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.

To begin at the beginning: dance tracks are long. They take their time to reveal themselves. Furthermore, in order for a club to function, a crowd needs to submit their trust. To enter into a dark building and be expected to lose yourself, for hours on end, to music you’ve never heard before is in itself an act of great patience. This is the very thing that excites me most about our culture. Witnessing a DJ create an atmosphere in a room from the ground up takes time and effort from everyone present, but when the pivotal moments hit, your watch stops ticking. Modern technology is undeniably incredible, but I feel we should be mindful of the immediacy and instant gratification it brings us. Searching hard for a record and adding it to your collection has a weight that is difficult to describe. Researching the background to a scene from the past can lead you to discover new heroes; giving yourself over to an album for repeated listens, day-on-day, requires energy – but it’s those records that eventually become a part of you.

Clubs are special: they provide a space where a personal obsession is shared with hundreds or thousands of others in an accepting and inclusive environment. In a world where knee-jerk internet outrage has become a deafening noise in our collective heads, electronic music is a constant reminder for us to take a breath together. A reminder that everything worthwhile in life takes
time and patience, and if 2017 turns out anything like 2016, we’re going to need it!