Whatever Happened to the Future: How Will Club Music Move Forward in 2016?

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Whatever Happened to the Future: How Will Club Music Move Forward in 2016?

If there's one thing we don't need this year, it's another revival.

I was born for the second time in a bedroom in rural north Norfolk in the summer of 2005. In the seemingly endless, seemingly eternal, gap between the institutional rigour and uniform of secondary school and the limitless possibilities of sixth form education, with its free periods and trips to the local chippy, I spent most of my time feeling sorry for myself. It was a glorious, golden summer, the kind of summer that never happens again after you've turned 17 and the world goes to shit, a summer for walks and bike rides and cider in the park. I spent it in my room, looking outside, largely forgoing fresh air for furtive masturbation sessions and lonely mopes around the virtual town centre clock tower that was MySpace back when MySpace was more real than reality. It was a completely unremarkable way to end my childhood. There were no rites of passage, no eureka moments, no major disruptions or causes for celebration. Just an elongated slide into the low-lying sense of anxiety, dread, and panic that's the fundamental basis of early adulthood.

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Like most forlorn teenage boys who'd read too many books but still weren't anywhere near as clever as they thought they'd be by that age, I'd created an internal world comprised largely of cultural objects and artefacts. Belle and Sebastian LPs, a Nouvelle Vague film or two, a handful of novels I hadn't really understood, half a decade's worth of record reviews from a six foot stack of Mojos. That sort of thing. It was that formative age when you find yourself very consciously creating a syllabus of Things You Love Beyond Rhyme or Reason and Things That Are Irredeemably Fucking Shit. I had decided, after single digit dalliances with the likes of Stardust and a few other half-remembered summer holiday favorites, that dance music, all dance music, belonged firmly in the latter category. Dance music was for bald blokes in anoraks and the kind of lads at school I resented because they were the kind of lads who'd fingered girls at an age where I'd never even touched a girl's hand. Dance music was people who eat McDonalds in the car, it was tracksuit bottoms with poppers, hair gel and aftershave. It was resolutely not for me. I told myself that it wasn't made for people like me even though I didn't really know what a person 'like me' was like and was increasingly aware that I wasn't actually a special person in any way.

Things changed that summer. I'd agreed to swap a CD I'd bought on a trip to London by seminal noise group Wolf Eyes for a mystery package, courtesy of a bloke from Leeds who knew a bloke who'd killed a prostitute with a brick. When his jiffy bag dropped through our postbox a week or so later, I ripped it open to discover that I'd been jibbed. All he'd sent me was a pair of marker pen'd CDRs. This wasn't fair. At all. The CDs he'd burned for me, though, eventually, when I'd gotten over the initial feeling of having been cheated, made me reassess my taste in music which meant that, in turn, I had to reassess myself as a totality. They were Michael Mayer's magisterial Immer mix, and Komapkt's Total 4 compilation. AKA two of the finest things released this millennium. And that was that. I was reborn. I liked dance music now. I obsessed over Perlon and Pole, and told anyone who'd listen to me that Jurgen Paape's "So Weit Wie Noch Nie" was the best thing of all time

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Back then, and there is a reason I'm telling you all this, it felt like there was an entire world at my disposal, an almost infinite archive of the previously unexplored. Everything was new. Because it was. Everything was new to me. Everything excited me. Every record I heard was the start of another avenue of exploration. I joined dots and plotted paths. I was enamoured with old songs and obsessed with new ones. I truly believed that dance music was the future. Eleven years and ten summers have passed since then, and now I'm not so sure about that.

I still love dance music, and now I'm old enough to, you know, actually hear it out in clubs, I actually understand it better than I did back when I was a wide eyed innocent yet to even sip on a half pint, let alone stumble back to a shitty, shared flat at 7am with wide eyes and a Mariana's Trench sized pool of self-loathing to fall into. But there's something missing, and it's not just youthful vitality, I swear. Things feel stuck, in stasis. Things don't feel like they're moving forward. Let me explain.

As a music writer, I'm contractually obliged to spend at least eight hours a day listening to music, 95% of it 'new'. Which is a good thing, obviously, because life, as much as we wish it sometimes was, isn't a mausoleum, and culture can't always live in the museum. Man can't live on Ron Trent reissues alone, sadly. So I trudge through the endless stream of big room techno, bland house, and utterly faceless tech-house that makes up the bulk of SoundCloud, I navigate the choppy waters of my overstuffed inbox wondering if I'll ever actually really honestly like footwork or grime or post-post-postmodern UK bass music, and I listen as hard as I can, always trying to find merit, always seeking something akin to excitement, always hoping that I'll somehow be transported back to that moment when the world opened up to me, back to when every new 12" I heard felt important, when every mix CD that arrived through my door felt was totemic, when it felt like the entire world loved "The Sun Can't Compare" by Larry Heard as much as I did. It rarely happens, if ever.

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I, obviously, am to blame. Partly. I think. After all, as we get older, our senses dull, and our capacity to feel joy diminishes into an apple pip that's rotting somewhere deep in the lower intestine, corroded by years of lager and ready meals. As a result, we're never going to experience that sensation of a total acceptance of the new that marks the height of late teen-hood. This is when the world is still yours, rather than theirs, and when the world becomes theirs, you tend to care less about it. As my youth ebbs away from me, minute after minute, I become more and more painfully aware of being superseded, of time passing me by, of losing touch with the world that changed my life. I guess this is growing up.

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And then I think, what if it isn't me? What if dance music's reached a plateau? What if my idea that the linear progression of time directly results in music that sounds 'new' or 'innovative' or even just 'different' isn't a sustainable way of understanding the way culture is produced? What if we've tacitly, implicitly, decided that everything's fine as it is, and that we don't need to create sounds that free themselves from the temporal anchor of the past? What if everything is destined to sound the same forever, and we're trapped in an infernally unceasing club that only plays "Dancing (Again!)" by Eats Everything on repeat?

We're obviously not living in that world, and thank god for that, but it does feel a little like we're living in a period of stasis. Look at the tracks that were consensually agreed upon as the best of 2015 — "What's a Girl to Do" is 11 years old, "Just" is a balearic throwback, "I Wanna Go Bang" could have come out any year in the last twenty. After we survived the "hey everyone, remember Masters at Work? Wasn't mid-90s NYC house just the best thing ever!" boom, I thought we were ready to move into the future. Instead, I'm half expecting an electroclash revival —the second or third?— by March. And as much as I love "Rippin Kittin", that's a slightly depressing thought.

There are labels, scenes, and individual artists who are clearly working towards creating club orientated music that's seemingly trying to actually engage with the state of the world as is —Sound Pellegrino, the Classical Trax collective, and Rabit spring to mind immediately— but, christ, we should be living in space by now, not feeling happy that a few producers have come to the realization that straight up, eyes down 4/4 techno isn't the be all and end all of the nightclub experience.

What I'm asking for, I guess, is slightly unfair, because what I'm really asking for, for totally selfish reasons, is for the complete and total abandonment of any kind of creative safety net just to see if the dissolution of the musical forms we know, love, and mainly just tolerate, results in a wave of dance focused, club orientated music that somehow makes me feel like a teenager again. Which isn't going to happen, and if even if it were to happen, even if in 2016 we miraculously found ourselves in a complete and total musical year zero, I'd end up being lost, confused, unable to fully comprehend what had happened and why.

So what I think I want is that the content generators of clubland engage more with the idea of challenging the already accepted, the staid, the stuff we know works well because it's worked well for three decades now. Again, this is unfair. I don't make music. I don't know how difficult the process is. I don't know how you even begin going about the process of creating something that sounds removed from everything we've previously known or if there's even the slightest possibility of that being a possibility. I do know, though, that the world doesn't need another throwback jack track. It's 2016, lads. 2016.

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