Recently I've been reading a new book by Michaelangelo Matos called The Underground Is Massive: How Electronic Dance Music Conquered America, and one of the problems with reading a book like this is that there are continuous references to music that I immediately have to track down on YouTube, so the first two chapters have been a stop-start experience that has opened my ears to a lot of great old music ("Space Invaders" by Player 1, I'm talking about you). The initial sections of the book have spent a lot of time in '80s Detroit, where techno musicians great and small first fleshed out the branch of EDM known as techno that ultimately got a hometown global showcase called the Detroit Electronic Music Festival starting in 2000.
Speaking of the DEMF, my friend Brian Siers and I once did some on-camera work interviewing festival goers -- among other things, I recall an extended sit-down with "Strings Of Life" auteur Derrick May, who did the interview with his typical infectious brio, then left with a white woman on each arm -- and in search of any kind of visual record of this adventure that I thought took place around 2001 or so, into YouTube I went. Imagine my surprise when I found the first part of an Italian DEMF documentary from 2001, which I thought would be the jackpot. And it was, but of a different, more melancholic kind. The link is here:
https://youtu.be/zNK50NcV0Y0?t=3m6s
At the 3:06 mark, an interviewer -- neither me nor Brian, BTW -- talked with a woman named Barbara. Barbara was one of my former students in my first few years at NCMC, an artistic sort who was full of creativity and energy and her own brand of brio; not long after this interview, she moved down to the Detroit area to explore the arts in a community more supportive of those living in the creative underground, massive in its own ways. (Knowing my love of David Bowie, she painted me a small Bowie portrait that I still have to this day.) Sadly, Barbara's story ended with her taking her own life less than a decade after this interview, her dreams of artistic examination of the boundaries of existence doomed to remain in mere conjecture. But thankfully, in the bottomless servers of YouTube, in a digital pit both underground and massive, Barbara's love of music and community will live on.
Speaking of the DEMF, my friend Brian Siers and I once did some on-camera work interviewing festival goers -- among other things, I recall an extended sit-down with "Strings Of Life" auteur Derrick May, who did the interview with his typical infectious brio, then left with a white woman on each arm -- and in search of any kind of visual record of this adventure that I thought took place around 2001 or so, into YouTube I went. Imagine my surprise when I found the first part of an Italian DEMF documentary from 2001, which I thought would be the jackpot. And it was, but of a different, more melancholic kind. The link is here:
https://youtu.be/zNK50NcV0Y0?t=3m6s
At the 3:06 mark, an interviewer -- neither me nor Brian, BTW -- talked with a woman named Barbara. Barbara was one of my former students in my first few years at NCMC, an artistic sort who was full of creativity and energy and her own brand of brio; not long after this interview, she moved down to the Detroit area to explore the arts in a community more supportive of those living in the creative underground, massive in its own ways. (Knowing my love of David Bowie, she painted me a small Bowie portrait that I still have to this day.) Sadly, Barbara's story ended with her taking her own life less than a decade after this interview, her dreams of artistic examination of the boundaries of existence doomed to remain in mere conjecture. But thankfully, in the bottomless servers of YouTube, in a digital pit both underground and massive, Barbara's love of music and community will live on.
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