator (the remixer or DJ) a share of revenue. *

Apple is just the start, says White. “The goal is to bring this to all 400 distributors worldwide. When you think about unlocking these millions of hours of content being created, it’s significant monetization for the industry.”

Much of the coverage I’ve seen, such as this article in FACT, assumes that Apple Music will use this alliance to go after SoundCloud. I have my doubts. For one thing, user-generated content isn’t really Apple’s bag (and adding this to the already muddled Apple Music interface would just create more headaches for casual users). My guess is that Dubset’s involvement is related to Beats One (and the inevitable Beats Two, Beats Three, etc) and making the station(s)’s sets ‘on demand’. Presently any radio sets that are on demand will have to consist of 100% pre-cleared music. I bet Apple would love to create more on demand content from the Beats station(s) without restricting their celebrity guest DJs. They would also be able to integrate featured guest DJ sets in Apple Music’s curated ‘For You’ section. Based on the timing of this announcement, I’m wondering if we might hear more at Apple’s event next week … there are rumors of a much-anticipated Apple Music overhaul.

As for SoundCloud, this news bodes well rather than being “ominous”. Apple doesn’t have an exclusive deal with Dubset, as the company openly aims to bring this technology to “all 400 distributors worldwide.” Having a huge corporation like Apple be one of the initial adopters will do a lot to convince others to come on board. What the technology accomplishes, once accepted throughout the industry, should do much to push ‘remix culture’ forward as it goes legit. And SoundCloud, who already dominate the niche of user-generated mixes and content, could end up coming out on top. Dubset’s tech, after all, seems to solve most of the problems that rightsholders have with SoundCloud’s service.

Watch: Good Looking Records Documentary from 1996

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Here’s a fantastic find that hopefully won’t get pulled offline anytime soon … it’s a BBC documentary from 1996 focusing on Good Looking Records and LTJ Bukem, right on the cusp of their peak.

Reminisce: People smoking in clubs! All the DJs playing vinyl! Excited that you can make a track in the studio and play it out a week later, but only after the dubplate is pressed! Worried that your record sales will suffer because a shop in Japan is selling cassette tapes of radio sets! One of the hottest DJs in Britain getting “as much as £1000” per gig!

In addition to all that, the doc is a brilliant glimpse into the international DJ and independent dance label scenes in the heyday of the mid-1990s. Many things are different, many things are the same. And business manager Tony Fordham’s adventures in Asia could be a documentary series of their own. Certainly worthy of an hour of your time.


Modern Times – LTJ Bukem Documentary (1996) by junglednbdocumentary

EDM After The Drop

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I’m not one to complain about EDM – it’s sort of like complaining about the weather on Mars to me – and SFX’s troubles just give me a headache, so I usually avoid posting here about either. But this article on NPR regarding the intertwined futures of the two is a great read.

This section gave me a giggle, and seriously makes some sense:

Few acts today stand with one foot in SFX’s world and another in the underground, says Marea Stamper, who DJs and produces music as the Black Madonna and works as a creative director and talent buyer at Chicago club Smart Bar. “It’s like comparing Kiss to the Clash,” she observes. “They’re just not related.”



[Music journalist Philip] Sherburne agrees with Stamper’s comparison between SFX-scale acts and vintage pop-metal bands. “Just sonically, Avicii or mainstream EDM sounds to me like Van Halen’s ‘Jump,'” Sherburne says. “It’s the same synthesizers; it’s the same pleasure centers. You could say that Alesso is Bon Jovi. Bon Jovi took metal or hard rock and aimed it squarely at a very mainstream, middle-American public. That’s exactly the same thing: These artists have taken what was once a subculture and redesigned it along a pop format. I don’t know the economics of hair metal, but it seems to me pretty clear that [with EDM] we’re in the era of the Wingers and the Whitesnakes.”


Drew Daniel of Matmos and Soft Pink Truth is also perceptive and a bit nostalgic:

“There were always limits and doubts that I had about the utopian ambitions of the rave era, but there was still a feeling that raving could mean cutting ties to business as usual,” Daniel says. “It’s epitomized in that kind of hilarious gatefold drawing inside one of those early Prodigy LPs.”



The artwork for the 1994 album Music for the Jilted Generation shows a long-haired raver cutting a bridge that connects the toxic, heavily policed city to an idyllic meadow.



“That exemplifies this idea that radical forms of dance music could also lead to radical forms of creating community,” Daniel says. “There’s always been a spectrum, so I don’t want to say there used to be a good thing and now there’s a terrible thing — that’s overly simplified.”


Be sure to check out the full article.

The Larry Levan Bump

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Pitchfork:

Bands that once defined ‘70s punk rock at CBGB’s began making music that would appeal to the dancefloor (at The Paradise Garage) located but one mile west of that notoriously filthy venue. Blondie cut “Heart of Glass” and “Rapture”, while Talking Heads locked into a groove to smooth out the spastic tendencies of frontman David Byrne, and the aquatic funk of “Once in a Lifetime” became a Garage favorite. Meanwhile, Levan used to tune the room’s sound to the Clash’s “The Magnificent Dance”, and even rock royalty like the Rolling Stones and the Who vied for club play.



It speaks to Levan’s DJ sensibilities that it didn’t matter the genre of music—punk, pop, funk, disco, R&B—as long as it moved the crowd, it worked for him. And if Levan loved something, such as Pat Benatar’s brooding metallic synth-pop power ballad “Love is a Battlefield”, he would play it multiple times in a night, until any and all resistance was overcome.



Well before YouTube and Shazam provided metrics to forecast a song’s popularity, one only needed to peer out on the Paradise Garage’s dancefloor to see what was going to be a hit.


It’s always inspiring to hear these near-mythical stories of Larry Levan and other DJs from his era, and how they had the ability to create ‘hits’ within their cities and circles. As this story explains, Levan’s pull was augmented by his taste-making relationship with legendary NYC radio host Frankie “Hollywood” Crocker, and the two worked together in a perpetual search for the next big thing. This symbiosis may be particularly of a time … is there any similar relationship with such influence today? The web has given all DJs and artists a global audience, but has this decentralization diminished the importance and effectiveness of building scenes (and ‘hits’) organically within a city or region?

This piece’s stories also made me think of the classic New Order “Confusion” video showing Arthur Baker rushing to the Fun House to give Jellybean Benitez the reel-to-reel mixdown – hot off the presses! – to gauge the dance floor’s reaction: