Dancing with the Night

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Those of us who write about music are often reputed to be nerdish elitists, cloistered in dingy lofts surrounded by well-worn albums and old issues of Creem, pining for the halcyon days of relevant music and praying for the next rock messiah to descend from the heavens. And yeah, I can almost see where the body public might get that impression. We’re sometimes so absorbed with justifying pop music as art that we skirt past the minutiae roaming along the fringes of the form. As self-proclaimed arbiters of what defines the state of music, we disavow dance music as a bad memory we’ve long since outgrown.

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But once the horizon has swallowed the sun, and the darkness is illuminated by neon, life takes on a different complexion. Skies shift into a liquid pale against the moon, and something wells up inside us. On such nights, coffeehouses and acoustic guitars are too familiar for our alien impulses. We want to imbibe blue drinks and give ourselves over to the sensually primal beast within us.

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We want to dance, damn it!

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And once we’ve made our way through the invariably cavernous entrance of the club to find ourselves bathed in bass and shards of broken light, we’re transformed. There’s something wolfen in our eyes we ease into a symbiotic relationship with the music pulsing through the walls. It’s stentorian, seeping into our systems so subtly we’re barely aware that it punctuates our attempts at conversation, all the while prodding us to the dance floor. Our souls are no longer our own—we are willing servants to the whims of the DJ’s ever-shifting incantations. You’re about 10,000 light years from disco home, and all your preconceptions about music, relevance, culture and society have evaporated—at least for this moment.

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Make no mistake—club culture is a world unto itself—vibrant, often dark, pulsing with a life timed by beats from all over the world. And as much as critics, iconoclasts and old school aficionados of varying ilks would like to deny it, club music, with all its mixes and variations, is an integral idiom of the larger vocabulary of music as a whole.It’s not that club culture sprang into life full grown—it’s the lineal descendant of disco—which may explain why it’s rarely held up for review in the mainstream—but through the years, it’s mutated, evolved and spawned so many variations it’s nigh impossible to define it precisely. And really, there’s even less reason to attempt to do so. It’s the music of immediacy, stripped naked of any pretense and existing to remind us that at our most technological, we remain feral once the sun sets. From Berlin to Miami to London to New York and points in between, dance remains a universal language. It’s in the beats that the dialects make the language take shape.

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The London club Fabric not only speaks the language, but is fluent in almost all the dialects. Widely regarded as one of the best venues in the world, it’s renowned for Room One’s bass-driven vibrating dance floor, which sends the beats from the floor and feeds them directly into the body. More than a club, Fabric is also a label that regularly releases CDs designed to promote the musical diversity of the club. Released on alternating months as Fabric and FabricLive, they showcase the work of some of the club’s DJ’s, and represent any number of genres within the larger club texture.

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There are almost 80 titles in the series at this point, all with utilitarian numerals to identify them. Each one is unique in its approach to the mixtape. Fabric 33: Ralph Lawson is downtempo, almost a paean to acid jazz in its loopy instrumental renderings. In a completely different take, FabricLive.32: Tayo skillfully fuses breakbeats and bass with hip hop, dub and funk into something that stands beyond definition. Ewan Pearson, on Fabric 35, goes a bit more mainstream, drenching his pop sensibilities with a healthy dose of bass and percussion. FabricLive 33 finds Baltimore-based trio Spank Rock mixing East Coast mashups with unlikely dubs and sound effects, even finding slots for Yes and the Romantics in their seamless remixes.

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These examples barely scratch the surface of the Fabric and FabricLive CDs, which, depending on one’s proclivities, range from the somewhat safe to the truly mind-bending. What makes the series most noteworthy is that it always presents the unexpected. The CDs are, without fail, crystal reproductions that convey at least a sense of the excitement that the club Fabric generates. They may not be the sort of thing that inspire rock critics to pontificate hither and yon, but they nonetheless sample sources from around the globe.

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You can’t talk about club culture without acknowledging Berlin as the city that’s known for first embracing it wholeheartedly. The reunification of Germany after the fall of the Wall opened up a myriad of possibilities, and with that came a freedom to push the boundaries of dance music. The early attempts formed the basis for techno, and while it was often cited as cold and devoid of emotion, it remains the roots music of club culture. Nobody embodies the freewheeling spirit of contemporary Berlin more than Ellen Allien. She’s noted as a DJ, vocalist, music producer, and founder of her own label, BPitch Control.

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On the TimeOut release The Other Side: Berlin, Allien pays tribute to her beloved city via a video tour that focuses on its sights, sounds and smells. It’s saved from being another tourist guide by being narrated more by the music of the night than a simple voice-over. With sections devoted to shopping, nightlife, food and sights, it’s a two-plus hour tour that presents Berlin as maybe the coolest place in Europe.The accompanying CD is best described as a techno sampler that never quite conveys the aura of the Berlin scene. Allien’s Fabric 34 underscores her talents as a DJ much more effectively, evoking as it does an aura that’s both heavily dark and unbearably light. She’s a mistress of experimentation, the sort of which finds its way into the popular consciousness.

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Granted, the music of club culture doesn’t easily lend itself to quiet introspection. It’s too mercurial for that. When you’re talking about a pulse, you quickly realize as soon as you attach a definition to it, it’s jumped into a new realm. It leaves you with a beat you can’t get out of your head, at least until the moon rises again, and a new rhythm possesses you. In that regard, it personifies the meaning of pop culture—meaningful in its meaninglessness, and seared into our synapses for reasons we’ll never acknowledge—or define.