In the mid-’70s, Chicago was still America’s second largest city. Yet after the financial collapse of a number of independent soul labels a few years earlier, its recording industry was virtually non-existent, and its club scene was heavily segregated. Into this vacuum stepped Robert Williams, a promoter whose parties brought together straight and gay youths of all races. His club, The Warehouse, closed before the first Chicago dance tracks were recorded by artists like Jamie Principle, Jesse Saunders, J.M. Silk, Farley “Jackmaster” Funk, and Chip E., but it set the stage for house music, popularizing after-hours clubbing and DJ edits in Chicago and launching the career of Frankie Knuckles.

Williams grew up in Jamaica, Queens, NY, then moved to Harlem where he studied law at Columbia University. In the early ’70s, he began dancing at Manhattan clubs like The Sanctuary, Better Days, and The Gallery, but it was David Mancuso’s parties that made the biggest impression. “I liked the intensity of it,” Williams explains. “He gave parties in his loft, private parties—membership only…. People were taking drugs. They were on LSD, most of the time, but it was wild. It made it super intense. And the music was great.”

As a juvenile officer at Spofford Juvenile Center in the Bronx, Williams met future DJs Larry Levan and Frankie Knuckles after they were caught skipping school. Williams encountered them again at East Village clubs like The Dome. Admits Williams with a smile, “They were much better dancers than I was.”

Williams moved from New York to Chicago around 1972 to escape the rat race, but he found Chicago’s nightlife underwhelming. After a few apartment parties with his fraternity brothers at Phi Beta Sigma, Williams and a half dozen friends founded US Studio, a venture inspired by Mancuso’s loft parties. In 1973, they opened Chicago’s first after-hours juice bar in a commercial space at 116 South Clinton Avenue.

At a time when most Chicago bars closed at 3 AM, US Studio was able to stay open all night as a liquor-free establishment. “We charged two dollars,” Williams recalls. “[And] we had five hundred people. It was so crowded that the police came to raid our party… but they had a difficult time getting in.” After just a couple of weeks, the building burned down between parties. “We lost a little equipment,” Williams explains, “but we bounced back.”

US Studio subsequently found space at 1400 South Michigan Avenue, across the street from a fire house. Unsurprisingly, inspectors shut the space down after just a few months. Next, an industrial realtor rented the group 10,000 square feet of loft space on the seventh floor of 555 West Adams Street. DJ Craig Cannon remembers, “We’d get in this elevator… confined, but the closer that you get to the floor where the party is, the louder the music gets, so it builds anticipation. By the time the elevator’s door opens, you’re practically running out of there.”

By this time Williams had been voted president of the group. Chicagoans Bennie Winfield and Michael Matthews were the DJs, but Williams made regular drives to New York to get music from Mancuso and Levan. He brought back exclusive soul and disco 12-inches by artists like First Choice, B.T. Express and LaBelle.

After two years on Adams Street, a dispute over membership fees resulted in most of the group leaving Williams to form “The Bowery.” As luck would have it, this splintering of US Studio resulted in the launch of The Warehouse at 206 South Jefferson Street. According to Williams, Adams Street “was a little large for us to maintain,” but The Warehouse, which could be glimpsed out the old club’s rear windows, was just right. A lease was signed in June 1976, and a couple of months later the space opened for parties, though initially they were just twice a month.

Meanwhile, disco music’s popularity began to skyrocket. Remembers DJ Michael Ezebukwu, “Back then Chicago was full of clubs. It was Den One, it was the Ritz, there was Le Pub, Broadway Limited… that’s just a short list.” Ron Hardy attracted a black crowd to Den One some nights, but for the most part it was a white club featuring the talents of Artie Feldman and Peter Lewicki.

There was also Dugan’s Bistro, Chicago’s largest gay disco, which opened in 1973. Its DJ, Lou DiVito, won two consecutive Billboard awards for best regional disc jockey, but the club was notorious for turning away African Americans. “They would ask us not only for the regular ID, but passports as well,” Craig Cannon explains. In response, the club was picketed and leafleted by a group calling itself the Committee of Black Gay Men.

By this time there were other black-owned after-hours lofts, including Lonnie Fulton’s Social Sounds and Michael Fields’ Castle in the Sky, and it became evident that The Warehouse would need a new disc jockey to stay competitive in Chicago’s growing club scene. Williams first asked Larry Levan, but he didn’t want to leave New York. He then approached Frankie Knuckles, who had taken over for Levan at New York’s Continental Baths before it went bankrupt. Knuckles agreed to come out for a “grand opening” in March 1977.

Williams enlisted Richard Long and Associates, also from New York, to install a custom sound and light system, but initial parties with Knuckles were a bust. Says Williams, “The music was fantastic, the sound, but… I guess there was controversy, propaganda, against Frankie. [People said,] ‘I don’t really want to hear that New York stuff.’” Knuckles returned to New York for a time, only visiting Chicago periodically for special parties.

It wasn’t until Knuckles spun at a few of The Bowery’s events that he developed a following. Williams explains, “[It was only] then they started coming to the Warehouse. So then Frankie decided he liked it, so he said he’d relocate for me.” According to Knuckles, this was in July 1977, almost a year after Williams had started holding parties in the space.

While there was no sign on the building, and the official name was “US Studio,” dancers started calling the club “The Warehouse” early on, and Williams adopted the name. Like its predecessors, the Warehouse was a nineteen-and-over, members-only juice bar. Knuckles usually kept the party jumping until eight in the morning.

“That place was three levels,” Cannon remembers. “You walked up the stairs and paid, and then you walked down the stairs to the party, and then there was a basement below that.” With no air conditioning, The Warehouse relied on fans and open windows in the summer. Cannon recalls the breeze made for a beautiful effect, especially when the open-beam ceiling was draped with crepe paper: “When you turned the mirror ball, you turned the fan on, and it was decorated, everything seemed like it was moving.”

Asked if there was acid in the punch, Cannon exclaims, “Oh, definitely. Everything was spiked. It was just crazy.” Williams recalls that they “had marathons which lasted a couple of days. Like twenty-four hours. Kids would go home, change clothes, come back.”

For its first couple of years, The Warehouse was one of Chicago’s wildest discos, but it wasn’t until 1979 or so that it began to embody a distinctive scene. Around this time, a black middle class “preppie” culture was developing in South Side private schools, including the Catholic high school Mendel. Teens who listened to Devo and The B-52s on Herb Kent’s Punk Out radio show began forming their own party promotion groups which rented spaces and distributed flyers, or “pluggers.” One such group was future producer Vince Lawrence’s Infinity Space Eclipse, which began throwing parties with an IZOD dress code.

Knuckles began to spin at North Side clubs to supplement his Saturdays at the Warehouse, starting with Carol’s Speakeasy (in Den One’s old building). In October 1980, Dave “Medusa” Shelton, a young clubber with curly blond hair (whose first party as a promoter had been held at The Warehouse the year before), opened his own juice bar, 161 West. Knuckles DJed there Friday nights. A Gay Life print ad from October 1980 describes dancers “jacking their bodies all night,” over two years before the first house record.

As electronic music gained a foothold, Knuckles began to mix New Wave records with his usual soul and disco cuts. Knuckles’s top ten list for April 9, 1981 (published by Brett Wilcots in Gay Chicago) includes such unlikely records as “Jezebel Spirit” by Brian Eno & David Byrne and “Walking on Thin Ice” by Yoko Ono alongside more predictable choices by People’s Choice, Billy Ocean and Grace Jones.

While Chicago’s more adventurous “progressive” fans were buying records at Wax Trax!, which also sold leather and studs, Knuckles and many other DJs shopped at Importes Etc., which started life as a counter in a used car dealership run by owner Paul Weisberg’s father. The store began a symbiotic relationship with Knuckles, labeling records “heard at the Warehouse”—which was soon shortened to “house.” In a 1987 obituary, DJ and Gay Chicago columnist Tom Parks credited Importes’ Dick Guenther with coining the term as a “promotional gimmick.”

Alongside imports, Knuckles began playing fresh edits of disco tunes that were already a few years old. Knuckles explains via email, “My close, dear friend Erasmo Rivera was in school for sound engineering. One of his classes was on editing, and he was cutting up everything. I began giving him records to re-edit.”

Williams says those edits drove the crowd wild: “You’d be like, I [have] that album at home, and it doesn’t sound like that. What the hell is going on?” For example, Knuckles’ edit of Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes’ “Baby, You Got My Nose Open,” starts at the break, then loops the passage, “All you men, all you men” before concluding with “…out there.” Another signature track was The Dells’ “Get on Down.” Knuckles would repeatedly tease two bars of crowd noise and the spoken word, “All right, let’s get it on!” before launching into the rest of the break.

Around this time, Knuckles was in high demand. In 1981 and 1982, he DJed for parties at Sauer’s, Pyramid, Annex 2, The Smart Bar and Metro. As Knuckles expanded his audience, The Warehouse benefited from the diversity. Cannon enthuses, “My fondest memory is the mixed crowd. Racially, ethnically, sexually. That was the best thing. I hit on all the straight guys, unbeknownst to me.” Knuckles confirms, “It was hip to act gay and hang out at gay clubs, but not actually be gay. You figure that one out!”

By all accounts, the Warehouse’s final year was also its wildest. The club was consistently packed with teenagers, many of whom were underage. Williams remembers parents coming to look for their children. According to Knuckles, older members were driven out. The club was overcrowded, and there were even several stick-ups inside. Knuckles sensed things spinning out of control, admitting that “the club was no longer safe.”

In November 1982, Knuckles left The Warehouse to open his own club, The Power Plant. “I felt I had reached a point where I couldn’t go any further with the Warehouse,” Knuckles explains. With The Warehouse gone, other after-hours clubs rose to take its place, including The Playground, First Impressions, and Shelton’s Medusa’s. Williams himself opened the Muzic Box [sic] several months later, where DJ Ron Hardy rose to local stardom. These new clubs (and the sudden availability of inexpensive synthesizers and drum machines) set the stage for local producers. In early 1984, electronic dance music by Chicago teenagers began to hit stores and the airwaves.

Three short years later, despite spawning several UK chart toppers, Chicago’s house scene became a victim of its own success. Many of its best-known producers signed to major labels, where they were quickly cast aside in favor of hip-hop. Meanwhile, Medusa’s latest dance club, which alternated house and industrial nights, came under attack by local residents concerned about teenage delinquency. In January 1987, a city ordinance passed requiring juice bars to follow liquor bar hours. It went into effect that April. Williams took his parties back underground, but Chicago’s club scene would never be the same.

Published / Wednesday, 16 May 2012

The critics are right: disco is dehumanising – all those twitching limbs, glazed-eyed, mindless. The disco aesthetic excludes feeling, it offers a glimpse of a harsh sci-fi future. ‘What’s your name, what’s your number?’ sings Andrea True in my current favourite single, and it’s not his telephone number she wants, but his position in the disco order of things. The problem of pogoing, I’ve found, is not that it’s too energetic for anyone over 30 years and 11 stone, but that it requires too much thought.

Popular music has always been dance music; disco is nothing but dance music. It has no rock’n’roll connotations; off the dance floor it is utterly meaningless, lyrically, musically and aesthetically. Every disco sound is subordinate to its physical function; disco progress is technological progress. The end doesn’t change but the means to that end, the ultimate beat, are refined and improved – hence drum machines, synthesisers, 12″ pressings. And disco is dance music in the abstract, content determined by form. Popular dance music of the past, in the 1930s say, was a form determined by its content.

The content was developed by dance hall instructors and sheet music salesmen and band leaders whose rules of partnership, decorum, uplift and grace, can still be followed in ‘Come Dancing’: the music is strictly subordinate to the conventions of flounce and simper. In contrast, when Boney M, German manufactured black American androgynes, sing for our dancing pleasure, ‘Belfast’, it means nothing at all. Any two syllables arranged and sounding just so would do and how we dance to them is, of course, entirely our own affair. There are no rules in disco, it’s just that individual expression means nothing when there’s nothing individual to express. I trace disco back to the twist, the first dance gimmick to be taken seriously and the first dance step to be without any redeeming social feature. I blame disco on Motown, the first company to realise that if the beat is right, soul power can be expressed without either the passion or emotion that made it soul power in the first place.

Disco is nothing like muzak. Muzak’s effect is subliminal; its purpose is to encourage its hearers to do anything but listen to it. Disco’s effect is material; its purpose is to encourage its hearers to do nothing but listen to it. Not even think.

Disco music is only disco music in discos. These days there are CP discos, women’s discos, anti-fascist discos, students’ discos, youth club discos, cricketers’ discos, punk discos and reggae discos. The disco form can be used by anyone who’s got a record player, records and a large enough room. But a proper disco exists only to be a disco and the records it plays exist only to be played by it. The Musicians’ Union hates discos because they put live musicians out of work.

I hate discos because they seem like such a soft way of making money: a DJ doesn’t do anything except buy records and put the needle on them – I can do that too. The whole enterprise is parasitic: if there is such a thing as disco creativity it happened in secret studio places long before. The best discos are the best just to the extent to which nothing unexpected happens – feet never falter, taste is never threatened, offence is never taken because never given. If you want a surprise don’t go to the disco.

Clubs with records as their only means of entertainment came to Britain from the continent in the early ‘60s. Before then DJs and records had been used in ballrooms (cf the pioneering career of Jimmy Savile) but not as alternatives to live music and, initially, discos simply served two sorts of incrowd: rock aristocrats seeking social exclusion and soul freaks seeking musical exclusion (as they still do in the Northern Soul clubs). The main British disco development occurred in the late ‘60s/early ‘70s as live rock became increasingly undanceable, expensive and in the wrong places (colleges and concert halls). British disco went teenage pop and, in a commercial sense, it mostly still is.

The style of consumption involved is working class provincial. Bouncers, louts, uneasy sexual posturing; dance hall culture really, but cooler and smarter than in the ‘50s, and with flashing lights and much better music. Women do most of the dancing, men most of the drinking, and none of them take disco as seriously as, perhaps, they ought. Because meanwhile in America discos are the setting for adult chic consumption, part of the culture of singles rather than of teenage courtship, anonymously safe places for elaborate displays of apathy. Can’t imagine drunks in Manhattan’s spruce discos, bumping buttocks with Susan Sontag and Lennie Bernstein.

The European connection is that discos in Paris are more like they are in New York than they are like they are in Nottingham. And French and Italian teenagers are, anyway, chic-er than Britons of any age. But the most wonderful Euro-discos of all are the ones in the holiday belts – Costa Brava, Riviera, Costa del Sol. Cellars which are open permanently in the summer months and in which earnest Northerners – Dutch, British, Swedes, Germans, develop their own singles culture, their own disco style. I can only explain it by noting that they dance to Donna Summer in their sandals. Ah disco! Ah Baccara!

As a rock writer, I’ve always been a frustrated DJ rather than musician. ‘Hey you,’ I’ve wanted to shout, ‘Listen to this!’ The model was John Peel, music lover and eclectic. I certainly didn’t fancy the provincial disco DJs I knew – big, hearty philistines who knew nothing about the records they played but enjoyed the patter and had dreams, like Albert Finney in ‘Gumshoe’, of moving from master of ceremonies to master of a comic routine. But this was a doomed approach anyway, survival from dance hall days. Real disco DJs aren’t entertainers at all, have nothing to with music. They’re technologists, men (very few women) of the future: their job is to play the audience. It’s a job I want again. By 1984 it’ll probably be called ‘consumption-coordinator’.

Discos are where people dance and dancing can be anything from the shuffle to a pre-rehearsed and elaborate routine to a straight display of cartwheels. What disco dancing isn’t is a) musical interpretation and b) self-expression. The opposite of disco dancing is what Legs and Co. do on ‘Top of the Pops’ – ie choreographed responses to the ‘meaning’ of a song.

What they do is so embarrassing that I usually turn the picture off, but I turn it back again for the rest of the show because, at an admittedly low level, it does reveal the difference between the Anglo-Collective disco style – all those dumpy little boys and girls looking nervously at each other – and the American-Individual style (on the clips from ‘Soul Train’) – all those intense boys and girls looking determinedly at their own feet. Most disco dancing has little to do with elegance, grace or agility, which is OK by me because if it did I wouldn’t do it.

Rock music, dance music, has always been a form of sexual expression – girl meets boy physically. The social problem has then been the control of this expression – hence the moral about rock ‘n’ roll, Elvis’s hips etc. Disco’s greatest achievement has been to develop a form in which sexuality is expressed and controlled simultaneously. Critics have missed the point of the standard formula – machinery plus orgasmic sighs.

The problem is not that the sighs are fake, but that it wouldn’t make any difference if they were real! Disco isn’t a frustrating music – preventing the climax from occurring – but a music of control – preventing the climax from being disruptive. It’s a noisy form of some Eastern mystical discipline and the only puzzle to me is why disco is so important an aspect of gay culture. I’m not gay, so I can’t say, except that it seems as if disco stylisation allows gays public displays that are sexual without apparently being offensive to the usual custodians of public morality.

The only thing to say about disco music as music is that it has given extraordinary opportunities to pop’s previously second class citizens – its session singers, engineers, Bee Gees. The technicians, in other words, who always could produce any sound to order but used not to know what to do with them. They know now.

Previous popular music has only reflected the world, in various ways; the point of disco, however is to replace it. •

© Simon Frith, 1978

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Jerome Derradji is proud to present his latest full length, 122 BPM – The Birth of House Music to be released in June on Still Music. .

122 BPM is  the story of how a father and his son changed Chicago’s Dance music scene in the 1980s and went on to take the world by storm, leaving an impression that will last forever with just a couple of 12” releases the world would soon know as House music. Nemiah Mitchell Jr and Vince Lawrence couldn’t have known what their contribution to House music would become. Their story provides the missing Chicago link between soul, disco, new wave and then House, between the radio and club DJs and their audience, between the old generation and the new generation. This is the story of the first House records ever made – long before Trax or DJ International were even dreamt of.

The compilation includes numerous unreleased tracks and beyond hard to find house tracks made in Chicago in the early to late Eighties from the catalogues of Mitchbal Records and Chicago Connection Records.

It will be released in June 2012 and includes a 3 cd set – including a 1 hour exclusive mix from Jerome Derradji – with a 28 pages booklet documenting the story of Mitchbal and Chicago Connection Records, a gatefold DLP and an exclusive D12″ featuring the uber rare Frankie Knuckles’ Unfinished Business – Out Of My Hands remixes along with the original classic disco release by Chicago disco band OMNI .

Once again, thanks to all of you for your outstanding support.
Jerome – Still Music Chicago

CLICK HERE FOR A SAMPLE VIA SOUNDCLOUD

Jerome Derradji Presents: “122 BPM – The Birth Of House Music -  Mitchbal Records  & Chicago Connection Records- CAT# Stillm3cd006, Stillmdlp006 and Stillmd12034

Tracklisting 3cd Boxset


Cd1 Jerome Derradji ChicaFlange House Mix

1 – Mr Lee & Kompany – Jackmaster Jerome Derradji Edit
2 – Mitchbal & Larry Williams – Do That Stuff Dance Mix
3 – Mitchbal & The Housemaster – When I Hear The Music
4 – Risque Rythum Team – The Jackin Zone
5 – Jeanette Thomas – Shake Your Body
6 – Libra Libra – I Am Music (Instrumental)
7 - Unfinished Business – Out Of My Hands (Club Mix)
8 – Dezz & Grant – The House Is On Fire
9 – Mr Lee & Kompany – Can You Feel It
10 – Z-Factor – Fantasy (feat. Jesse Saunders) Instrumental - Jerome Derradji Edit



CD2


1 – Jeanette Thomas – Shake Your Body 
2 – Mitchbal & The Housemaster – When I Hear The Music
3 – Unfinished Business – Out Of My Hands (Club Mix)
4 – Dezz & Grant – The House Is On Fire
5 – Mitchbal & Larry Williams – Do That Stuff Dance Mix
6 – Libra Libra – I Am Music Instrumental
7 – Mr Lee & Kompany – Jackmaster Vocal Mix
8 – Z-Factor – Fantasy (feat. Jesse Saunders) Instrumental
9 – Risque Rythum Team – The Jackin Zone
10 - Mr Lee & Kompany – Can You Feel It



CD3


1 - Z-Factor – I Am the DJ (feat. Jesse Saunders)
2 - Libra Libra - I Like It (Club Mix)
3 – Risque´ Rhythm Team – More Than Just A Dance (Backyard Mix)
4 –  Libra Libra – Where Did My Love Go Vocal
5 - Z-Factor  - (I Like To Do It In) Fast Cars
6 - Mr Lee – I Can’t Forget (Vocal Mix)
7 - Z-Factor – I Synthesize
8 - Z-Factor – My Ride
9 - Risque Rhythum Team – That’s The Beat
10 - Libra Libra – I Am Music (Ninja Mix)
11 - Mc Ghee – I Got Broke Breakdancing Instrumental
12 - Mitchbal & Friends – Love Is The Answer  Farley “The King Of House Music” Jackmaster Funk Remix (Bonus)

Tracklisting DLP
Lp

1 

A1 – Jeanette Thomas – Shake Your Body

A2 – Z Factor – I Am the DJ (feat. Jesse Saunders) Jazzy Mix

B1 – Mitchbal & Larry Williams – Do Dat Stuff Dance Mix

B2 – Libra Libra - I Like It (Club Mix)
Lp 2 

C1 – Z-Factor – Fantasy Instrumental

C2 – Risque Rythum Team – The Jackin Zone

D1 – Z-Factor – (I Like To Do It In) Fast Cars

D2 – Mc Ghee – I Got Broke Breakdancing Instrumental

Tracklisting D12″

A1 – Unfinished Business – Out Of My Hands (Love’s Taken Over) Vocal Mix
A2 – Unfinished Business – Out Of My Hands (Love’s Taken Over) Instrumental Mix
B1 – Omni – Out Of My Hands (Love’s Taken Over) Long Version
B2 – Omni – Out Of My Hands (Love’s Taken Over) Short Version

Chances are, if you know anything about Vancouver, your thoughts will immediately drift to mountains, nature, skiing and seafood. All valid associations. But did you know that Vancouver has a vibrant electronic music scene? Well, now you do.

It hasn’t always been this way. Derisively dubbed the “no fun city,” Vancouver’s restrictive liquor licensing laws, venue regulations, inexorably high real estate prices and other legal quibbles have long stunted its musical growth. Thankfully, the city has started to ease its iron grip on nightlife in response to its negative reputation, and downtown’s Entertainment District—centered around Granville Street—has become a bustling hub for nighttime entertainment, with a rapidly changing landscape due equally to Vancouver’s high rents and fickle crowds.

Unfortunately, you’re not going to find much culture or music on Granville Street. Popular nightclubs like Caprice, The Roxy and Au Bar play a mixture of top 40, hip-hop, mainstream-leaning house, electro and, increasingly, dubstep, catering to a “bridge-and-tunnel” crowd who are looking for little more with their night than to get wasted. The gay scene in the Davie Village isn’t so different: clubs stick mostly to tried-and-tested local DJs who play the usual melange of top 40 and trance. There’s little adventure or even musical variety to be had in a traditional “nightclub” in Vancouver.

Part of that is by design: much like a similar hotspot of musical creativity, Glasgow, Vancouver bylaws force most venues to close at 2 AM. Some clubs get a privileged 3 AM license, and special events can go till 4, but the alcohol is likely to stop flowing around 2:30 either way. This doesn’t lend itself well to anything but fumbling for instant gratification in terms of both music and consumption. Thankfully, Vancouver has no shortage of passionate people working to provide music fans with good spaces and music. The city’s sizable warehouse rave scene of the ’90s has bled into the current decade, downsized and compacted to something more manageable.

So what does Vancouver’s underground sound like? Like a lot of the West Coast, Vancouver has been enamored with dubstep and its “bass music” offspring for longer than most. The city’s LiGHTA! crew has been one of the most visible in the process, while Kuma‘s Konspiracy Group brought Kode9 to Vancouver all the way back in 2005. Famous for its old Dubforms parties, LiGHTA! had the UK’s biggest bass music DJs come through the city for well-attended gigs at spaces both legal and illegal: one night you’d find Distance playing in the back of a shoddy looking art gallery, and another you could find Appleblim playing the beloved Open Studios. Drum & bass has had a foothold on a certain sector of the city’s music fans since the late ’90s, while hip-hop remains the sort of universal bread-and-butter, soundtracking the tiny side rooms and afterparties of Vancouver.

Of course, when suggesting your associations with Vancouver, your answer might have been Mathew Jonson or his Wagon Repair label. In the late ’90s, Vancouver had a bustling and well-supported techno scene anchored by artists like the Jonson brothers that unfortunately dwindled away in the next decade as DJs began what seemed like a mass exodus to Europe. A few years ago, at the height of dubstep’s grip on the underground, you’d be hard-pressed to find any techno or house events less than a few months apart. But thanks to hard work from names new and old, Vancouver is experiencing a 4/4 boom that nicely coincides with bass music’s exploding mainstream popularity. “The city’s gone from having one or two interesting house/techno nights every few months to sometimes having three or four in one night,” says local DJ Scott Woodworth, whose various parties have booked Mike Huckaby and Levon Vincent among others.

Woodworth and his partner Cedric Meister aren’t the only ones either: the Midnight City franchise has brought Metro Area and MK, while Leisure’s Derek Duncan has booked Basic Soul Unit and a number of smaller-scale house-focused parties throughout the city. One recent night in Vancouver saw Omar-S, Basic Soul Unit and Peter Van Hoesen all playing at different events—something that was unthinkable even two years ago. The other thing that defines Vancouver these days is cross-pollination. There are more house shows because there are more people willing to dance to house than ever before. “The divide between scenes and music genres is becoming less apparent, and people are starting to appreciate similar things and beginning to work together,” says Woodworth. There’s also a growing contingent of polymath dance music fans perhaps no better manifested than in Vancouver fixture Prison Garde, whose sets are a nimble blur of hip-hop, bass music, R&B and house. His short-lived Yours Truly monthly paired acts like Todd Edwards and XI.

This surge in activity still needs places to happen, and Vancouver’s underground scene is in a bit of a transition stage as the popularity of the music begins to outgrow small-capacity venues. Either way, Vancouver is home to many well-loved spaces that provide an experience you just can’t get in a Granville Street club. “A lot of what one would expect to see in a club in London or Berlin happens more in alternative spaces in Vancouver,” says Malcolm Levy, who works for the nonprofit arts group New Forms out of Open Studios.

Open has been a crown jewel in Vancouver’s underground music scene over the past ten years, an art gallery space located in an industrial area of Vancouver’s east side just on the outskirts of downtown. It doesn’t look like much from the outside, and it doesn’t look like much on the inside either: a sparse room painted completely black, you’d be forgiven for mistaking the intimate 250-capacity venue for an abandoned theatre. But when it comes to life, it’s a force to be reckoned with: Open boasts one of Vancouver’s strongest sound systems, and a lighting rig deserving of any ritzy club you could think of (it doesn’t hurt that the club is run by VJ Ben Reeder and hosts the office of one of Vancouver’s most prominent installation artists).

Open Studios has long been the spiritual home of Vancouver’s dubstep-and-beyond scene and one of its central venues. “My favourite thing about Open Studios is the music that’s played here. The freedom. You see all sorts of people. The autonomy is amazing, and people come from all over to go to the studio. The list of people who have played here is a real who’s who of electronic music in Vancouver and beyond. People like Konrad Black and Mathew Jonson have been part of the studio in the past,” says Levy. Another part of Open’s appeal is that shows there go far later into the night (or morning) than nightclubs—and for the most part, it’s all legal.

“Open Studios has a long-standing relationship with the city. They’ve known about the studio since its inception, and since then it’s been about working within the limits of what the city can do. It’s an ongoing dialogue but the city has been really supportive considering there’s nothing in the regulations that allows us to do this kind of stuff, until just now,” Levy explains. “We have no neighbours—the reason we can go till 4 is because they let us. They know what goes on and they allow it, because they have to allow it somewhere. We’re able to function as an alternative space because the city recognizes there are no mainstream spaces that can satisfy what people want from Open Studios in regards to a night out, to music, and overall aesthetic. They need spaces like this.”

The city’s treatment of Open Studios is a unique situation, and noise complaints aren’t the only issue: a recent and now infamous case of Vancouver’s convoluted licensing laws involved the independent Rio theatre, which acquired a liquor license that due to technicalities actually forbade it from showing movies during evening hours, even when alcohol was not being served. A legal battle—still ongoing after several months at the time of this writing—is indicative of the kind of frustrating bureaucratic situation the city leaves many in the entertainment industry to deal with.

Any discussion of Vancouver’s underground has to include more than just Open, however. The Astoria Hotel in the heart of Vancouver’s notorious poverty-struck Downtown Eastside neighbourhood is a pure dive inside and out, but catnip to keen promoters like Max Ulis. “It’s completely affordable for anyone to go in there and do whatever they want. They have a decent sound system, they pack it full of people, and it’s not pretentious at all. It’s cheap in every way.” With everything from indie rock bands to the long-running Ting! Thursday dancehall night, the Astoria occupies a special place in many a Vancouver ravers’ heart, an intimate, unpretentious spot with cheap cover and even cheaper drinks.

Vancouver proper is a small and dense metropolis, and some of its best new venues have been created out of old places. The W2 has arguably defined Vancouver’s underground since it opened late last decade out of the remnants of the failed Storyeum Museum. The W2 Storyeum was a cavernous four-room warehouse space with enviably high ceilings and a massive 2000-person capacity. Home to 2010′s instalment of the New Forms Festival and all sorts of dubstep, techno and arts-oriented events, the community co-operative and arts-promoting nature of the W2 organization meant it too had a special relationship with the city. The W2 as we knew it ended in April 2011, marked by a massive closing party that over 2,000 people attended. But it reincarnated about a block away a few months later as W2 Media Cafe in the basement of the rejuvenated Woodwards Complex, operating the same pro-arts agenda only with a full service cafe attached and an intimate basement room similar to Open Studios.

And then there’s the Waldorf. Located deep in east Vancouver—named “Vancouver’s Cultural Oasis in the Middle of Nowhere” by national paper The Globe and Mail—it was, just a few years ago, a frighteningly shabby hotel known for its tacky Tiki-themed bar. But in 2010 the Waldorf underwent a comprehensive renovation, and has since become one of east Vancouver’s cultural hotspots. There’s a few reasons why. For one, its location is covered by several major bus routes, meaning it’s a locus for Vancouver’s famously counterculture east side: crowds at the Waldorf are about as diverse as you’re going to find in the city. The venue’s four rooms mean there’s bound to be something for everyone on any given night, whether your thing is jacking house in the sweaty basement Hideaway or classic rock 45s in the Tiki Bar.

The Waldorf’s variety and unique location render it attractive to that same pool of promoters who might put on shows at Open Studios or those defunct underground venues, Ulis included. He’s a vocal fan: “It’s comfortable. It’s got warm colours, it’s got wood, it has an undeniable vibe. It reminds me of the Hawaiian grandparents’ basement that I never had. It’s so kitschy, and the sound is unbelievable.” Having adventurous programming never hurts either, and Ulis credits manager Kasha Marciniak as “a patron of the arts,” willing to take risks with adventurous bookings that most other venues in the city wouldn’t touch.

he Waldorf is a place where the underground rubs shoulders with the overground, and as such, it’s become a popular spot for shows by “bigger” promoters like Vancouver monolith Blueprint and independent agent Andishae Akhavan, who formerly worked as a talent buyer for megaclub 560. Akhavan doesn’t book the kind of big-room, balls-out electro, dubstep or trance acts you might expect from that sort of resume. Since starting work at 560, Akhavan has worked to get lesser-known acts over to Vancouver: “We knew who we were booking were big in other, more relevant cities. It was a calculated risk: whether people showed up or not, it would be a positive thing to just bring these people to Vancouver.”

A risk indeed: after hosting shows from artists like Pearson Sound and Salva, 560 changed management, leaving Akhavan a free agent. One of his most prominent venues these days is Fortune Sound Club, tucked away in the middle of Chinatown on the outskirts of downtown. The venue is known for its Funktion One soundsystem and is home to some of the most adventurous nightclub programming in the city, in part thanks to Akhavan. “That place is packed every Friday regardless of what’s happening: it’s about finding the right match with that. Fortune is the only club in town that was built to be a club; it’s based around the soundsystem, and was built to be welcoming. There’s no douchebags, and if douchebags go to Fortune, they get converted—or they’ll never come back, because they realize they’re not welcome there.”

Akhavan is positive about the role bigger spaces can play in Vancouver’s music scene, and he’s already felt the impact: “The first time we booked Brenmar was at 560, and now he plays Fortune on Friday nights and he’s a household name in Vancouver. It happened once, and it can happen more.” Another key player in the city’s above-ground landscape is Blueprint Events, which puts on shows at Granville Street venues among others. Blueprint books everything from Steve Aoki to Armin Van Buuren to Benga, and makes no bones about its slightly more “mainstream” pedigree: “There’s a business element to what we do and I’m not gonna lie about that,” says Matt Owchar, their Marketing Director. “If we book mainstream acts, we book mainstream acts. Someone’s gotta do it, and the demand obviously exists for it. We book house, electro, dubstep, drum & bass, techno—the bookings we do encompass everything.”

Blueprint also has the advantages of avoiding problems with the authorities and having bar, soundsystem and other factors taken out of their hands. But these venues also come with expectations and stigma. “There’s no question that if you want to throw a certain event on Granville Street, you can expect that a number of people in this city are actively going to avoid going there. We work within those mainstream venues, but we also do parties at the Waldorf and other spaces. Blueprint actually started in the underground warehouse scene.”

One venue that Blueprint has taken an increasing interest in is Celebrities, the city’s busiest gay club on the Davie Street strip. Gay clubs in Vancouver typically don’t see a whole lot of crossover with either the Granville Street or underground music scenes, but Blueprint has established a coveted weekly on Celebrities’ Friday nights, where they’ve brought DJs like Brodinski to a sold-out club with a remarkably diverse audience. “It’s a club that has a lot of history in this city, and it’s a gay club. Gay clubs exist in the crossroads of a lot of different scenes, and Celebrities exists as the happy medium in this city. A lot of people disagree,” Owchar admits.

One thing Celebrities has going for it is sound: the club is well-equipped, and Ulis credits it with having the most potentially powerful sound system in the city. But it has a long way to go to get past associations that might seem unsavoury. As it turns out, the musical underground in Vancouver isn’t an audience that likes to mix and mingle with the overground, according to Owchar: “I understand and empathize with people, and I realize I work for the biggest company in Vancouver which owns the majority of the venues, but I wish there was a little bit more awareness. I’m not asking for people to be open to it, but lazily blaming what’s popular among the youth… that attitude needs to step to the side a little bit. But that’s probably asking too much.”

The other thing “legitimate” venues have to deal with is Vancouver’s early last call. “I think early closing times have been a problem in the past,” Owchar says, “but a couple of a years ago, it used to be a hard everything’s-done-at-2-or-3 thing. But I find now there’s an active afterparty scene. Most of the venues are illegitimate, but it’s something that didn’t exist a few years ago, and it’s very healthy.”

Vancouver has a few legal afterhours venues—Gorg-o-mish, The World—but cover is usually around $30 and there’s certainly no alcohol being served. The entrepreneurial spirit strikes, and venues like Glen are born. Located in industrial east Vancouver in an old warehouse, Glen has become an afterhours hotspot, attracting a variety of promoters, including Andishae Akhavan. “People don’t even care who’s playing all the time, they just wanna keep partying. But headliners have been there—Brenmar and Kingdom have played there twice, Dubbel Dutch, Venus X, Dillon Francis. If you’re looking for afterhours parties, you’ll find them.”

Published / Wednesday, 28 March 2012

The day has finally arrived….After six years in the city of Toronto and continuing our long tradition of distributing mix series to the general public for free….The official BANG THE PARTY! CD will be made available in April for the meager cost of $10….ANDYCAPP has put together a compilation of 35 Tracks across 2 CDs in a lovely cardboard cut out packaging designed by graffiti artist and close friend DARCY OBOKATA …..This project was a laborious two year undertaking compiling and mixing tracks that have never before been available on previous BANG THE PARTY! compilations or on any other compilations made commercially available before with the exception of maybe two or three that are either no longer available or have limited distribution…..covering a wide range of rare disco and post punk, spiritual jazz, leftfield house, caribbean soul, west end broken beat, white boy soul, and weirdo nuggets from the past 30 years or so…..

However the mystery will continue until we find the right spot for CD release party in the near future….meanwhile the CD’s are still being mastered for the best sound quality and play….To keep you guessing as to what will be on this fine compilation we will be posting selected tracks from the mix every other day or so to keep you salivating… Until then, enjoy this first taste…..and watch out for furthur posts…..