Music People

be the party u wish 2 see in the world

Greetings, cool babies. In this newsletter I want to write about how a good IRL experience led me to a good internet experience that then led me back to a great IRL experience this weekend...read on for:

a recap of said IRL experience

new music from past I Enjoy Music featurees

Blog Posts of the Recent Past

You can normalize, don't it make you feel alive?

I'm a fan of LCD Soundsystem, this is known. Back in 2014 LCD's maestro James Murphy and Belgian DJ brethren 2manydjs worked with the audio engineer John Klett to launch a unique soundsystem called Despacio. It's an enclosed dance zone with black-and-white checkered floors, killer sound from eight speaker stacks powered by old McIntosh amps, a fat ass disco ball, and a layout that encourages dancers to face each other rather than the DJ, who is playing vinyl-only selections, naturally. It can travel anywhere in the world, but it is large and unwieldy and its appearances are rare.

I was a bozo and completely missed Despacio when it came to Coachella in 2016. It wasn't until I returned home and saw a great deal of online chatter about it that I realized how badly I'd boned it. When Despacio came to Knockdown Center in 2018, I knew I couldn't miss it again. Chris was out of town so I went solo and I had a total blast. Everyone was there specifically to dance, and DJ hero worship was at a minimum. I didn't recognize much of the music, which leaned groovy (funk, disco, etc.); the only IDs I got from the whole night were "Here Comes the Sun" by the Beatles and "I Can't Go For That (No Can Do)" by Hall & Oates. The lighting stayed blessedly dark a lot of the time, but occasionally they'd blast the disco ball with a blazing light and everyone would freak out.

Despacio was set to return to New York in spring 2020, and you can imagine how that worked out. In its absence, I joined the Despacio subreddit, a small but mighty group of soundsystem appreciators. It was nice to see people talk about experiencing this unique and rare musical Happening, and sometimes folks would share track IDs from different nights, or playlists of songs that have been played at Despacio over the years.

r/despacio is where I saw a post advertising an upcoming dance party in L.A. called Burnin' Chancla, billed as a "mini Despacio party" thrown by friends "working super hard to build the spirit and energy" of the original rig. It looked intriguing and I didn't have any plans that night, so we grabbed tickets!

Independently-thrown events in L.A. are a crapshoot, and that's part of their charm. I've gone to an evening of gentle music at a gorgeous mansion in Baldwin Hills that sold prerolls at the bar and even had an old-fashioned swing set from which you could behold a fantastic view of the city (the woman who was swinging next to me: "Wow. I am feeling the acid"), and I've gone to a techno warehouse party where the sound was cranked painfully beyond the speaker capacity and there was nowhere to hide from the corrupted decibels besides a small patch of wet ground in front of the port-a-potty.

So I didn't know what to expect for Burnin' Chancla (named for a term the party organizers Andres Montiel and Christopher Pavlov encountered in an article about Latinx disco fans in the '70s in Los Angeles—it means dancing so hard that you melt your flip flops), but when I arrived I knew it was going to be good. The venue was a spacious loft with ample seating. Multiple couches says "I care."

We got there about an hour into the party and the dance floor was already packed. The setup was very much in the Despacio mode, enclosed with drapes, kitted out with lighting that split into red, blue and red slices of color, and furbished with a throbbing Altec Model 19 speaker in each corner. The sound was calibrated at a healthy, non-earsplitting volume. The music was vinyl-only and excellent. The DJs—Montiel and Pavlov, plus Cole Thompson, who also plays in the band Your Grandparents—selected warm disco and house tunes. I tried not to Shazam too much but one that really got me was "Magnetism" by Eugene Record. Hearing disco on a good sound system is a dopamine-rich activity, you really can pick out lots of percussive quirks, and the pure emotion of the vocals.

Other party highlights: when you bought tickets to the party, you received an email with community guidelines for keeping the dance floor respectful, and when you got to the door, they had them printed out as well. They also had dance floor monitors wearing light-up wristbands you could talk to if you needed to, jugs of free water that got regular refills, and a gentle restrict-your-cell-phone-use-on-the-dancefloor policy.

People were really dancing!! Hell yes!! If you read this blog regularly, you know I've had it up to here with parties more interested in furnishing great photo opportunities than maintaining an enthusiastic dance floor. This was not one of those parties. People were there with intention. We even made a dance floor friend who also found out about the party via the Reddit post (shout out to Brian). Toward the end of the night, they played "Get Innocuous!" by LCD Soundsystem, oh yeah babe. I left, aglow. Such a good Be The Party You Wish To See In The World, ENERGY IN / ENERGY OUT experience. I'll be back for more for sure.

NEW MUSIC ZONE

A spell ago, I interviewed Chris Anderson from the Sheffield, UK-based band New Ghost for The Alternative...

New Ghost has a new album out, A Dagger In Every Tide. As devastating as it is pretty, this is intense-to-the-point-of-overwhelming music that splits the difference between dream pop and shoegaze...DREAMGAZE? Certainly not shoe pop. The guitars are unreal, as saturated and layered as a damn tiramisu.

Ravine Angel, aka Aoife Josie Clements, who I last chatted with when she recommended a song by Lauren Bousfield over on the now defunct but universally beloved The Molly Zone newsletter, has a new album out too. Okay it's not new but it's been chilling in my "gotta listen to it" pile all summer and now's the time. The album is called castration songs. The songs on it were commissioned for the director Louise Weard's film castration movie (though they are not the official soundtrack), described last year in Fangoria as a "trans girl exploitation movie full of sex and violence filtered through a DIY underground aesthetic." Ravine Angel's liner notes describe the album as "the ugliest and most purposefully alienating songs i've ever made." If you're the type of person who kicks off their autumn with some Type O Negative and some leaf-shriveling thoughts of darkness, this might be your jam.