Daniel Avery: "Everything in life takes patience and dance music is no exception"

A particular memory has overtaken my thoughts recently: one late-summer evening in 2005, with a small group of friends, I made the London pilgrimage to fabric. We couldn’t afford a hotel and got the first train back so we could work our day jobs at the local record shop on no sleep. The line-up at the club included acts who had never played in the country before and whose early 12”s we had been importing in, eagerly waiting for the post to arrive every morning. It’s far from an unusual story, but that night spent getting lost walking back to Waterloo truly meant something to us. That’s the thing about electronic music: while it has an immediate effect on the body, the culture surrounding it has the ability to run deep into your life.

The endless stream of heartbreaking news in 2016 proved tiring for most of us, and proved a lot of folks would rather believe a sensationalist headline than take time to investigate a reality. It was also a year in which the electronic music scene was yet again attacked for being sordid and shallow, something that most people “will grow out of one day”. Now is the time for all of us to argue the opposite as forcefully as we can. Dance music is founded on the idea of patience, and it is that virtue which should be treasured in today’s society.