It was just a couple days after Dan Bell had played Cambridge, that M_nus artist Troy Pierce, also known as Louderbach and one-third of Run Stop Restore, came by to play a set in downtown Boston on January 25th. As it often is with these one-off gigs, I am heading towards a place I’ve never been before, the top floor of a club called Felt on the outskirts of Chinatown. This place is pretty posh looking and probably is home to many more hip-hop nights than techno parties. But hey, they are offering free drinks.Oh. And the place has an excellent sound system, as well. There is nothing worse than dancing and trying to envelop yourself in the groove because the sound is too weak to smother you by itself. Pierce goes on a little before midnight and is playing and mixing new tracks from his laptop all night long, so it’s gladly not a night where any of my rampant music geek desires to have tracks identified shows up. With my brain free to roam, Pierce throws down a great opening half-hour that swirls from funky to nearly gothic techno, yet curiously the momentum is a bit stolid, as every track has practically the same stark, pinpoint kick drum and thick, mechanical hi-hat. So after about a solid hour of this, people are already starting to leave and Pierce almost seems to admit defeat by playing some vapidly abstract tech-house that encourages the remaining crowd to head towards the bar.

But a funny thing happened at the end of Pierce’s set for me, as I returned out to a mostly empty dance floor. Yes, some of the funk and even some neo-italo elements reappeared at the end, but what got me excited about the rest of the set was the enthusiasm of the two people dancing next to me, who I’d never met before but were still egging me on to dance with them. Just as friends feed of their common interests, a lot of my dancing adrenalin comes from the energy of other people in the room. By the end, my boundless energy even surprised myself, it really didn’t matter what music Pierce was playing, or how good it was, I had hit such an empathic high with those around me that all I needed was for music to be there to let myself go wild.

[Michael F. Gill]

A high, clicking percussion sound starts, followed swiftly by a nimble bassline. Everybody knows this one, several people whooping while others rattle tambourines, bang on cowbells and shake homemade noisemakers. The song is “Expansions,” by Lonnie Liston Smith, a piece of cosmic soul-jazz recorded for Flying Dutchman records in 1974, and one of the host’s signature songs. “Expand your mind to understand / We all must live in peace,” Donald Smith sings, and there is no doubt that everyone dancing on the packed floor is mouthing those words and feeling, if only here and now, that sentiment.

David Mancuso stands at floor level between two turntables placed on stacks of cinder blocks. He puts a record on, lets it end and then plays another record. As the night progresses, people actually clap at the end of certain songs. The volume level is the lowest I’ve ever heard in a “club,” but the sound is impeccably clear, speakers placed above floor level on all sides of the room. The bass is thick and resonant but not overbearing, and the treble and midrange are perfectly tweaked to allow dancers to enjoy the nuances of each song, rather than bludgeoning them with constant thumpage. Referring to himself as a “musical host,” not a DJ, David approaches the sound as a whole, concentrating on the experience of his guests rather than engaging in displays of mixing technique.

Of course, Mancuso has earned the right to call himself whatever he likes. His first “Love Saves the Day” party (the capitals are important here) was on Valentine’s Day, 1970, and he’s rarely stopped since. Begun in his own converted loft apartment (hence the informal name of the event) on 647 Broadway, north of Houston St., the initial house parties were just that—handmade invitations were passed out, the punchbowl was laced, balloons were inflated, and the dancing commenced. Later, the move to Prince St. and the rise of disco brought on a slightly more conventional approach, but the home-like atmosphere (one of the old school crowd reminisces about the showers at the Prince St. ‘Loft!’) remained. In the thirty-six years since David first brought friends together to eat, drink, and listen to records, much has changed. The music played tonight and then (a mix of African, jazz, soul, funk and rock) would coalesce into ‘disco’ and then ‘house’ and so on, until the average person on the street could hear the phrase ‘dance music’ and immediately have an idea what that meant. In 1970, such was not the case.

“I been livin’ in a world of fantasy, said I’m goin’ back, goin’ back to reality”

This is the second time I’ve been here, to a rented space above a Ukranian restaurant on 2nd Avenue in newly sanitized Manhattan. The first time was in February of last year, for the 35th anniversary party, and I was full of high expectations and uncertain notions of the experience to come. As we headed downtown, my girlfriend and partner-in-disco April asked me, and I wondered, “Do you think we’ll be the youngest people there?” Laughable now in light of our experience, it was a valid enough question at the time. Once we were there, though, forget about it—every time you try to get a bead on the Loft crowd, all you have to do is look around to have it changed. Black, white, Asian, Hispanic, young, old, scene veteran, newbie, child, adult, people in wheelchairs, men, women, gays, straights, hairy hippies, and slim professionals, in all the world of dancing there is no crowd like a Loft crowd. Period.

The Sunday evening begins at 5 o’clock, airy but slowly pulsing instrumental jazz forming a backdrop as the revelers arrive, many sitting at the circular tables ringing the room, couples with or without their children, groups of friends, total strangers meeting and greeting. Out on the dancefloor, the serious few are already stretching and getting into a fluid, limber groove somewhere in between ballet, aerobics and jazz dance. Steadily, gradually and with unparalleled grace, David picks the beat up, widening the scope to take in Afrobeat, a sublimely funky hi-life track, percolating ambient techno, and a killer version of the evergreen “My Favorite Things.” The dancers begin to gather underneath an inspiring display of balloons, thickly woven together around a giant discoball like strands of DNA.

“Reach… reach… reach / You’re almost there…”

As the night progresses, David plays nothing but classics, great song after great song, to an almost frustrating degree—trying to leave to mop sweat off of my face or get a drink of water, I find myself pulled right back, unable to resist one jam or another. The dancefloor fills up and never thins out, but people here move and let others move with an unspoken respect. Stepping on someone’s foot in my ecstatic rump-shaking, I turn to apologize but they’re smiling and waving it away already. When the crowd of dancers is at its wildest and thickest, a circle clears near the discoball and I see a tiny girl, maybe five years old breakdancing to the cheers of the onlookers. After a few minutes, her father finally drags her away, laughing, knowing there was no need to worry—everyone around her giving her space, smiling and clapping as she tried to execute a 360, making sure no one stepped in without seeing her.

Though the dance scene has undergone a bolt of fresh energy in recent years, the influence has been one of a more skeptical, dark nature. Not necessarily a bad thing, given the times we are living in, but one which ignores a vast wealth of human emotion which resides at dance music’s core. Throughout the night we hear songs from sources as varied as Chuck Mangione, Depeche Mode and Stevie Wonder, but all resonate with love, optimism and a desire for the kind of communal joy that is the ultimate goal of any quality dancefloor. Much has been made in the critical writing on dance music culture of the inapproachability of this kind of spiritual unity. If the Loft doesn’t put the lie to that kind of thinking, then there is nothing on this Earth that could.

“Loving you/ Until the day that you are me and I am you/ Now ain’t that loving you?”

When we leave on that first night in February, we walk down the stairs opening onto 2nd Avenue, fallen balloons clutched firmly in hand. As the heavy door swings behind us, we discover that it’s snowing, and has been for a while. Walking through the pristine flakes, watching as they descend and liquify on the (comparatively) hot pavement, I am immediately struck by the difference between tonight and so many others. We evaluate everything so constantly today, so quickly and so indiscriminately even a believer like me is judging something while it happens. It’s only as I walk out into the black/white/red smear of Manhattan midnight that I come to realize I hadn’t wasted any time thinking about my experience as it occurred.

“Now that we found love what are we gonna do with it?”

[Mallory O’Donnell]

It’s Sunday, January 23rd. There’s a ticking in my head. It’s been there for awhile, seemingly acting as a subconscious pulse that’s reliable when life can seem overly dramatic or overly boring. As I travel to and fro, the desire grows to give an external shell to this pulse, to share its energy with those around me. For those times when I am not surrounded by friends or people who care about me, the constant rhythm of house music is this outgrowth of my inner clock. Four on the floor: it’s the eternal optimist.

Where do these thoughts come from? I try not to interpret and deconstruct electronic dance music as if it were a riddle, I much prefer to work off the feelings it provides me and the reactions it provokes as a partial set of blueprints relating to who I am. These are things that I remind myself off as I get ready to see Daniel Bell spin over at the Phoenix Landing in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I feel when I go out I have this side of me that is very cerebral and knowing, wanting to slowly analyze the music and environment around me, as well as a side that’s very loose and loopy, letting the night just “happen” to me. It can be hard to let go of this brainy side when you are a music geek, easily charmed that an episode of Law & Order revolved around a person with the last name Speicher.

I arrive a bit late, but just in time to see Dan go on. He played a good set here last January that was mostly straight minimal techno, with a couple of vocal wildcards like Sexual Harassment’s “I Need A Freak” & Freaks’ “Turning Orange 2 Please U.” He’s even better tonight, diversifying things with snippets of minimal vocal house that act as brief respites from the more bangin’ techno tracks. It’s worth noting that since Bell avoids any sense of “melody” throughout the set, when the rippling acoustic guitars of Luciano’s Salif Keita remix come in at the very end of the set, it’s not only a refreshing shock, it’s almost out of character.

This brings me to a point I was discussing at the end of the night with local producer Mike Uzzi, who, after gently chiding me on my lack of knowledge about Stewart Walker’s Persona label, remarked how expansive and diverse Dan’s set was. That Mike was able to notice this is testament to how finely tuned his ears are, because during the best moments of Dan’s set, when I found myself really immersed and being carried by the music, my ears tend to tune out all the shifts from sub-genre to sub-genre, and enjoy the set as one large, level plane. I wonder how many people dancing around me were attuned to the subtle shifts in the music and how many were oblivious, and if there was any difference in each group’s level of enjoyment. Perhaps I should hand out written surveys at the end of the show alongside those people who hand out flyers to leaving clubgoers. Perhaps I am thinking about this too much. Hmm, I think so.

As I’m walking out, I have a chance to talk briefly with Dan, who is more laid-back and down-to-earth than you’d expect for someone who just threw down a few hours of obscure techno and funky pinpricks. In contrast, Fred Gianelli (another Boston-based techno producer) is standing next to us launching into an unprompted story about how his lesbian cousin saved his life by pulling him away from a horse that started attacking his head for no reason. While I’m really tired as I arrive home, I’m greeted by a comforting sound as I’m about to fall asleep: a pulsating ticking in my head.

[Michael F. Gill]