Back to... Not Much, Actually
a.k.a. Electronic music on pause (again).
A QUICK SCHEDULING NOTE
Hello again. Now that the calendar has officially flipped to 2022, I wanted to let everyone know that I’m making a small change to the First Floor publishing schedule.
Effective immediately, the newsletter will be going out on Tuesdays and Thursdays, with Tuesdays dedicated to essays, interviews and other long-form content, while Thursdays will contain the weekly round-up of news, links and new music recommendations. (Just like before, the Tuesday editions will be available to paid subscribers only, while the Thursday editions will be available to everyone.)
Long story short, the free edition of the newsletter is getting pushed back one day, mostly because I didn’t like the idea of bombarding people’s inboxes two days in a row. Otherwise, First Floor will continue to be the newsletter you know and love (or at least tolerate). Thanks to all of you for your ongoing support.
HAPPY (?) NEW YEAR
After three weeks away from the newsletter—and more than a month since I last wrote one of these essays—I feel like I should be coming back full of energy and excitement, but if I’m being honest, my general feeling about electronic music right now is… meh.
It’s not that I’ve lost my passion for the music (which continues to be released at a staggering clip), or that my interest in the industry is waning, but it’s a bit difficult to get worked up about anything when so much of the culture is on pause—again. Omicron has wreaked havoc on nightlife, and this time around, there’s no collective appetite for filling the void with DJ livestreams. Here in Barcelona, clubs were open for less than three months before they closed down again in December, and it’s unclear when they’ll re-open. The situation is similar in many places around the globe, and while scattered parties do seem to be happening in certain locations—such as England, where the government (and the nightlife industry) seems determined to pretend that the pandemic isn’t happening—it’s telling that the DJs playing these gigs often couch any promotion with something along the lines of “I know it’s weird to be playing right now.” Maybe they’re simply wary of potential “plague rave” shaming, but even the most reliably noisy corners of social media don’t seem to consistently have the energy for that discussion anymore. (That ire instead seems to be primarily focused on crypto practitioners these days; if you’re curious where that “discourse” is at right now, someone literally compared noted Web3 enthusiast Mat Dryhurst to the KGB on Twitter last week.)
I’m not even a big party guy, but the COVID closure / lockdown cycle has become repetitive and demoralizing; even worse, all of the “this is an opportunity to remake the world” energy we saw in March 2020 has now been replaced by lingering malaise and questions like “when is this going to be over?” The morals of that can be debated—and when it comes to things like clubbing, clamoring for restrictions to end does convey an undeniable level of privilege—but no matter where you fall on the “individuals need to sacrifice for the greater good” spectrum, people’s exhaustion and frustration with the status quo are at the very least understandable.
In electronic music, two years used to feel like a lifetime. The genre has long been obsessed with futurism, and even if it frequently struggles to live up to that ethos, its rate of turnover has always been high. Pre-pandemic, two years was plenty of time for a new style or subgenre to appear (and summarily disappear), and in clubbing circles, two years used to be more than enough time for the average young person to “discover” raving, throw themselves headlong into the music and lifestyle, overdo it a few times, start to burn out and eventually cycle out of the “scene” entirely.
Since March 2020 though, electronic music culture (and its usual churn) has largely ground to a halt.