(Wickedlocal) By 11 p.m. on any given night in Cambridge’s Central Square, lines form in familiar places from the Middlesex to the Middle East, the newly opened Naga to the Phoenix Landing. The sounds emanating from each may be different but there’s one thing in common: the throbbing rhythmic beat and the sea of sweaty patrons pouring out at night’s end.
For David Day, co-founder of the MMMMaven Project, electronic dance music – a blanket term coined in the last several years to cover a style of music that’s anything but one genre – it’s more than just a passing trend: it’s the future of music.
“Just like jazz was born out of the Great Depression, I think electronic dance music is a way for people to escape and have fun,” Day said. And just like the Berklee College of Music was established as a way to teach jazz, Day said his hope for MMMMaven, Cambridge’s first and only school for DJs and electronic music production, is to do exactly that with electronic dance music.
Day and co-founder Alex Maniatis first called Central Square home when they moved the headquarters of the Together Festival, a week-long music bonanza featuring mostly electronic-based musicians from a cross-section of subgenres, from Boston to Cambridge. For them, the decision was easy.
“During the day, it’s an amazingly crazy, busy place, but at night, people either go home or come (to Central Square),” Maniatis said. “We looked for some bigger spaces in Boston, but we got to know the local government and the local businesses a lot more and we found that it was the place for us, not only because all of our venues are in walking distance, but it’s also a hub where people go out at night.”
MMMMaven will begin formal four-week classes at the end of the month but they said they already have plans to expand their adult classes to younger audiences after receiving an outpouring of requests before classes even got underway.
The complete embrace of the new school didn’t come as such a surprise to the co-founders who have seen the electronic dance music scene grow from underground to mainstream in just a few short years, despite the fact that it’s been around for literally decades.
Deep roots
When DJ Lenore Fauliso first asked for a night at the Phoenix Landing in 1999 to showcase drum and bass, a form of dance music focused largely on densely layered percussive elements that came out of Britain in the early 1990s, there weren’t any other nights like it.
But for nearly 14 years running, Fauliso and what she calls her extended family, have kept the night alive longer than other drum and bass night in the country.
“That was before things were based on social media. A lot of it was word of mouth and having to go out to other nights, which we were doing anyway because we were already part of the underground electronic music scene,” Fauliso said. “Back then, the music was a lot more underground and nights were more dedicated to specific genres…The way things have branched out lately is to have more multi-genre nights, but we’ve maintained our underground roots.”
The splintering and re-branding of particular genres or styles of electronic music is par for the course to electronic music fans who have seen the rise and fall of particular genres come and go like ocean waves.
Jason Trefts, the newest addition to hip hop promotions company Leedz Edutainment, which just launched it’s electronic arm CRUSH at the Middle East this moth, said the big difference with electronic music now from when it first rose in the late 90’s is just how much it’s growing.
“We’re growing as the scene grows,” Trefts said. “I spend hours researching who we should book and there are still countless acts that I had no idea about whereas I feel like not even a couple of years ago, I knew everybody.”
Randy Deshaies, co-promoter of the Phoenix Landing’s Re:Set Wednesdays, said he had already seen the crest rise and fall on electronic music.
“I’ve already gone through the first wave and I see a lot similarities. I see the same things that were happening in 1999 happening now,” Deshaies said. “Maybe this is the start of a new age of music. It’s definitely true that different pop songs have embraced the aesthetics of electronic music, but we’re got have to keep working to sustain it.”
Digital age
In many ways, fans of the genre said its no coincidence that the rise of electronic music coincided with the rise of the Internet.
“You’re making music on the computer and you can send your tracks out to hundreds of people instantly. That kind of adaptive, collaborative nature of electronic music has propelled innovation so quickly,” Day said, citing websites like SoundCloud that have fostered the growth of electronic music and UStream, a site that literally streams electronic dance parties live.
“It’s a million times easier to share music than ever before,” said Conor Loughman, co-founder of The Brain Trust, an electronic music and hip hop record label that frequently books shows at the Middle East.
Trefts said it represents a democratization of music. He pointed to Coachella, a three-day music festival featuring a variety of artists and genres from indie rock to hip hop, which closed its show with an electronic group not signed to any record label, the Swedish House Mafia.
“There wasn’t anyone telling you to listen to their music, they came up completely independently,” Trefts said. “That’s exciting to me that it’s really the people’s choice and it’s the first music that’s truly speaking for the modern consumer.”
Add to that a college crowd that’s constantly regenerating itself in a city known for its ability to innovate with technology and Day said it’s certainly no surprise that Cambridge is home to a wide variety of venues bumping rhythms.
Central Square Business Association president Robin Lapidus said she considered MMMMaven a technology start up more than anything else.
“It’s the marriage of technology and art,” Lapidus said. “There’s no other place it belongs.”
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