Skills ~ graphic design, realtime visuals
Interests ~ sound, newmedia
The intent of my website is to preserve the crucial role of the creative presentation of pre-recorded music (what is today called DJing) as a starting point to understand contemporary music and technology related arts. The site was born in 1997, arranging and compiling information based on the culture and sounds that I come from. I was tired about the abuse of terms regarding the so-called dance genres and sub-genres, which numerous people, many of which often involved in the music business, were using in a totally wrong contexts.
Another aspect that inspired this website was the implausible lack of a sound-system culture, especially in my country. History has never known of influential music venues that do not promote the quality of sound-systems. Even if today club culture is dominant, I feel that these misinterpretations are still taking place. Not always an artistic practice depends from the value of its past, but it is essential to consider that also the practice of the past can emerge from a contradictory approach that generates a cultural impact. The commonly accepted condition of someone placing his/her creativity on pre-recorded music presentation is not so new. In the mid 30's, pioneer French musician Pierre Schaeffer, founding father of "musique concrète", experimented with the phonograph and sound libraries as a modern artist could do today with a digital sampler. In Jamaican culture, the DJ is the person who speaks at the microphone over the records played by the "selector". For Hip Hop turntablist culture, DJ is the man who scratches, cuts and re-edits with decks (an approach inherited also from the early disco DJs). For other contexts, like club and radio environments, a DJ is a refined playback engineer that has a story to narrate. More than ever, I feel today that I cannot fully embrace any of these visions. I've conceived an hypothetical timeline for the main menu that contains what I consider decisive, focusing on seminal dance music styles like Jamaican dub and Detroit techno, legendary American venues like the Loft, the Paradise Garage, the Music Box, and touching a bit of early DJ mixing technology with a comprehensive section about the vintage Bozak rotary mixer. I'm also planning new sections for the future. I'm conscious that my work is almost infinitesimal and partial. However, I really hope that the site will be useful to understand more about the modern dance scene.
~ Michele (September 2005)
So that it may live and vibrate, music necessitates of new means of expression, and only science is capable of infusing it with a youthful vigour.
(Edgar Varèse, 1917)
Every record is a microcosm, a world of thirty (or twelve) centimeters. A record bin is a range of possible worlds. Take a record, put it on the turntable and this is what will manifest: the world where you have deciced to live for the next hour.
(Evan Eisenberg, 1997 - The Recording Angel)
The record is contemporary live music, while live music repeats, as dead, that music which was born from the record. So those who want to listen to some live music can listen to a record.
(Manlio Sgalambro, 1998 - The Song Theory)
I can clearly see the time is not far off when the music is just programmed, and the people are passive to it, and they come and listen to it, and they dance, and go away.
(Jeff Mills, 2009 - The Wire)
I think it's a big mistake to call today's music electronic music. People do things with computers and samples but it's not the same approach as the way I work, or how Karlheinz Stockhausen worked in his electronic pieces. There is not the same craft, and it's not progress.
(Pierre Henry, 2009 - The Wire)
John Whitney "Catalog" 1961
