The Wire 300: Alan Licht On The Emergence Of Experimental DJ Culture

Ah, 1982: the year that Christian Marclay, who would soon be known for bringing turntables to the world of free improvisation, using fast cuts, layering and loops for a live translation of tape music, first performed with his decks at the Kitchen; the year that Brian Eno released On Land, his second ambient album - largely ignored back then, its deep bass sound and glacial movement would become a major influence on the Ambient club movement a decade later; and lastly, as Steve Barrow says in Simon Reynolds’s Generation Ecstasy, “By 1982, dub had run its course in Jamaica, it had become a formula.” Reynolds himself then notes, “But this was just the moment at which dub techniques were being used by New York electro-funk and disco producers in remixes, and vocal-free B-side instrumental versions.”

These unrelated occurrences in The Wire’s year zero all helped set in motion the idea of DJ culture, which reached its pinnacle in the mid- to late 90s. The DJ, not the guitarist, was the instrumental pop hero of the decade. In the disco era, DJs like Larry Levan and Nicky Siano attracted a cult following for their weekly all-night flights, crafting an endless groove from different extended-mix 12” singles, but never took center stage. Only the late Arthur Russell seems to have made the connection at the time between these marathon disco DJ sets and the rhythmic trance element of the minimalist Riley/Reich/Glass axis. Russell was a cellist, not a DJ, but a consideration of his output of disco singles, classical compositions, and pop songs and instrumentals invites comparison to the connect-the-dots aesthetic of a good DJ, and his activities are in some ways a harbinger of the rapport between the avant and electronica worlds to come not long after his death in 1992.

It wouldn’t be until Ambient found an audience with Aphex Twin/Richard James’s Selected Ambient Works 85-92 that experimental music fans and performers really took interest in what was going on at dance clubs (he was also a wicked DJ - I’ll never forget him playing pieces of sandpaper on the turntables at the Knitting Factory at a Blast First night in 1995). In James’s wake, the correspondences between Techno and experimental music became more pronounced. Autechre injected large doses of metallic noise in and on top of their beats; The Orb sampled Steve Reich; and the underground responded, with parties like London’s Electronic Lounge or New York’s Soundlab, that were somewhere between a night at the Kitchen and a night at the Hacienda, arty raves without the drugs. DJ Olive coined the term Illbient to distinguish the scene’s rougher soundscapes from the more New Age-y Techno chill-out room associations of Ambient. The DJs were the stars, even in egalitarian setups with no stage, or DJ booth. The Wire put DJ Spooky on its cover in 1995 (issue 138), before he even had an album out; in the article he mentioned doing “all backwards jazz sets, or blues Ambient sets using John Lee Hooker’s instrumentals”, which seemed to confirm that the floating dance party was another arena where experimental music could be found.