Boston Comes Together for EDM

posted in: Music News

Electonic music is blowing up on a national scale, so we decided to take a closer look at what’s going on right in our backyard. The week-long electronic music fest Together is back for the third year in a row, and boasts a stronger lineup than ever before. With headliners ranging from RJD2 and Nero to Photek and Treasure Fingers, there’s a flavor for every ear bud.

The Boston-based festival includes nightly shows at local venues in addition to daytime panels that are free to the public and cover a wide variety of topics”with highlights like “confessions of a teenage synth hacker”, a drum production master class, a DJ/producer tutorial being sponsored by Dubspot and copyright law.

If you’re in the area, be sure to check out the schedule for all the events going on this week.

Last Friday, I headed down to the Together headquarters in Central Square, where I got to hang out with some of the good folks putting on this electronic music festival, to get an idea of what exactly Together is all about.

After checking out the artwork, grooving to the disco-house tunes streaming from the DJ booth and talking about all things music with the always-friendly Together staff, I got a chance to sit down with co-founder and creative director David Day, to get his view of the EDM community. Read on for some insight into this world through the eyes of someone who’s seen it all before.

OS: Where have you witnessed the EDM scene go since you got involved, and where is it moving?

DD: When I got into it, I was at a record store called Other Music in NYC, and what was really big at the time was minimal techno, like Plastikman¦ and by big I mean moderately popular with a small percentage of the community. But it did kind of set the stage for this aesthetic explosion. By the mid 2000’s electro exploded, like Justice. And that made it cool to what they call rage out. So now the people who usually associated EDM with drugs were now blacked out drunk, raging. So that was a thing. Then dubstep came along soon after electro, it crept out of London, and we know what happened with that¦basically dubstep and electro merged to form this beast of huge proportions. To me, we call it Together because what divided music fans was that kind of aesthetic¦ ya know “drum and bass is better than house, or electro is better than techno”, whatever. But when electro and then dubstep happened, all of those divisions were essentially decimated. To me, all music is valid. And everyone takes music very personally because it’s very important to being human. I find that it’s much easier to catch flies with honey¦ so we’re open and really happy to host any and all fans of EDM. And at the end of the day, it’s all made by computers, or at least a part of it is. That’s what we’re trying to expose, is the creativity of computerized music, that it’s not cold and artificial. And it’s very hard to make, I think there’s a stigma that electronic music is really easy to create¦But if you check out our panels you’ll discover it’s actually very difficult¦or difficult to do well.

OS: I agree. I think what the average listener doesn’t grasp is that this stuff actually takes a lot of skill and musicianship to produce, and whether or not you like his music you’ve got to respect a guy like Skrillex¦

DD: Well, I fucking love Skrillex. He’s a great example of someone who knows his shit, you know, he’s not an idiot. I honestly consider him to be Elvis, he’s legitimately that big and will have that much influence. The way Elvis was to rock ‘n’ roll is the way Skrillex is to EDM. And God bless him, I hope he doesn’t die on the toilet from eating fried banana sandwiches¦

OS: As someone who got to witness EDM get big in late ’90s, do you think this most recent explosion will last?

DD: Oh I totally think its here to stay. Its kind of like what jazz was in the depression, a way for people to escape, do drugs, drink, go to the speakeasys¦but then jazz sort of solidified itself in the mainstream. And I think it was the same way in the recession… everyone didn’t want to watch the news, they just wanted to party, and party their face off at clubs, and the one industry that exploded during the recession was EDM. While hip hop tours were  being cancelled and rock tours were shrinking, EDM had 230,000 people at a festival in Las Vegas each spend[ing] about $300 on a ticket, add in a couple waters, t-shirts, you’re starting to talk about a multi-billion dollar industry. And that’s the point, we can create jobs with this, its not just stupid party music. This can be an industry that can sustain itself, and provide people with¦food. People gotta eat.

From the limited time I had at the Together Center, it became quite apparent that this was about more than just throwing a couple good parties. The folks running the show at Together have a much larger vision for what they want the festival to become, and with the success they have had in past years, we’re sure that this year will bring them closer to their goal of a community driven art, tech, and music fest for all ages and all genres.

Now that is what we call bringing people Together.