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Music

Ataxia, Secrets and the Detroit Crowd Won’t Dance for Some Bullshit

“The nightlife may not be as packed as a club in New York or London, but the quality of people in this city are the best in the world.”

Detroit has gone through a lot over the past couple of years, but there's always been one thing that is still alive and going strong—the music. During Movement Detroit, I noticed no matter what the social status was or where people were from, for three days, everyone was there to enjoy the sounds of electronic music. From meeting countless locals, I could tell there was a sense of community within the city and that the music is part of it all. While the city struggles financially and economically, the dance music scene is still full of passion and creating a thriving community. So when I heard about a musical collaboration between Ford motor company and local producers, ATAXIA and Secrets, I was curious to hear what their opinions were on the current state of the city, how the electronic music scene is outside of Movement festival weekend and their thoughts on the collaboration. Ted Krisko who is one-half of ATAXIA and Matt Abbott aka Secrets, have both been heavily involved with the promotion of Movement and events in Detroit. I had a chance to catch up with the two after the long weekend craze.

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Ted, how did it feel to play the very first Silent Disco stage at Movement?
Ted: The opportunity to close a stage at the Movement festival was hands down the greatest feeling in the world. I'm forever grateful. Touched, blessed that everyone from Paxahau gave us this opportunity. The fact that they have so much love and trust in what we do, that they let us close the stage is needless to say a dream come true.

How was it in terms of playing to a crowd with headphones on?
T: Super challenging, especially with the headphones on. With the nature and proximity of the stages, and Mike, the head sound guy for Movement, he did an incredible job tuning the sound systems. Mike was the original sound guy for all of the first Plastikman parties—the original of rave culture. Mike's stages are so fucking loud that something that we didn't anticipate at the silent disco was having sound bleeding from the main stage. And it's nobody's fault at all because there are always growing pains with new ideas.

How about the Moog stage? Every time I passed by, people were always having a blast.
Matt: It was awesome; it was my third time playing the festival. Move D is one of my favourites and I played right before him so that was really great.

T: Matt has this history, let's just be honest. I would say every time we have an ATAXIA and Secrets events, some kind of act of God happens. It fucking ruins Matt's world, and it's usually some kind of rainstorm, or full a collapse. Something crazy happens. But this year, Matt got to have his set go down without any frills happening and the feedback he got was amazing.

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With Movement officially over, Detroit has been going through a lot in the past year. The city recently filed bankruptcy and the rate of vacant buildings has been increasing to over 80,000. With that in mind, how is the community and nightlife?
T: Our community is extremely strong and it has a wonderful group of both key players in the industry and on the artist side of things. We have so many friends that support the shit out of what we do and are so present in our dealings, and even though Detroit has this general reputation as a ghost town, those vacant buildings are still with the spirit and energy of raves.

All of us are able to look at each other every time we hangout somewhere, at TV Bar or Whisky Disco, or at any other venue, and smile because we know that as far as the music world is concerned, we are Detroit, collectively. The nightlife may not be as packed as a club in New York, Berlin or London, but the quality of people in this city is the best in the world for dance music. It always has been and always will be. There's nothing that can change that.

What are some of the struggles within Detroit for electronic music?
M: Everything here is DIY, I think the biggest thing for me is that we do better with locals than having DJs from out of town come in. It's hit or miss in Detroit. It'll be really good times with a couple months of all the venues being packed and everyone making money, and then it'll just dry up for no real reason. So it's a tough city to please, which isn't necessarily a bad thing; it keeps you on your toes as a promoter. I think it's because people are so malleable with music in the city. So it's good and bad. It's definitely more good than bad though.

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T: Let's be very honest and clear about this. We have such deep respect for all our international friends, and this is nothing against them, but there is no way anyone could claim Detroit better than a Detroit DJ. Detroit DJs know exactly what it takes to rock the party. People in Detroit are not going to pay the five, ten dollars to get into one of our parties and pay for bullshit. If there's bullshit going on, they'll protest. I'm the same way. I'm not going to dance my ass off for some bullshit.

I can't explain how many times Matt and I have spent thousands of dollars to bring in DJs that we love, but generally speaking, we will lose money on them. We don't do any of this for money, and if you haven't lost a lot of money throwing parties in Detroit, then you're not a promoter. Everything in Detroit is done organically and when it's done like that, it's completely proper.

Speaking about doing things organically, how did Ford approach you for this collaboration?
T: Secrets and Ataxia have affiliations with Paxahau, who are the producers of the Movement Festival. Whenever there were opportunities that would help us put Detroit on a higher exposure level and a good name around the world for our city, Paxahau trusts us to be great representatives of what we do. So for this instance, Chuck from Paxahau approached us and asked if we wanted to be involved in this project. My dad worked at a third party advertising agency for Ford for over thirty years, so Ford is in the bloodlines for many of us from Detroit.

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M: Anybody who grew up here knows someone who has worked for Ford. It's such a huge part of the reason Detroit is what it is—the whole auto industry. It has done a lot for this city, but it also fucked a lot of stuff up recently.

T: When we were touring the factory, how much did that fucking factory sound like Plastikman albums?

M: Oh yeah, that's why I tried to grasp the whole echo shaper of the warehouse. I've never been in a building that big before. It was mind blowing.

How long were you guys in the factory for?
T: For about three hours, and then we had about 36 hours to make the track.

How was the time crunch? Was it stressful or did you know what you wanted to do right away?
M: I had a pretty good idea what I wanted to do. I wanted to incorporate those samples into a previous track, but I ended up making one from scratch and I had no idea what to expect, but I tend to work way better under pressure.

T: I don't think Matt or I have ever, ever, ever had a to-do list. But somehow we've been able to, falls included, complete any of the tasks that have ever been put in front of us to move our mission of music forward, so working under pressure is really the only way that I think we know how to do things. I don't think if we had any real time to prepare things, that anything would actually get done because we would just be busy fucking off. We premeditated this a bit though. Using some pretty new equipment from Roland, their new TR8, their 808 and 909 hybrid clone, and the TB3, their new 303 hybrid clone.

M: Why does everyone have those except me? It's fucking crazy.

T: When we started designing this track and thinking about Ford, we really just wanted to make something that sounded like driving. So we took the perspective of doing an auto related tune and we wanted to create something that went with the warehouse sound that also coordinated well with the minimalistic approach of integrating noise from a warehouse. Also making sure to have enough room in the track for our samples to breathe throughout.

You can follow Connie on Twitter: @ConstanceChan