lukas

my urge to groove
Greek philosophers and medieval theorists defined music as tones ordered horizontally melodies and vertically as harmonies. This sounds pretty dry and mathematical, and doesn’t tell me a lot about music at all, but you’d be surprised how true it is in the end taking dance music as an example. When you dance, your body moves horizontally and vertically at the same time.
Rewind. 10000 years back in time, or probably more… It may be hard to determine a specific date for the idea of people gathering together in groups around a campfire, celebrating, singing and dancing, being first established. Or who came up with it – as most natural it would look like in an episode of the flintstones, I really can’t imagine a mammoth fur skirted promoter, rushing through cave village and passing out stone tablet flyers for the first ancient party ever...
It’s more likely that this urge to groove is part of our genetic setup and has always been there - after spending days or weeks of hunting out in the ancient wildlife, trying to bring food back home to an awaiting tribe to assure their survival, in case one makes it back at all - an automated process, a natural release vent for stress and pressure to get our chemicals back to the right level. We’d literally celebrate life - we would chant and sing, we’d clap our hands and bang the drum to express our soul. The cradle of dance music lies somewhere in there, closely related to the aspect of celebration of life, and, for the most part – to our soul!
Nowadays a lot has changed in many ways, but then again not. The general outlines and schemes have stayed the same. We’ve traded the wildlife with the 9-5 jungle and the only thing stopping us from getting home in time might be the traffic on the streets, and also the music has changed shapes throughout time. When looking at today, a whole culture evolved out of the former ritual habits – the club culture – and their international language is called “house music”. House is a well aged blend of funk and soul, is made by DJ’s, played by DJ’s for dance floors all over the world at the speed of your heartbeat. It is the underground legacy of the spiritual aspect of dance music, uniting all heritages of style and various human cultures.
I am a House DJ, and I play what I love. My house is deep, soulful and tribalistic – sometimes progressive and twisted, but always phatt and groovy. I very well know that we’re facing a time and crowd that’s more and more demanding a tribute to MTV and market tailored top 40 productions as a DJ’s playlist. And most of the Clubs and DJ’s follow that route. But then where’s the Soul? Let the radio stations and the music channels on tv do their job for money, and I’ll do mine from the heart. And from the Soul.
My bass lines talk in funk, the chords and rhodes speak jazz, the vocals sing soul and the percussions say salsa. Maybe they’ll chat a little bit with merengue on the way to the flamenco guitar, but most likely they will never put their word out on MTV.