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Beat Research Celebrates Ten Years of Keeping Boston Weird

Hard work in a city known for the Dropkick Murphys and Fenway Park.

An audio-visual set by Steve Nalepa at the Enormous Room in 2008

In recent years, Boston, Massachusetts has become a worthy destination for touring DJs and their fans, thanks to events like Together, the city's annual electronic music festival. It wasn't always this way, though. Throughout the 2000s, only a handful of brave soldiers were doggedly keeping machine music alive amidst an endless sea of alt-rock radio stations and Dropkick Murphys fans.

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During that time of dance hardship, a little Monday night party called Beat Research shone bright like a guiding LED for confused and disoriented fans of dance music in Boston and Cambridge. It's been ten years since they threw their first party in a tiny attic above an Indian restaurant in Cambridge, and tonight the original cast is reuniting to celebrate.

Beat Resarch founders, DJ C and DJ Flack paid their dues in the city's small but stalwart electronic music scene before launching their weekly party in 2004. Jumping off from the more experimental end of jungle, trip-hop, and breakcore, they initially helped found Toneburst, a collective that included members like DJ /Rupture, DJ Ripley, and Hrvatski. From the late-90s to 2001, the collective organized 20-or-so large-scale multimedia events, including Junk, which paired jungle DJs with punk bands trading 20-minute sets, as well as an all-ages takeover of the Boston Children's Museum.

Around the turn of the century, many of Toneburst's founders dispersed across the country or simply moved on to the next one, but Flack and C remained. As the duo shifted gears between Toneburst and Beat Research, their tastes turned to a more international palette. "Our extreme eclecticism led to an unquenchable thirst for bass music from around the world," DJ C explains. "Even back in the early '00s days of Spectrum [a precursor to Beat Research] we were uncovering dubstep, Baltimore club, baile funk, and mixing that with hip-hop, dancehall, jungle, etc. I saw that kind of digging for new sounds as Beat Research."

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Casting about for a venue, the duo hit upon The Enormous Room in Cambridge's Central Square neighborhood. First-time visitors might be confused at the name, given that it was a tiny, low-lit lounge that accommodated about 80 people if you really packed them tight (this was the whole joke, I guess). In the end the venue was perfect, flanked mostly by ethnic restaurants, used record stores, modest, vinyl-sided two-story homes, and all of this only a block from the subway.

DJ Rashad, live at Beat Research in 2012

For seven-and-a-half years, Beat Research ruled Monday nights as a haven for touring underground DJs, electronic musicians, and experimental weirdos of all stripes. The list of past performers is vast. Week-to-week, their booking could range from a live performance by thereminist Pamelia Kurstin to the bass-heavy diasporic beats of Ghislain Poirier to dubstep-turned-techno tastemaker Scuba to footwork guru DJ Rashad (RIP), New York rapper Le1f, UK grime originator Plastician, and NOLA bounce star Nicky Da B.

"Many acts who came through our humble free Monday night went on to become big players in the music scene," marvels Flack, citing some of the names above plus others like Vex'd, MC Zulu, and Aaron Spectre aka Drumcorps. "Sometimes already well established touring acts that would play huge clubs in NYC the previous Saturday would tell us that our night was one of their favorite gigs because they were free to play whatever they wanted and the smaller weeknight crowd really appreciated what they were doing."

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San Francisco experimentalist Kid Kameleon opened the first Beat Research party and chalks up the night's magic to its calendar slot. "If there's ever a day of the week that separates people who are out for the music versus people who are just out for the scene, it's Monday," he affirms.

And who comes out on a Monday? Maga Bo, the Rio-based DJ/producer who graced the Beat Research stage many times, fondly recalls "great conversations with people that came down—exactly and specifically for that night—folks with a similar open and wide-reaching view of music, technology, culture." He sums up: "Basically, a whole bunch of geeks accompanying my set through all the weirdest changes, twists and bends, from soft to hard to aggro core break soul beats from wherever the fuck."

Multi-instrumentalist Filastine performing his live set out of a tricked-out shopping cart at Beat Research

When DJ C moved to Chicago in 2007, ethnomusicologist and renowned music writer Wayne&Wax (aka Wayne Marshall) took over over as the face of Beat Research, booking gigs and linking the club night to his work as a researcher and critic. And in 2011, the Enormous Room closed unexpectedly, so the party moved downtown to Good Life, a club in Boston's Financial District. In 2012, DJ Pace, a dedicated scholar of Boston's hip-hop history and longtime friend of Beat Research, stepped in to man the helm with Flack.

Though the party has always been a modest endeavor, it's hard to overstate the mark it's made, both as a landing pad for international artists, and as a platform for local talent. "Beat Research has been the mainstay of the best that Boston music has had to offer over the years: positive, eclectic, smart and open musical exploration," says DJ Ripley, who will play tonight's anniversary bash. "It has been my musical home away from home especially because of their fearless and enthusiastic embrace of genre-crossing musical experiences."

"It always seemed like the perfect encapsulation of Boston to me," says Kid Kameleon. "It was smart. It was gritty but it had a sense of humor. It was worldly but had a definite sense of local pride and character that was unmistakable." With an all-local (if now elsewhere) cast and crew on tap, a decade of experimental party music just scratches the surface for Boston's offbeat music heads.

Tonight, May 1, is the Beat Research ten-year anniversary party with residents DJ Flack and DJ Pace, guests DJ C, DJ Ripley, and Edan (live). Additonal info here.