(graphic by Sadie Murphy)
Where is the dance? profiles writers who influence how we remember dance music history. This recurring column aims to contextualize their documentation in our current moment, and discuss how their background and past work heavily influence today’s narratives on dance music. The column is part of a wider project aiming to spark conversation and ideation of what dance music journalism has been and what it can look like moving forward.
To kick off this series I hopped on a call with Piotr Orlov, a Brooklyn-based writer, music lover, and dance music history lover. Orlov publishes the weekly newsletter Dada Strain, a project highlighting local, independent, and community driven events. Orlov’s writing centers on how rhythm, improvisation and community converge. His bylines appear in NPR, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Village Voice, and RBMA, among many other publications. He also teaches music journalism at Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University. We spoke about how his childhood and his love of the Grateful Dead led him to first write about dance music, the writers who influenced him early on, how listening and dancing go hand in hand, and how today’s dance music writers need to get to their local club.
For transparency’s sake: I have worked with Orlov extensively for my own research, and have had conversations about dance music with him for a few years now. I chose to kick off this column with Orlov because I realized, despite knowing his opinion of other writers, that I never took the time to dive deep into his own relationship with writing about sound and dance.
What was your first entry point into writing about dance music?
My idea of what dance music is is not what the traditional idea of dance music is. I came from the Soviet Union to the United States when I was just shy of my eighth birthday, and I only have a music writing background because my father was a relatively famous sports writer—and my paternal grandmother was a classical musicologist. Growing up in the Soviet Union my parents had Western records, so I watched my parents drunkenly do the Charleston and that kind of stuff. So for me, music and dancing mixed together naturally.
Fast forward to my first year in the United States, and Saturday Night Fever comes out. It was the height of the initial craze of MTV. We didn’t have juice bars the way that they had them in Chicago, but I was already going to matinees at CBGBs and the Ritz, which is what Webster Hall is now.
My first time going out and dancing was going to these bars that would play videos, some of which were by Namjun Pak who was having video installations in a lot of places, including MOMA. I had no understanding of it, but there would be stacked TVs playing MTV videos that everybody was dancing to. Looking back, I know some videos included records that Larry Levan was playing. So it was this crossover.
Later, I wrote for my college newspaper, had my first buylines in the DC city paper, and then came back to New York. I got some little bits in the Village Voice, but it would be a few years before I had a proper byline. I was a big deadhead; I still am. One of the things I loved about the Grateful Dead was doing drugs and dancing.
I was still going to clubs, but nobody in clubs liked the Grateful Dead. These two things couldn’t be further away from each other in the minds of these people. Whereas to me, it’s kind of the same thing. These are dance parties, you know? I was thinking—what are you guys talking about that is so different? It’s just different audiences.
But Jerry Garcia died in August of 1995. After Jerry died, I wasn’t spending money being on the road with the Grateful Dead. I needed a new version of that. So I started going to clubs a lot more.
And it was at that moment in time I already understood the lanes that Chicago, New York, and Detroit were occupying within dance music history. I went to see a couple of people play Detroit-style music, and I was like “Oh my god, this moves me.” Then I heard some proper jacking house music from Chicago. And the intensity grabbed me. I realized this is not at all like the Dead.
I came back to writing about music after a couple of years off. It was 1998 and the internet was just starting, so there was a lot more opportunity to just write about music and I was questioning what my voice was. The American music industry ignored acid house, ignored rave, and then alternative rock ran its course. There were not a lot of people in what I would call mainstream media who were writing about dance music. Somebody came up with the word “electronica,” what ended up being called IDM, intelligent dance music, like bleep and warp records, these somewhat dancy, but somewhat heady post-techno, quasi-ambient, compositional records. Electronica gobbled itself around what ended up being Big Beat. So, The Prodigy, The Chemical Brothers, Fat Boy Slim, Orbital. When Madonna’s ray of light came out, it was globbed into Electronica.
Many of the people who are writing about that shit were writing from the perspective of rock people who never danced a moment in their lives. Whereas I’d been dancing for years. I was one of the people who knew indie rock shit, but I also know the jazz shit, but I also know the dance music shit. I became close with some people that I first wrote about at CMJ, some people from Detroit, Dance Nace, who’s now Caribou, Quartet, Floating Point. I wrote about a lot of these people really early on in their career.
You started writing about dance music at a time when in the mainstream that was a bit unusual.
Right.
Who were the voices that you were reading? Who were the writers you looked to at the start of your career?
Definitely Simon Reynolds. When I started writing about music in college, I lost my financial aid because I was spending too much time on the road with the Grateful Dead. I got a full-time job working at the university library to continue. They had a full collection of both enemy and melody maker, and Rolling Stone on microfiche, so caught up on the acid house, UK summer of love very quickly. When Madchester began to happen, I was already in it. None of it was foreign to me, Simon was writing about a lot of that.
Another guy named Barry Walters, who just wrote a book on LGBTQ music, was always writing about disco. I would see his byline all the time, writing about music that had beats.
I had a father who was a sports journalist. I grew up with two newspapers always in the house; the New York Times and the New York Post. The post had a great local sports section, culture section, and their art section as well. One of my best friends is a guy named Joseph Patel. Joseph introduced me to Carl [Craig], Reclus, Moodymann and Theo [Parrish].
And Bruce Tantum, he’s an editor of DJ Mag. Bruce’s partner at the time, Adam Goldstone, was just so on top of shit. Adam wrote a bit, made music and he also ran this label called New Phonic, which was a UK label that had an office in the US. Adam was the first person to tell me who David Mancuso was. Adam knew everything that was fucking going on, that was incredible. Adam died tragically at Burning Man, it was horrific. He was a really fucking good DJ. He was a Sherpa for a ton of us, who were not quite full on rave kids because we were trying to be professional writers.
How do you think about your relationship to writing about sound versus listening, and kind of your relationship to writing about sound?
When I was a lot more self-conscious, I would try to be train spotting. I don’t trainspot at all anymore. I just need to know about the feel and the texture of the music. I was always dancing. Because by that point, I had just done enough grateful deadness. A good reporter is also a participant. I would be in it. But it’s about knowing that you don’t need to know all the details, but you need to know some. It’s creating a map of the night. And, depending on what your state is, or what the night is, creating a map of the night might be surprising.
So some of it is hearing what the contour is. Then hearing the details in the sharp edges. And I think that once you get both of those little bits, you don’t need to fill out the color at that moment. What you do is you take that, then add in some historical context, and at some point you add in who’s on the dance floor. This thing [writing] is a sketch, not exact details. To me, writing about sound has to start with listening, but at some point the interpretive bit has to kick in. The verbs become stronger. Not too many modifiers. What is the music doing to you? How is it moving to you? Is it pulverising you? Is it entrancing you? You know, what are the actions that are taking place? And then, how do the actions that are taking place? How are they mixing with the narrative? If you’re in a trance, but writing that something is pulverising you, you’re like, okay, well, what kind of trance is that? You’re not being entranced. You are being bludgeoned.
I teach three impetuses for writing about music. One is to describe the sound. It’s the main thing that needs to be there, description of sound. But also important, describe the context. And then the third, the least important because if you do the first two correctly you don’t even need to put any much of yourself, describe your feelings. Describing your feelings really says why it’s important enough to spend time there? Why are you writing about it?
You’re speaking about listening, but tangentially dancing. Do you separate the two? Or think about writing about dancing and movement in a different way or is that folded into the listening aspect?
It’s folded in. I’ve never really written about dancing in that way of describing motions. I can say somebody is two-stepping or somebody is wiggling like a deadhead over there, or house dancing or break dancing. But to me, it’s really less about dancing. It’s about the energy on the dance floor. So it’s not necessarily about the movement. Sometimes it’s like the crowd really gets intense. The DJ got intense and then the crowd got intense. Those kinds of things are coming together, right? It’s about what the group mind is doing, what the collective is doing. It’s how the collective energy is happening or not happening on the dance floor.
You know you can go to someplace the music’s great, the sound is great. But everybody is a fucking dud in the club. There’s a book, Berghain Nights, that I thought was really, really good about him being on drugs, describing his own dancing and describing the dancing of the people around him. How he remained in the moment and how he transposed remaining in the moment and then put it on page.I don’t even try to do that. I make it known that I’m a participant. But I make it known that I’m a participant of, like, the energy that is in the group. So when I write about dancing it’s definitely like listening and dancing to me come together. It would suck not to be in it. Get off your ass and get your ass to the club. Part of the thing about being a participant is that some people expect you to not be a participant.
I don’t trust dance music writing by people who don’t dance. Like, your ass better actually engage with this thing, and your ass engaging with this thing is not the same thing as just listening and writing it down. To me, this is why Simon’s good. Eric Demby, Adam Goldstone, Joseph Patel, I’ve spent time on the dance floor with these people. I’ve been on a dance floor with them at three o’clock in the morning in states of disrepair when a DJ is just blowing our minds and all of us are recognizing that that is happening. And unless I understand that you’re not just chin scratching during that moment, that you are fully in it, I don’t know that you carry the weight of being able to talk about it. Maybe a lot of that had to do with all these fucking rock people who tried to get into dance music, electronica, at that moment in time when their careers depended on it. You know, and then being in Detroit is too hard. Moodymann is too weird. People on a proper dance floor lose all their pretensions. It’s like the moment overtakes them. And I want to know that you are capable of recognizing that moment.
What do you think the responsibility of the people writing about dance music is right now? In terms of shaping the direction of where dance music writing is going.
I think they should be looking locally. What’s the dance music version of go out and touch grass? It’s going out to your local club, right? What the fuck’s going on in your local club? Get the fuck offline. Go out and touch grass. I think it’s important that people recognize what is going on around them. I think that the internet-based high mind is fucking awful. That does not mean that all of the internet is awful, although it increasingly is.
I think that there are people who are trying to create a dance music consensus, that I think is kind of full of shit. I kind of hate it. Unfortunately, they’ve convinced people that their platforms are right. I think the best thing that people can be doing is recognizing what’s going on, broadly, but also what’s going on locally. For the last seven or eight years, I’ve been telling people about local artists who are just now getting featured in RA. I’ve been obsessed with Lena Wilkins with her NTS shit where part of it is live. Eris Drew and Octo Octa’s new record that’s coming out in like a week is them trying to make a chemical brothers record as themselves. And of course, it’s phenomenal. So these things are what pushes forward. What doesn’t push things forward is these stupid think pieces about how there’s no sound in the decade.
I would agree.
I went to see Mark Ernestus from Basic Channel a couple of weeks ago at LSD in Greenpoint. His whole thing right now is playing ammo piano. There’s a lot of people who find it boring, and ask where his dub techno is. But I was thinking, what are you people talking about? He’s dubbing, except, he’s now not dubbing the thing that you’re used to, he’s dubbing the thing that he’s in love with. That’s amazing. It’s amazing that it’s happening, but, does it need to be the sound of the decade? Shut the fuck up. I saw somebody talk about the fact that there are all these things happening in all these places that are not Western Europe. Duh, you think? Why does it not matter if it’s not a new thing popping up in Berlin? Is it not the sound of the moment? The sound of the moment is so expansive and thank God.
I wanted to know what your favourite and least favourite story you’ve written is.
I’m proud of my 50th anniversary of the Love Saves the Day story for NPR. I am proud of a piece I wrote for the Art Forum about Techno education, how King Britt is teaching electronica. Probably my least favourite stuff is the stuff where I thought that I was like being the smartest person in the room back in the day.