In a previous In Our House column, I talked about music and obsession, and how being a fan of dance music can easily bend these fixations into something overwhelming. Lately I’ve been noticing how intertwined and reflective house, techno, and even disco can be outside of a club context.

It started when I read about a local arts project in which young kids document their entire day with a movie camera in order to create material for a mini documentary about their lives. They would re-watch each tape, gaining a sort of omnipotent view of the day, and notice little tics and movements of themselves and other people that they would have never noticed otherwise. Over time, they became more aware of their internal process, and how they carried about their everyday lives. It struck me rather personally, as I often engage with things on a minute level, where everyday experiences are sometimes even more important than the big picture.

It’s not hard to make the connection from these mini-documentaries to track-based or texture-based dance music, both being games of inches, compilations of precise moments. While I haven’t gone as far as carrying a movie camera with me, I have done similar experiments with a tape recorder, and with consciously being aware of the moment I am in. Feeling the ground for each step that I make, following the stock ticker of passing thoughts in my head, noticing the shapes of shadows, recognizing the patterns in which people move their eyebrows: these are just some of the things that can make something as mundane as riding a bus have a sense of individual meaning. I’ve also have a fascination with the rhythm and contours of language and words, which often overlap chaotically in public spaces, but perhaps that is the subject of another column.

This acute sense is habitually reflected in the music I connect with. Whether it is a reggae dubplate or a cornball Italo track, the flicker of a hi-hat is frequently just as tangible as a sweeping chord change. A lot of musicians and music fans are striving for something big: a single, an album, a box set, something approaching a blanket statement. Myself, I’m looking to capture a second; to be able to divorce it from time and have it flutter my veins. If I can manage to better understand one second, I might fare better in improving each minute, hour, and day of my life.

I say this not on a soapbox, but as knowledge of my own experiences and connections with dance music and my own life, in hopes that even people with no interest for house or techno can understand where I’m coming from. To me, dance music is like a satellite I move around in self-reflection, with its immense attention to detail acting as a reminder about the impact that I have in every action I take. It’s a slow process, but I think it’s helping me understand myself better.

[Michael F. Gill]