It’s hard to read, write, or talk about the state of contemporary dance music nowadays without these two words making an appearance.
1. Hard
2. Speed
Users of such include, but are not limited to: critics, enthusiasts, casual enjoyers, that guy you met in the club who keeps telling you about his favourite Boiler Room sets, and argumentative 40 year olds. Whilst there’s much debate regarding the specifics of what exactly this super speedy genre taking the world by storm should be labelled (hard techno? speed garage?) there’s a unanimous agreement from all parties that dance music is only getting faster.
Social media’s pervasive demand for easier cultural digestion, the ease with which the indifferent copycat can produce, release, and promote a track, and an obsession with elevating the DJ to a kind of superhuman status: all potential contributing factors to dance music’s supercharged accelerationism. All speculations that aren’t necessarily new, or that interesting. What’s more interesting are the things neglected in the pursuit of mass appeal.
- Groove
- Grit
Not that all good dance music must contain both; or that every current release is missing them. However, if you examine dance music globally, the resounding lack of both is stunning. And ironic. Historically “fast” genres such as techno, drum and bass, trance, jungle, electro, and breakbeat were literally birthed from or at least heavily inspired by their groovier forefathers. The process of creation has become breezier in dance music, too – the original grittiness of genres like ghettotech, jersey and Baltimore club at risk in its more homogeneous, uninspired, newer editions.
Enter HONEYPAQQ Vol. 1: the new mixtape from Detroit’s HiTech. Self proclaimed and legitimate representatives of the “new sound of Detroit”, HiTech borrow from ghettotech forbearers with an eye still on today. Integral to ghettotech is a cheeky crudeness which HiTech embrace wholeheartedly through wild, live MCing. It’s one informed especially by modern hip-hop sounds. Manipulating, repeating, distorting and pitch adjusting phrases and words give the vocal contributions on the tape a kind of percussive element.
And while HONEYPAQQ Vol.1 is wildly fast in tempo, its complex drums and basslines are groovy, soulful and deep too. It’s not a tradeoff – both can be true. HiTech perfectly juggles dance music’s storied past and its exhilarating present.
Words by Madi Martin-Bygrave