The fact is, great records keep getting made, in the face of a down-swing in the economy, a downswing in the American consumer’s acceptance of underground dance music, and a rapidly shifting economic model. It’s increasingly difficult to even stock dance music vinyl, because there aren’t many distributors left; mom and pop stores that stocked dance vinyl are every bit as susceptible to the death of physical media as a product.

But producers keep producing, DJs keep playing — even if they are using Serato or Tractor Scratch — and people keep dancing. Beatport.com, Boomkat.com, and a slug of other digital download vendors are booming.

My pics for techno’s saviors — UR keeps putting great records, and getting ignored by everyone in the US. Burial may not be strictly techno, but his track ‘Raver’ is devestating. 2652 from Holland has put out an album that is at the crossroads between Dubstep, Detroit Techno, and Berlin-style Dub. Tolga Fidan makes incredibly rocking techno incorporating all sorts of eastern european sounds and influences. Kontext has put out 2 fantastic Dubstep-esque EPs, and I expect great things in the future from him.

There’s always going to be something rather static and glacial about dance music; just as streamlining makes all cars regress towards the same shape, dance music is trapped in a certain uniformity by its function. But that doesn’t mean innovation and new sounds don’t happen.

Collectively, right on.

my collection – and this is coming from a person who’s only ever played out a single night in his life – is stuffed full of $6.99 domestic label releases. give me the earthtones/seasons, underground resistance, driftwood, wave, naked, or any of the dozens of other worthwhile domestic labels of the past two decades over the thicker, better pressed, but twice as expensive imports any day.

furthermore, give me a pristine, dusty thriftstore/flea market, let me search through it for the $1 prescriptions, transmats, mood II swing, strictly rhythms, the discarded releases of the myriad of european labels that sprung up over the course of the late 80′s and 90′s and then disappeared just as quickly who were releasing the vanguard of both american and european producers. let me squint in the bad fluorescent lighting to try to read the engineered/produced-by in fine print.

i’ve got over 1500 records and have only ever paid more than $10 for a single 12″ twice – the one-sided original release of music sounds better and the junior boys own re-issue of rez/why why why. give me the 2×12, the label compilation, or give me the cut-out bin. make it worth my while to give you my money – it’s no different than any other business.

in the end, it comes down to this: techno was never about being clean! techno is about using what you have, at 5am, covered in sweat and filth, exhausted in the sunday morning sunrise. this is, to me, exactly why dubstep has maintained its foothold and is quickly eclipsing the movements it grew out of – it’s revitalizing the gritty urban freedom of what is quickly becoming a bygone era.

to me, dj’ing – whether for an audience, a few friends, or just for yourself, whether techno, indie, jazz, hiphop – is about perserverance and knowledge, not reading charts. let me reward myself – and in extension, you – for knowing what i’m looking for, and being willing to risk a couple of bucks and a few minutes of our time to try something maybe not necessarily new, but instead maybe just different. trying to stay afloat in a saturated market, no matter which side of it you’re on, is a losing proposition for all involved.

In 2005, when I folded my label, I had six U.S. distributors: Syntax, Nemesis, Watts, Downtown 161, TRC, and Unique. Of those, four have since gone out of business, one stopped selling house in favor of hip-hop and porno, and only Downtown 161 remains. (Let’s not forget Amato and the other phenomenal UK distros lost, as well as Universal and all of the vinyl pressing plants that went under.) This trickled down to the labels, who lost product and didn’t get paid by many of them, which trickled down to the producers who had to take advance paycuts they weren’t ready for. And so on and so forth.

The price of vinyl, however, is the biggest concern in the industry. I know that in our store, we still sold imports for $10.99 — even when we knew the mark-up should have been up to $13.99 in some cases. I think we were just trying to keep it alive, hoping the incline in prices were a temporary aberration. They weren’t — and perhaps unsurprisingly, the shop closed a few years ago.

As for the weird Knife comment: I can’t even count the number of innovations and unique subgenres born from house and techno since 1993. I mean, I like the Knife too, but they are arguably a pop band. You probably need to buy more records.

I also concur that there have certainly been many developments in
the subgenres as you have suggested, and it is frightening to realize
how many producers from 93 on still go unrecognized. this is of course
why so many think nothing innovative had been happening since that
time…

Thanks for the shout out, Matos!