{"id":149025,"date":"2012-03-09T20:13:02","date_gmt":"2012-03-09T20:13:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/socancom100stg.wpenginepowered.com\/electronic-dance-music-breaks-through\/"},"modified":"2012-03-09T20:13:02","modified_gmt":"2012-03-09T20:13:02","slug":"electronic-dance-music-breaks-through","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/electronic-dance-music-breaks-through\/","title":{"rendered":"Electronic dance music breaks through"},"content":{"rendered":"

Les traductions pour les articles avant l\u2019automne 2013 ne sont pas disponibles pour le moment.<\/strong><\/p>\n

When deadmau5 became the first Canadian ever to headline Toronto\u2019s Rogers Centre last November, he turned the dome from an unwelcoming concrete hangar into the perfect rave venue. It felt like a defining moment: electronic dance music had clearly gained a foothold in Canadian culture. Likely a number of mouse-eared-glowstick-wearing fans went home inspired, eager to try their hands at music production. After all, if a self-taught misfit rave kid from Niagara Falls could achieve so much on the strength of tracks created using readily-available software, why couldn\u2019t they?<\/p>\n

It may be even easier for deadmau5 followers to kick off their careers than, say, the 1970s generation of DIY punks who bought guitars after seeing The Sex Pistols. For one thing, according to Azari & III producer Alphonse \u201cIII\u201d Lanza, some of today\u2019s software has an exceptionally short learning curve. \u201cIf you want to learn to play guitar, you can hack your way through it, but it\u2019s a 10 [or] 15-year process to get your own sound and really vibe. Kids these days would rather learn Ableton [Live]. After two nights you already have some kind of listenable product.\u201d<\/p>\n

And as Ableton and even easier-to-use software (e.g., FL, GarageBand) facilitates the means of production, demand is rising. \u201cDJs need a new record every two minutes,\u201d says Lanza. \u201cAs long as [your effort is] decent, someone will put it out. It\u2019ll be on Beatport. Someone will play it.\u201d<\/p>\n

That said, a track thrown together after two days of practice probably won\u2019t have staying power. Indeed, the 10-15 year process can also apply to electronic music, as Lanza and Christian \u201cAzari\u201d Farley have shown with Azari & III. While the band itself \u2013 which also includes singers Fritz Helder and Cedric Gasaida \u2013 dates back only to 2009, Farley and Lanza have been creating electronic music separately since the mid-\u201890s. The quartet seductively streamlines house, \u201880s-inspired pop, and soul into a sound that\u2019s lush but cool, dark but danceable. \u201cWe\u2019ve been veterans in the scene in our own right,\u201d says Farley. \u201cWe\u2019ve paid our dues, and that helps you create. You have a nice library of sounds in the back of your head from different types of music.\u201d It also helps broaden appeal: with a full release of their self-titled debut album on the way in North America, Azari & III have already achieved European stardom and, at press time, were being considered for an opening slot on Madonna\u2019s upcoming tour.<\/p>\n

Likewise, Edmonton\u2019s Shout Out Out Out Out benefits from Nik Kozub\u2019s lifelong familiarity with synthesizers. They were \u201calways around,\u201d he says, when he was growing up in the \u201880s and his father, Wilfred Kozub, was making electro-pop records with Wilfred N the Grown Men. He grew to love \u201cmanipulating voltage, creating sound with electricity, and having synths with a bunch of knobs on them.\u201d
\nLike Lanza (a guitarist) and Farley (a drummer and percussionist), Kozub grew up playing a more \u201cconventional\u201d instrument, wielding a bass in punk bands and then in the indie rock trio Veal. Shout Out Out Out Out, with its four bassists and many analog keyboards, inventively combines his two musical loves.<\/p>\n

He sings mainly through a vocoder \u2013 an instrument whose lineage includes Wendy Carlos\u2019s 1971 Clockwork Orange soundtrack and Neil Young\u2019s 1982 album Trans \u2013 to mask Kozub\u2019s often personal, introspective lyrics (\u201cI like the idea of someone spending the time to listen closely and figure out what I\u2019m saying\u201d) and help his vocals mesh with the band\u2019s lush analog textures. He\u2019s drawn to \u201cplaying somewhat energetic and fun music with a more serious lyrical base,\u201d and by mining this complexity, the band has progressed beyond the highly-touted live act that was lumped into the mid-2000s \u201cdance punk\u201d scene. Kozub promises that the band\u2019s third album, due this year, will be \u201ca bit slower and a lot more melodic. It reflects my disinterest in just making something slamming. The songs are still energetic; there\u2019s more to them than there was before.\u201d<\/p>\n

Complexity is also key to the music of ill.Gates, a.k.a. Dylan Lane, whose website bills him as a \u201cglitch hop\u201d artist but whose music encompasses varying styles, all of which are underpinned by heavy-duty bass. Over the phone from his San Francisco pad \u2013 the Ottawa native \u00a0divides his time between there and Toronto \u2013 he speaks about constantly questioning the \u201cunderlying assumptions\u201d in his own work. \u201cWhen things start feeling too formulaic or repetitive, it\u2019s hard for people to feel spontaneous when they\u2019re dancing. The element of surprise is so important.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lane\u2019s parents bought him his first synthesizer \u2013 a Radio Shack-model Concertmate 800 \u2013 when he was seven, with a view to his learning to play piano. And yet, it was the four small yellow sampling pads above the keys that fascinated him. As he grew up, he came to feel that the sampler, as a technology, \u201cneeded\u201d him: he wanted to be \u201cinvolved in its infancy, helping to explore and define what that instrument is culturally.\u201d<\/p>\n

By 19, in 2001, he was releasing fairly commercial breakbeat-based productions as The Phat Conductor; in 2007, he adopted the moniker ill.Gates in conjunction with a change in his outlook. Since then, he\u2019s forged a unique career that’s found him playing a record 21 sets in five days at last year\u2019s edition of the renowned Burning Man Festival, filling dancefloors with collaborators from Toronto rapper Masia One to rising-star Kelownian dubstepper Datsik, playing the first-ever concert for the deaf, and even making ringtones in collaboration with his near-namesake\u2019s company, Microsoft.<\/p>\n

As he tours, Lane gives workshops on production and DJ-ing; this spring, he plans to launch an electronic artist-education website at ill-methodology.com. Despite electronic music software\u2019s quick learning curve, it still helps to have someone guide you through its more arcane workings. Kozub, who teaches a music recording course at Edmonton\u2019s McEwan University, has started incorporating electronic music production into his classes in response to a growing demand, and even deadmau5 has taken time out from touring to broadcast studio tips on his Ustream channel.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the key to electronic music\u2019s flourishing \u2013 not just as popular music, but as art \u2013 is the fact that its creators, sequestered as they may be in their home studios, are always collaborating. They swap tips, advise software developers, share bills, and send files back and forth to create tracks. The strong sense of community among producers across Canada and around the world continues to grow as boundaries between styles break down. Deadmau5\u2019s Rogers Centre gig, for instance, featured opening sets by Crystal Castles (whose cult following grows internationally as their abrasive synth-pop becomes more melodic) and electro-house duo MSTRKRFT (who\u2019ve remixed everyone from Kylie Minogue to The Yeah Yeah Yeahs). By working together and drawing on combined expertise, electronic dance artists can push innovation and keep their music fresh.<\/p>\n

It was this very sentiment that spurred on the formation of Azari & III. Lanza compares their early days to \u201cone of those post-apocalyptic movies where you make associates to get by. In a bleak world where nothing\u2019s happening, you\u2019re not too picky. It\u2019s like, \u2018Oh, I found someone else in this barren wasteland \u2013 doesn\u2019t matter, white, black, gay \u2013 I\u2019m just happy to see somebody.\u2019 The musical landscape at the time was all tied to indie rock and harsh electro stuff; very few people had any interest in doing anything other. You just take what you can get. If these people are willing and talented, that should be better than giving into the current sound to fit in.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Azari & III, ill.Gates, Shout Out Out Out Out on the cusp<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[97],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-149025","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-non-categorise"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149025","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=149025"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149025\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=149025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=149025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=149025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}