Issue #009 (November 2004) Detroit Electronic Music Festival 2004 Event Review Email this article to a friend Detroit Electronic Music Festival (DEMF) Review by Will Tregonning I flew into Detroit from New York and had asked for a window seat for the flight so that when I got to Detroit, I would get that sweeping view of ‘downtown’ – just like 8 Mile. Imagine my disappointment when the plane landed in deepest, darkest suburbia. Detroit was a tiny a speck in the distance. After an hour in a cab, I was at the Holiday Inn, in the middle of downtown. Most of the former office blocks were boarded-up and deserted – as if it was after an apocalypse. In Detroit, no-one lives downtown if they can afford not to. Instead the middle class live a million kilometres away out in the 'burbs and, should they be so unlucky as to work in the city, commute everyday. Which means that buildings in the city that aren’t abandoned buildings, are car parks. Just around the corner from my hotel was what used to be a really nice, leafy plaza but which was now bum-central. Bums would be hanging out there all day, waiting for buses that they knew would never come. The night I arrived I went out looking for a convenience store. It was like the 1970's inside and the whole counter area down one side and across the back of the store was shielded right to the ceiling by dirty old plexiglass—even the deli counter! I wonder how many times some shopkeeper took a ‘cap in his ass’ before they were like: “right, that's it!” Before I got there, I'd heard about Detroit’s ruined downtown and was expecting to be amazed by the post-industrial melancholia of it all – and I was amazed. But it did occur to me that it's one thing to be a visitor wandering around appreciating the gritty aesthetic and quite another thing to actually live there, when the “shithole” aspect would probably take over from the “melancholic grandeur”. Festival organiser Derrick May was hardly to be seen over the weekend. When he did pop up, he was looking pretty worried – not much of a surprise seeing as it was a lot of his cash that was funding the event. Since the festival is always free, they were having a tough time getting anything back. He interrupted Barbara Presinger’s (Scape Records) set for an “important announcement”: they needed cash, so could we ‘please buy the official merchandise’? Later on it turned out that the power suppliers had threatened to turn off the power the next morning if they didn't get paid and that, as recently as two days before the festival started, the lengendary Kevin Saunderson was scraping around for the $125,000 that they needed to pay the security and sound guys. Presinger was playing what was called the Underground Stage which was literally underground, in a space a bit like a double-height car park. It had a massive PA that was always turned up too loud to the point where the kicks and bass all just blurred together into a huge messy, bowel-shifting boom that made the top of my skull vibrate. When Presinger played, it was raining outside so the place was packed with ‘peakers’. When May interrupted, he apologised for breaking up her ‘really excellent set’ and I'm thinking: ‘bullshit, you only just got here’. As a taste maker she's faultless, but it's a party and if she's going to DJ, she should learn how to mix. But she wasn’t the only one with substandard mixing skills. Kevin Saunderson played the penultimate set on the main stage on the last day. This joker’s been DJing since before I was born and his mixing was rubbish. The best day of the festival was the first one, when most of the darker, electro-y people and the Dutch contingent played. Kill Memory Crash were easily my favourite, banging out a rough set of cranky electro. It’s good to see producers laying their own vocals over their tracks, even if they are just screaming through a vocoder. I was really looking forward to Legowelt’s D&D techno, but he was disappointing, probably because the booming PA meant that you could hear almost none of the melody and top end, which is really what his tracks are all about. One of the least impressive of the day was some clown calling himself Hieroglyphic Being, who grabbed the mike before his set and amped the crowd, quote: ‘life's too short not to dance’. He later proceeded to clear out the floor with his boring-as-batshit set. The ramp off the floor was packed. [Hieroglyphic Being is now signed to Klang Elektronik and Axis as a result of this set so we're not sure what our reviewer heard! - eds] The prize for the weekend’s most amazing after party venue goes to Ghostly International , who hired out the ballroom of the Detroit Masonic Temple – a massive, slightly gothic, shabby building, from the 1920s - similar to those amazing upper Westside apartment buildings looking over New York's Central Park. I stumbled on it just when I thought I was about to get mugged. I knew I was lost and had lapped the block when the same hooker tried to pick me up twice. The inside of the building was all stone floors, wide, dramatic staircases, high ceilings, low lighting and massive chandeliers. The ballroom even had a mezzanine with viewing boxes. Unfortunately, in order for it have looked like a party, they would have needed about another 400 people more than the 150-odd techno geeks, intellectuals and professional-haircuts that were there by the time Matthew Dear bumped out a tough, minimal and occasionally interesting laptop set. But they get full marks for giving it a shot because it was one of the best venues I've ever seen.There was a pretty amazing afterparty where the same Kill Memory Crash played alongside DJs including Ben Sims. It was in three little rundown, sweaty, interconnected shopfronts—rough n' tumble and really dark. Tech-house in one room, bangin’ techno in another and electro-tech in another. Brilliant. Another afterparty had Japanese techno legend Ken Ishii playing for a crowd of just 200. By the last day, when most of the big local names were playing, it got to the stage where I was just praying that Kevin Saunderson, Stacey Pullen and Rolando would be able to save the main event by at least being entertaining. Saunderson's set I've already mentioned. The other two were unfortunately on at the same time and Pullen lost out. Rolando was playing the main stage and he played a mostly excellent, well constructed set. In a good way, it was kind of just what you would expect – some Detroit history mixed in with newer, Detroit-influenced tracks. But the crowd? There would have been a few thousand people there. Only about half were dancing. The rest just stood around. When the MC (Derrick May, hidden behind a speaker stack) was trying to amp up the crowd, no-one was responding to his calls. There was even crowd-surfing and, god help us, girls flashing their tits. It was all so surreal. Why have a free techno festival for people who, it seems, mostly aren't really that into it? It seems like part of the reason for having a big-ass festival is to pay homage to their glory. Most of them have been around a while now — some would have released their first record nearly 20 years ago — so I suppose their options are either to fuel the hype or fade away. Many still seem to believe, without a hint of irony, that they’re on some sort of futuristic mission for the salvation of music. The festival program guide was full of this hagiographic, self aggrandising bollocks. This is the glaring problem for the festival: that the Detroit sound is, well, kind of boring now. Despite supposedly being the music of the future, it is sounding purely historical. They needed more fresh talent, not just the old men.