Why dance music will never give up vinyl

This month Bacardi is celebrating the craft and heritage of analogue music culture with Fuego Revolutions, a series of six vinyl-only club events. Revolutions kicks off tomorrow in Melbourne and hits 77 in Sydney on Saturday. Entry is free, you just have to RSVP to be there. 

Back in 2010, Parisian house head Jeremy Underground kicked off his new vinyl-only label My Love Is Underground with a 12″ that doubled as a mission statement.

Titled The Resurrxion, the EP marked the long-overdue return of producer James N. Tinsley under his alias The Nathaniel X Project. Tinsley was an industrious producer on the house music underground in the early 90s, and his comeback EP channels the spirit of that era. “House music is here to stay, and it’s here to stay on vinyl,” intones the A-side track Gotta Get Over 2010. “Everybody calls themselves a DJ, and all they’ve got is the digital MP3s. They should be called MP3-Js. Nothing can replace a good piece of wax…”

“There are many selectors still choosing a backbreaking bag of wax over a tiny USB”

Six years on, those words still ring true for DJs who won’t give up on vinyl. Primarily in the worlds of house, techno and hip-hop, but in other genres too, there are many selectors still choosing a backbreaking bag of wax over a tiny USB.

So, aside from the well-worn argument about superior sound quality, is there really nothing more rewarding than playing records?

If you’re in Richie Hawtin’s corner, it’s a long out-dated format, with digital DJing offering infinitely more creative possibilities. Back in 2010, the same year The Nathaniel X Project was hailing vinyl’s staying power, Hawtin told inthemix he just didn’t get it. “I don’t know what these crazy [vinyl DJs] are doing,” he laughed. “I’m not invited to that party, and frankly I don’t want to go to that party. I love vinyl, but I spent 20 years doing that.”

Hawtin has a lot of close friends on the other side of that argument. One of those guys is Sven Väth, whose allegiance to vinyl is a point of pride.

As the Cocoon don put it to The Sun newspaper: “Every set and track I play needs to come from the heart, and I need to smell and feel my vinyl.” (Also, you can’t exactly wave a USB above your head with a Sven-tastic flourish, can you?) In his blog post on 30 years of DJing, Väth gave his reasons for sticking to records. “I’m not a fan of effects or artificial breaks,” he wrote, giving the alternative view to Hawtin’s: “As a producer, I would not be happy if my song was totally cut up and drowned in effects.”

This is an argument echoed by many vinyl DJs: if you love a track, why not let it breathe? In a post for the Electronic Beats website, Australian DJ Claire Morgan laid out her love for wax, despite its tendency to drain bank accounts, strain muscles and go missing on long haul flights.

“This is an argument echoed by many vinyl DJs: if you love a track, why not let it breathe?”

“When I injured my hand years ago I had to play just digital for six months, and I instantly started DJing like a douchebag,” she wrote. “Cueing up the next track happens in a heartbeat, so I had so much free time that I’d get on the EQs or filters or crappy effects and mess around with music that’s far too beautiful to have some joe on a DJM800 fucking with it.” And to that you can hear a chorus of like-minded DJs shouting, “Hear, hear!”

Halfway through 2016, dance music is still holding it down for wax. Several of the house and techno scene’s most in-demand DJs, from Motor City Drum Ensemble to Floating Points to Ricardo Villalobos, travel the world with bulging bags of records. MCDE and Jeremy Underground’s recent nine-hour Resident Advisor podcast contains so many rare gems that RA uploaded it at a lower bitrate to prevent other DJs from “ripping chunks of their record collections.”

Australia, too, has produced numerous DJs dedicated to the vinyl hustle, including honorary Berliners like Tornado Wallace, Andy Hart and the aforementioned Claire Morgan.

Vinyl-only stages have also become a recurring feature in recent years at major festivals such as Tomorrowland, where Väth invited his friends like Josh Wink and Maceo Plex to dig deep, and New York’s Electric Zoo. Meanwhile, the craft of DJing is at the centre of events like the new Selectors festival in Croatia curated by Dutch crew Dekmantel. While vinyl is not explicitly the theme there, you can be sure the turntables will get a heavy workout.

Another roll-on of this love affair with wax is the growing number of vinyl-only imprints. Last month, Pitchfork Contributing Editor Philip Sherburne went deep on the leading labels that skip digital altogether, speaking to the people behind the likes of Sex Tags Mania and Aniara.

Sherburne describes the experience of shopping for vinyl in 2016 and finding “racks and racks of records that look like they haven’t made it out of the factory fully dressed.” With few distinguishing features in the packaging, these short run pressings have only deepened the appeal of crate-digging. Meanwhile, records from vinyl-focussed labels such as Giegling, Mood Hut, Perlon, Novel Sound and Lobster Theremin remain highly collectable on Discogs and beyond.

“While CDs seem certain to never make a comeback, the romantic allure of vinyl isn’t going anywhere”

While the DJ world has always held a flame for wax, much has been made of a more general vinyl renaissance in recent years.

Overall sales appear to have slowed in 2016, but the demand is still there, particularly for full albums. David Bowie’s Blackstar is reportedly the top-selling vinyl LP of 2016 so far, ahead of Adele’s 25. Even Justin Bieber pressed his Purpose album to picture disc for Record Store Day and Target is stocking a low-cost turntable perfect for kids. While CDs seem certain to never make a comeback, the romantic allure of vinyl isn’t going anywhere.

In dance music, meanwhile, the vinyl vs. digital debate (AKA, Sven vs. Richie) is no closer to reaching an armistice. For every advancement in digital DJing, a new vinyl-only label will start pressing records the old school way. As long as the music stays its course, though, dancefloors can keep on enjoying the best of both worlds.

This month Bacardi is celebrating the craft and heritage of analogue music culture with Fuego Revolutions, a series of six vinyl-only club events with names like Funkineven, Darshan Jersani and Damiano Von Erckert on the bill. Revolutions kicks off tomorrow in Melbourne and hits 77 in Sydney on Saturday. Entry is free, you just have to RSVP to be there. 

The post Why dance music will never give up vinyl appeared first on inthemix.