Long-time friends and collaborators, musician Daniel Avery, alongside photographer Keffer present Techno is Boring, a new book that collects a decade of work chronicling club culture. The book also includes short written essays and notes from Avery and fellow DJ, writer and collaborator John Loveless, who has written the following blog post about the experience.
While I have written about nightclubs and electronic music for nearly twenty years, everywhere for local zines to The Guardian, very little of my work has concerned my own personal experience with what is now broadly termed ‘club culture’. I have interviewed hundreds of DJs and producers, written the press texts for even more singles and albums, succinctly plotted expansive careers into digestible biographies, and alternately, occasionally made up a load of absolute bollocks on behalf of people seeking a lukewarm slice of crumbly electronic influencer pie.
Meanwhile, my own life as a DJ has very slowly blossomed, especially on radio in my adopted home of Berlin, where I host shows on the contrasting but equally excellent stations Cashmere Radio and Refuge Worldwide. Here, I’m lucky enough to have a space where I can turn up every month, solo or with a friend, and play music I believe in, records that make me feel good. It has afforded me the opportunity to build a small but loyal audience, one that includes a woman who turned up to see me play in a club, and compliment not only my record collection, but the qualities of my “flat, hypnotic voice.”
In absolute contradiction to the previous two paragraphs, I have nonetheless long had trouble centering myself in the scenes and creative milieu that I have encountered. Being a huge consumer in the dance music scene is sometimes a sign to inform the cardiologist, although in my case, I mean it in the purest sense. The arrival of new music to hear is something I find endless pleasure in. Hearing one good record can save a whole bad night out. And it keeps coming, until it stops.
Slowly, the bad nights out get worse, and perhaps more frequent. The music fails to inspire you as it once did. When Daniel Avery asked me to be a part of his new photo book with Keffer, I found myself in one of these somewhat melodramatic slumps, this one bang in the epicenter of my thirties and stretching for longer than ever previously observed. Confronted with writing a book about the sanctity of nightclubbing, my brain ached, even as my body relaxed with relief, knowing I might soon heed the call of a life at lower decibels.
‘Authentically’ representing nightclubs in any other medium but the hardworn tiles of a dance floor itself, seems to present a notorious challenge. To its credit, Velocity Press has done a fine job transferring pingers to page, capturing contemporary youth culture as well as British rave culture’s foundations.
The title of Harold Heath’s Long Relationships alone speaks to the passions and frustrations lurking within this thing of ours. As such, knowing the book would be in such fine company proved inspiring, if not somewhat intimidating. Not only do you hope to do justice to your own, often deeply influential and treasured experiences in the rave, but ideally, make space for the universe of scenes in parallel.
This is of course, completely impossible. Instead, I’ve found myself drawn back to a few of the shining examples that somehow just get it. In 2019, I contributed to DJ Mag a list of The Best Dance Music Films of The Decade, which in retrospect, proves more bountiful than I’d recalled.
Inevitably, Zac Effron’s EDM-tinged ‘We Are Your Friends’ does make an appearance, along with his character’s inadvertently iconic monologue about the importance of “128BPM… the magic number… once you’ve got the crowd there, you’re controlling their entire circulatory system.” Write that down!
At a slower pace, Robin Campillo’s masterful 120BPM also features. Concerning the foundation of the ACT UP movement for HIV awareness in France, it’s not only one of the best films about activism full stop, but is driven by a memorable score from an electro hero of the nation, Arnaud Rebotini.
Also rooted in Paris, Mia-Hansen Love’s ‘Eden’ is a film I have revisited occasionally in the years since it’s release, showcasing one of my personal favourite contemporary directors capturing the melancholy of the close-but-no-cigar brush with stardom, the reality of many DJs and producers, but rarely represented on screen with such empathy.
From my bookshelf, Tim Lawrence’s ‘Life & Death on the New York Dancefloor 1980-1983‘, documenting electronic music’s very earliest vibrations into a party culture, provides the ideal segue into Simon Reynolds’ ‘Energy Flash’, which explores the explosion of house music through the prism of ecstasy thereafter. Both books blend politics and culture in a way that reframed my younger mind, and prove equally absorbing even when just dipping in for reference.
More recently, McKenzie Wark’s ‘Raving‘ offers not only a vivid and discreet glimpse of the recent New York techno scene, positing raving as an art in the bodies of queer and trans dancers, but evidence of how club culture can radically transform the perspective and philosophy of an individual at any stage of their life or practice.
Ultimately, serving to compliment Keffer’s visceral, unique photography, the writing in Techno is Boring exclusively reflects Daniel’s experiences, as well as my own. Sometimes, these have been intertwined over the years, and I have been able to observe Dan progress and develop his instincts and talents, from ‘Drone Logic’ until now.
In writing it together, we have come to few conclusions, but the process has taken me out of my slump; my own ‘long relationship’ continues, for better or worse. For all tomorrow’s parties, I hope we can continue to make good on what we have on the page. The desire to be vulnerable, to embrace chaos without causing it, and to never, ever lose our sense of humour.
John Loveless
‘Techno is Boring’ is due for release on 1 November but pre-order now to receive it first in October and get a signed A5 photo print with a download code for an exclusive, new Daniel Avery track.
