- On a recent Saturday night in Bushwick, Brooklyn, the DIY venue Palisades celebrated its one-year anniversary. The no-frills club, which skewed towards punk, garage rock, indie and noise music when it first opened, has become increasingly important for New York City's dance music circles, hosting recent gigs with Joey Anderson, Hieroglyphic Being and Ikonika. The birthday lineup was topped by the leftfield techno purveyor Container (AKA Ren Schofield) who played live following opening sets by Black Dice frontman Eric Copeland and the newly-formed trio Sasha Jan Rezzie. Schofields's live set delivered on the promise of razor sharp, ferocious machine music, and the night itself, which brought together noise, hardcore and dance music fans, illustrated an interesting shift taking place within the more experimental reaches of dance music in general.
Container's breakneck drum machine patterns—built from stuttering toms, hissing hi-hats and pitched-down, ultra-saturated kicks—seemed to spring from the driving rhythms of Detroit electro, ghettotech and footwork, albeit with a more abstract, polyrhythmic bent. His caustic synth blasts cut through the air like fire alarms. The audience, packed shoulder-to-shoulder into the front of the room and bubbling with kinetic spirit, reached a rolling boil as the energy mounted, and by the third or fourth song the polite pushing and shoving exploded into a miniature circle pit. Underneath me someone was on their knees scanning the floor with an iPhone light. I spotted his glasses by my foot and tapped him on the shoulder. "He was playing some insane polyrhythms and then my glasses just flew off," he yelled in my ear over the chaos. "I swear I'm not on drugs. It's just that good!"
The grit and intensity of artists like Container has drawn a new crowd into the margins of dance music, a crowd that seems to be trickling in from the self-identified avant-garde fields of noise and abstract electronics. His discography (especially later tracks like "Glaze" and "Eject") fits into a legacy of techno that has unfurled over the course of 25 years, growing from the militant sounds of Underground Resistance and the chaotic pranksterism of UK labels like Rephlex and Planet Mu. Though music like this has existed since the '90s, it's currently experiencing a surge in interest among leather jacket-strapped punks who otherwise wouldn't have given it the time of the day. Because acts like Container are positioned within the aesthetics of the avant-garde—his music is often referred to as "noise techno"—the scene has opened up to a new audience who may be wading in the waters of rave music until they feel comfortable diving in head first.