- In the electronic world there is something of a divide between music that is considered intelligent and music that is for the dancefloor. Head music can never be hip music and vice versa. But why shouldn’t music be aimed at both? The recent Panorama party at Club Yellow proved that such a thing is possible.
Terre Thaemlitz opened the night with a DJ set. From a musician who’s done solo piano interpretations of Kraftwerk, Gary Numan and Devo, the crowd was expecting something unusual, and that’s exactly what the now Japan-based experimentalist dished up in a fearlessly eclectic set: powerful and emotional tracks ranging from Nina Simone’s ‘Sinnerman’ to house that had just stepped out of the South American rainforest. Not every track was danceable, but they were all arresting.
Luomo is the most dancefloor friendly of Vladislav Delay’s aliases. Smart, sexy, and sensuous, Luomo is perhaps best described as house music for people who don’t normally like house music. But to do so risks being dismissive of what Delay achieves: Luomo, particularly in his live incarnation, produces music that is enormously encompassing, touching on the sexiness of house, the narcotic textures of dub, and the rhythms of R&B.
Luomo served up a live set that massaged both the brains and the behinds of Club Yellow. Lost in the music as he rocked gently backwards and forwards behind his laptop and controller, the dub-coated slinkiness of Luomo quickly won over the crowd. Unlike his usual live sets, he chose to stop for a moment after each track. Letting each tune speak for itself was a trick that worked wonderfully. As Luomo moved through his more killer material, ‘The Present Lover’, ‘What Good’, ‘Shelter’, and his achingly beautiful remix of ‘Sit Beside Me’, Yellow loosened up. Girls began to dance with other girls, then with boys. People smiled, lost their inhibitions, and gave into the groove. The evening had changed from an event into a party. At the same time, Luomo’s complex productions gave the more intellectually inclined more than enough meat to chew on. He closed his set with an excellent version of his classic ‘Tessio’ that went straight for the heartstrings.
Kentaro Iwaki (aka Dub Arachnoid Trim) is the secret weapon of Tokyo’s club circuit: anyone who starts a set off with a track from Wolfgang Voight's Gas project is going to take you somewhere special. Like Thaemiltz, Iwaki played eclectically, but this time it was thoroughly danceable. Moving effortlessly from techno to house to tracks with jazzy percussive freakouts, Iwaki cut a path through diverse genres that kept the crowd moving.
By the end of the night, clubgoers at Yellow had been totally won over by the genre-bending invention of Luomo, Thaemlitz, and Iwaki. Instead of sheltering meekly in only one musical style, the performers led the crowd through sounds that were by turns stimulating, sexy, sensuous, and heartfelt. The fact that the crowd opened up as much as they did proves that pitching dance music evenly at both the head and the hips is not only possible, it’s highly desirable. There are indeed places where the intellect and the body meet, although it’s a shame that they are so few and far between.