The geeks come out

The geeks come out

19 June, 2008 | 7.38AM

• Written by: Ben Raven
• Filed under: Music News: geeks, history

Lets face it: We music geeks love to lord it up by uncovering a killer tune, but these days what amuses Ben Raven is more likely to be a gem from the past than a hot new white label.

Not so long ago things used to work a little differently. 

Being the smuggest DJ on the block was all about hawking the newest, freshest promo you could possibly lay your hands on.

For many it didn’t even matter if they were that great, so long as you could almost smell the burning plastic of the vinyl cutting room when you unleashed the track from its white label.

Dropping that super-hot-off-the-press track to the amazement of your peers was about as good as a trainspotting high could get (apart from maybe finding a £300 copy of a disco classic in a car boot sale).

In the late 1990s DJs like Sasha and Digweed even cut deals with producers to secure upfront tracks for their compilations to prevent other DJs from getting their hands on them ahead of the compilations release.

Now technology has changed all that irrevocably.

The world of digital downloads has sped up the process so fast that as soon as a track is promo’d or even mastered it’s often uploaded to a blog or doing the rounds of DJs swapshop circles.

Labels like Minus try to counter the problem by releasing tracks to DJs and the press the same day as the public, giving the ordinary DJ on the street just as much access to the latest music as the A-List DJ.

Dance music is finally democratising itself for better or for worse.

But that hasn’t stopped trainspotters from devising new ways of outdoing each other.

I’m quick to admit, I’m just as big a music geek as the next trainspotter. And I’m guessing if you’re reading this page then you’ll have to admit you are too.

It’s not a crime to admit that getting one up on your geek friends is one of electronic music’s most pleasurable benefits.

Now, however, scoring those geek trump cards is all about looking back, not forwards.

Amongst my inner circle of geek friends, the past year’s musical jousting has mostly involved uncovering old tackle from the depths of our record collections.

But sites like Beatport have accelerated this trend into overdrive.

Discovering that forgotten B-side of a Mood II Swing single or Mike Dunn remix is the new blagging a copy of the latest X-Press 2 white label.

As more and more labels upload their back catalogues, suddenly dance music’s past is seemingly much more of an alluring place than its present.

It largely explains why the underground has swung back to a deep, funky mid-1990s house sound in reaction to the prevalence of minimal techno over the past few years.

Take a bird’s-eye view of the phenomenon and you’ll see that it’s almost as if dance music’s various past trends are all converging to form the present.

The future, it seems, currently lies in the past.

But then that’s no great new phenomenon in dance music either. Confused?

Acid house, for example, owes its existence to the rediscovery of old technology.

The Roland 303 was a largely ignored piece of kit until house music’s founding fathers began tinkering with its effects parameters to create the infamous acid squelches that ignited a generation.

So perhaps amongst all this uncovering of the past the key to the future lies waiting to unlock the imagination of a new producer and inspire something completely new.

Until then, lets put our creative geek brains to good use.

If you’ve been mining Beatport’s back catalogues for lost classics, then drop some suggestions of tracks in the comments box below and let’s see what musical gems we can rediscover.

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