Dancecult 2.1 - Cover, TOC and Editor's Introduction Volume 2 Number 1 2011 Executive Editor Graham St John (University of Queensland, AU) Managing Editor tobias c. van Veen (McGill University, CA) Reviews Editor Karenza Moore (Lancaster University, UK) Art Director Cato Pulleyblank (Fairy Punk Creative Studio, CA) Production Director Gary Botts Powell (Texas A&M University, US) Production Assistants Luis-Manuel Garcia (University of Chicago, US) Ed Montano (RMIT University, AU) Botond Vitos (Monash University, AU) Operations Assistant Neal Thomas (McGill University, CA) Copyeditors Catherine Baker (University of Southampton, UK) Katrina Loughrey (AU) Dancecult Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture Issue 2 (1) 2011 ISSN 1947-5403 ©2011 Dancecult Published twice yearly at: International Advisory Board Eliot Bates (University of Maryland, College Park, US), Andy Bennett (Griffith University, AU), Mark J Butler (Northwestern University, US), Anthony D’Andrea (University of Limerick, IE), Rebekah Farrugia (Oakland University, US), Kai Fikentscher (DE), François Gauthier (Université du Québec à Montréal, CA), Anna Gavanas (Institute for Futures Studies, SE), Chris Gibson (University of New South Wales, AU), Jeremy Gilbert (University of East London, UK), Ross Harley (University of New South Wales, AU), David Hesmondhalgh (University of Leeds, UK), Tim Lawrence (University of East London, UK), Geert Lovink (University of Amsterdam, NL), Gordon Lynch (Birkbeck University of London, UK), Rene Lysloff (University of California, Riverside, US), Alejandro L. Madrid (University of Illinois, Chicago, US), Charity Marsh (University of Regina, CA), Tony Mitchell (University of Technology Sydney, AU),Karenza Moore (Lancaster University, UK), Andrew Murphie (University of New South Wales, AU), Christopher Partridge (Lancaster University, UK), Anne Petiau (ITSRS / Université Paris 5, FR), Hillegonda C Rietveld (London South Bank University, UK), Geoff Stahl (Victoria University of Wellington, NZ), Sonjah Nadine Stanley-Niaah (University of West Indies, JM), Graham St John (University of Queensland, AU), Will Straw (McGill University, CA), Rupert Till (University of Huddersfield, UK), tobias c. van Veen (McGill University, CA), Michael Veal (Yale University, US) Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Cult ure is a peer-reviewed, open-access e-journal for the study of electronic dance music culture (EDMC). A platform for interdisciplinary scholarship on the shifting terrain of EDMCs worldwide, the Journal houses research exploring the sites, technologies, sounds and cultures of electronic music in historical and contemporary perspectives. Playing host to studies of emergent forms of electronic music production, performance, distribution, and reception, as a portal for cutting-edge research on the relation between bodies, technologies, and cyberspace, as a medium through which the cultural politics of dance is critically investigated, and as a venue for innovative multimedia projects, Dancecult is the forum for research on EDMC. Cover Image: wolfgang sterneck http://dj.dancecult.net Volume 2 Number 1 2011 Editor’s Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 01 Graham St John FEATURE ARTICLES Disco’s Revenge: House Music’s Nomadic Memory. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 04 Hillegonda C. Rietveld Hooked on an Affect: Detroit Techno and Dystopian Digital Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Richard Pope Maintaining “Synk” in Detroit: Two Case Studies in the Remix Aesthetic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 Carleton S. Gholz Festival Fever and International DJs: The Changing Shape of DJ Culture. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 in Sydney’s Commercial Electronic Dance Music Scene Ed Montano FROM THE FLOOR – online Nomads In Sound vol. 1 Anna Gavanas Special Section on the Love Parade Where is Duisburg? An LP Postscript Ronald Hitzler and Sean Nye Party, Love and Profit: The Rhythms of the Love Parade (Interview with Wolfgang Sterneck) Graham St John Pathological Crowds: Affect and Danger in Responses to the Love Parade Disaster at Duisburg Luis-Manuel Garcia REVIEWS Books Hip Hop Underground: The Integrity and Ethics of Racial Identification (Anthony Kwame Harrison) . . . . . 90 Rebecca Bodenheimer The Local Scenes and Global Culture of Psytrance (Graham St John) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94 Rupert Till Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound (Tara Rodgers) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 Anna Gavanas Technomad: Global Raving Countercultures (Graham St John) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 Phil Kirby Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (Steve Goodman) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .102 tobias c. van Veen Films Music World: Donk (Andy Capper) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .107 Phil Kirby Speaking in Code (Amy Grill) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .111 tobias c. van Veen This issue ha s been s ome time in the making, given the departure of maestro and founding Managing Editor Eliot Bates who had tinkered for long hours down in the dark recesses of Open Journal Systems producing results comparable to that consistently manifested by The Chief on Battlestar Galactica. With Eliot’s departure and a scheduled special edition that unfortunately did not reach fruition, wounds were being licking down at Dancecult. Then, arriving to gallantly perform a whole lot more than slack-taking was our new Managing Editor tobias c. van Veen, followed by a production team including Copyeditors Catherine Baker and Katrina Loughrey, Art Director Cato Pulleyblank (who has transformed our layout design and designed our great new logo!), Production Director Gary Botts Powell, Production Assistants Luis-Manuel Garcia, Ed Montano and Botond Vitos, along with Operations Assistant Neal Thomas. This team, who have joined Reviews Editor Karenza Moore and myself, have worked hard to produce this edition, working together for the first time and with our authors in what I feel has been a rewarding experience for all concerned. The issue features two strong themes. The first is Detroit techno, the second the Love Parade. Our Feature Articles section contains two contributions to the emergent study of the music and culture of Detroit techno. A more than capable tour guide of the “Real of Detroit” and its progeny (“techno survivalism”), Richard Pope’s exploration of “radical pessimism” in his article “Hooked on an Affect: Detroit Techno and Dystopian Digital Culture”, offers an engaging account of the dystopian aesthetic of Detroit techno, mirroring the fate of the city’s industry. The article is complemented by Carleton Gholz’s “Maintaining ‘Synk’ in Detroit: Two Case Studies in the Remix Aesthetic”, a study of the cross-mediated artifice of Detroit techno producers, namely The Wizard himself Jeff Mills and Richie Hawtin. Bookending this section are two further articles. The first is an intriguing contribution by Hillegonda C. Rietveld. In the previous edition of Dancecult, Simon Reynolds defended and expanded his position on the “hardcore continuum”, that is the perceived continuity of UK hardcore styles through jungle to dubstep. In this edition, Rietveld offers a study on what might be called the disco-ntinuum. In her article “Disco’s Revenge: House Music’s Nomadic Memory”, she uses Deleuze and Guattari to explore Chicago house music as a “nomadic disco memory machine” where house music is placed under the microscope as a “wandering institution”. Rounding off our Feature Articles section is Ed Montano’s account of the changing shape of DJ culture in Sydney’s commercial EDM scene: “Festival Fever and International DJs”. Editor’s Introduction DOI: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.00 St John | Editor’s Introduction 2 The dystopian theme continues in our special From the Floor section, where three pieces address the disaster that became the Love Parade, once the pride of “Techno Kulture” and a global EDM phenomenon. Twenty one years from its founding in Berlin (1989, just before the Berlin Wall came down), in 2010 the Love Parade died. Although many argue the Love Parade expired long ago (having run its course before it was sold to the company McFit), on 24 July 2010 what had become a travelling EDM carnival, and a ghost of its former self, went down in grizzly fashion, taking 21 lives with it, and injuring 500 others. The scene of the tragedy was the Ruhr Valley city of Duisburg , inside a heavily enclosed region of the former Duisburg depot, an industrial site tellingly removed from the event’s glory days floating down the Straße des 17. Juni before Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate. Long gone was the passion for Unification that had driven the initiative and fueled its former parades. Indeed, at Duisburg , the event was no longer a parade, but a spectacular pawn for regional municipalities jostling for culture and capital. Those who danced in the ruins of the Duisburg depot had reached the terminus of a movement that had emerged in a climate of hope and which once posed for the world aboard a vision splendid, but had been finally crushed under the weight of history. The first article, a collaboration between Ronald Hitzler and Sean Nye (instigated by Nye, who translated Hitzler’s work from the German), offers a detailed and rewarding introduction to the fate of the Love Parade, once a “symbol of a generation”. The article offers an incisive account by the authors, one of whom was “backstage” and the other observing “live” streaming from the tabloid website Bild.de, positions from which they are able to begin assessing the compromises, the deception and the carnage in Duisburg. The second piece is an electronic interview I conducted with activist and educator Wolfgang Sterneck. Sterneck had an early involvement with The Love Parade, but has long viewed the event with studied contempt. The interview offers Sterneck’s views on the siphoning of the love over the parade’s successive “phases” and the emergence of the Fuck Parade. The interview was translated from the German by Luis-Manuel Garcia, who also contributed the final piece to this special section. Garcia’s “Pathological Crowds” offers an intriguing analysis of the portrayal of the dangerous crowd in commentary of the Duisburg disaster which he interprets by way of early studies of crowd psycholog y in which urban crowds were pathologised. Additionally, From the Floor is proud to host “Nomads in Sound vol. 1”, a compilation of original tracks and short films with commentaries compiled by Anna Gavanas (aka Gavana), which was, I was surprised and delighted to discover, inspired by my recent book Technomad: Global Raving Countercultures. This volume of “Nomads in Sound” includes tracks by Gavana, Mutamassik, Dr Das, X.A.Cute, Aimnbreak, Hakan Ludvigson and Doveshack, and film contributions by M-OP and Martin Borell. This is the first of two volumes on this theme compiled by Gavanas, with vol. 2 to be published in Dancecult 2.2. Finally, this edition features four book reviews and two film documentary reviews. The books reviewed are Anthony Kwame Harrison’s Hip Hop Underground: The Integrity and Ethics of Racial Identification (reviewed by Rebecca Bodenheimer); Graham St John’s edited Dancecult 2(1)3 collection The Local Scenes and Global Culture of Psytrance (reviewed by Rupert Till); Tara Roger’s Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound (reviewed by Anna Gavanas); Graham St John’s Technomad: Global Raving Countercultures (edited by Phil Kirby); and Steve Goodman’s Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect and the Ecolog y of Fear (reviewed by tobias c. van Veen). The films reviewed are Andy Capper’s Music World: Donk (reviewed by Phil Kirby) and Amy Grill’s Speaking in Code (reviewed by tobias c. van Veen). Additionally, for those author’s seeking to publish material in our From the Floor section, please note our updated description. The From the Floor (FTF) section hosts: Imaginative submissions reviewed by Dancecult editors (that is, submissions are not typically subject to blind peer-review). Submissions include field reports, mini- ethnographies, photo-essays and interviews. Pieces for this section should be between 750–2500 words in length. Rather than written in the style of an article with formal analysis and many citations, FTF pieces are more conversational or blog-like in style, and may consist of experimental and creative reportage styles across the field of EDM. They may include substantive multimedia components. Also, a reminder to anyone seeking to be involved in the forthcoming special edition of Dancecult, “The Exodus of Psytrance?”, the deadline for abstracts is 1 May 2011 (with the deadline for full articles 1 November). For complete details, please see the announcements. A warm thank you to all of our contributors to this edition, to our valued reviewers, and to the members of our new team at Dancecult for producing the edition. Special thanks to tobias c. van Veen who has been instrumental in revamping the journal’s production procedure and for his invaluable assistance formulating a new and improved Dancecult Style Guide (the DSG) which better illustrates our multidisciplinary approach and outlines requirements associated with our cross-platform (HTML and PDF) approach. The DSG is now available for download and should be read thoroughly by all authors submitting to the journal. Returned submissions are not unlikely if they do not conform to style. As the DSG illustrates, Dancecult generally follows the Chicago Manual of Style 16th ed. Feedback is certainly welcome as we wish to make the submission process as painless as possible. From the sweet spot, Graham St John Executive Editor http://dj.dancecult.net/index.php/journal/announcement/view/8