Part 2
In as far as it is applicable to your work, how would you describe the interaction between your music and DJing/DJ culture and clubs?
It’s a symbiotic relationship. For me, one cannot exist without the other.
As a dancer, I enjoy being in the moment, feeling the music, and contributing energy from the dance floor side — moving my body in a dance circle, hollering when something amazing happens in the mix, feeling a connection to the DJ playing, and appreciating the story they are telling.
Whether I’m in the studio or the DJ booth, I’m there to share my sound with the people on the dance floor, and I want to give them something special every time. In the studio, it’s about developing a particular idea to create a specific mood within one piece of music, singularly focused on that for hours at a time. From there it’s out of my hands, it’s up to DJs to find a place for that finished track in their sets as they see fit. It’s always exciting for me to hear my tracks played by other DJs, and interesting to hear how they choose to contextualize them.
When I’m DJing, I love it when I have an energetic dance floor in front of me that is open minded and up for an adventure. In the course of a set I love to take the story through different turns, moods, genres, and moments. I play this way because that’s who I am as a dancer, I want to explore and be taken to unique destinations with the music I’m experiencing.
Regardless of which side of the decks I’m on at the club, I want to be part of the overall experience and exchange of energies. As someone who has been doing all this for a while now and seen a variety of different dance floors, it’s always my hope that people going out to clubs realize that ultimately THEY are the party. It’s not just about the DJ or the club or the soundsystem.
Don’t get me wrong, all of those elements are essential, and need to be on point! That said, I want people to enjoy dancing expressively, connect with one another, and unite to react collectively when they are feeling the music. True club culture requires active participation in it, as opposed to passive consumption of it.
Participation is the magic thing that makes clubs such unique listening environments and dynamic places, as compared to standing or sitting in one place and facing forward for the duration of a concert, with much less opportunity for bodily movement and social interaction.
Even if AI will not entirely replace human composition, it looks set to have a significant impact on it. What do the terms composing/producing mean in the era of AI, do you feel?
I think if we care about authentic music, soon we might have to define composing/producing as something created by a human.
In a creative pursuit, what AI creates is derivative of other existing works, effectively stealing the work of artists who personally put in the creative effort in the past, while chipping away at the value of human-created music in the present and future.
With AI in music, at the very least people should know what they are listening to or consuming. Anything created with AI should be labeled as such, and be clearly discernible to the listener/consumer, not unlike the labeling on GMO vs. organic foods.
The music marketplace has to be regulated as well — already we are hearing about AIs churning out thousands of tracks to flood and monetize streaming playlists, while human artists require much more time and effort to create something unique that has a deeper personal meaning for them. If there is no regulation here, listeners will be flooded with artificial AI slop, while human composers and producers are drowned out in the static. Bandcamp has already taken a stand to not allow AI music on their platform, and I think that's a good move.
Some might say that AI taking over music and art is inevitable, and a sign of progress, dismissing current concerns about AI by making a comparison to previous concerns people raised about talkie movies taking over at the end of the silent film era.
The reality of that false comparison is, while talkie movies changed the medium humans used to express themselves (and forced silent film actors to retire or adapt), an unregulated proliferation of AI raises the spectre of steadily then completely removing humans from the creative process, which would essentially eviscerate the forward-facing record of genuine human expression, effectively ending our relevance as a cultural species on planet Earth. That sounds pretty bleak to me!
So, if we are going to continue to respect music as a human artform, we have to make the choice to safeguard the integrity of it by regulating AI in music. People act like it’s a foregone conclusion that AI will take over everything. While AI is here and will continue to develop, at the moment we still have a choice, and it will only take over everything if we allow it to.
Do you have things that you are really passionate about but rarely get to talk about?
People who know a bit about me will already know that I’m a dancer, and have danced for music videos, taught dance classes, etc. What I don’t get to talk about as much is that as a big fan of dance in general.
I love watching and learning about all kinds of old and new styles of dance from the stage, the dance floor, and the street — the moves, the terminology, the history, the origins, and the culture. House, tap, jazz, swing, salsa, breakdance, popping, ballet, vogue, waacking, liquid, Chicago Footwork, Oakland Turfing, Memphis Jookin, so much to learn about and enjoy!
To give you something to check out, if you are interested in house dance in New York in the 90s, I can highly recommend watching the documentary Check Your Body At The Door.
One thing that I never get to talk about in a music interview is cave exploration. I’m fascinated by it! I have taken guided tours of a couple of caves many years ago, and love watching in-depth cave exploration videos and documentaries online. The vast amount of underground caverns, rivers, lakes, passageways, and secret chambers deep beneath our feet is incredible!
I don’t know if I’d personally want to deal with a free-hanging rappel into 179 meters of an abyss in pitch darkness or squeeze through tiny passages, so some of it I’m happy to appreciate from the safety of a screen. That said, I’d love to check out some more caves myself someday!
Lastly, I am obsessed with space. I enjoy reading scientific studies and thinking about concepts at the edges of human comprehension, like black holes and infinity. Several studies have demonstrated the distinct possibility that our universe is inside a black hole. There are theories that every black hole generates a universe inside of it with its own unique physics, and black holes continue to create new generations of universes derived from but different from the one in which they formed, mutating and evolving as they do so. Amazing stuff.
Some ideas I’ve mused about based on all this are - with black holes deconstructing and “spaghettifying” all matter they absorb from outside, passing into them through the event horizon, the event horizon could hypothetically serve a function similar to that of a cell membrane. This could support the idea of having a universe inside every black hole that is unique, yet still built from the same basic elements found elsewhere in other universes, as all of these elements would have passed into a universe via a event horizon in a simplified “basic building block” level form.
Now, with regard to infinity: looking outward from within our universe toward the visible edge of it, I feel like the concept of us being inside a black hole also could theoretically explain what we see as infinity. As relative time slows down as an object approaches the event horizon outside a black hole, I imagine that as time warps at the event horizon, from inside looking out, what we see as an infinite physical distance forward could simply be a relative distortion of time giving the illusion of a larger amount of space, appearing to be infinite, while in reality it is the stretching of time that creates this illusion.
Things to think about ...
