deepchild

Berlin to Miami

Friday, July 9th, 2010 | deepchild live and dj sets, reflections

I’m in the skies, only an hour from Miami now, having departed Berlin at 8am this morning. Listenin’ to homeboy Hugh Wilson’s new album, The Third Sea. Contemporary pop-rock with surprising depth, belying its radio-friendly tone and hi-fi production values. It’s honestly refreshing to hear such an accessible hook-heavy musical-framework subverted with some genuine lyrical substance. To my ears, the homage here to U2s early works, especially The Joshua Tree, are evident, and I can’t help but feel warmed by this…

I can’t help but smile by the wealth of musical-talent I’m surrounded by, and the utter diversity of my artist-friends. Hugh’s most certainly cut from a classic pop-cloth, and plying his trade in New York, whilst working concurrently on advertising-gigs, singing and writing for soda-pop companies to subsidize what is surely one of the most difficult industries to turn a coin within’. Lord knows how traditional singer-songwriters manage to support themselves…

Meanwhile, I chuckle in the knowledge that, for many years, I tooled and tweaked the graphic content for so many advertising companies and multinationals also. I started to feel my heart shrink and dry though. Moreover, I confess, I didn’t have the emotional tenacity to withstand the feeling that I was selling stuff that people didn’t need, to people who didn’t need it, overseen by companies who didn’t actually care about their product. Of course, the irony of sliding into the, ahem, *morally righteous* world of dj-culture is not lost on me either. I do so-much love electronic-music though, and my ridiculously gracious extended musical-community.

It’s the late-nights, alcohol and necessity to be sustainably engaging which I find the most challenging. And so….on my way to Miami, for only a few days, where I’m paid to play music I love at several beachfront clubs, in the height of summer. I’m told that this is ‘living the dream’, and I’m certainly not arrogant enough to complain.

And yet…and yet…I’ve honestly never bought into these mythologies of affluence and aspiration. In actuality, it was the notion of flaunted privilege and ‘artistic fetishism’, which repelled me so strongly from a great deal of pop/rock/dance-music culture when I was younger. The self-important pantheon of artistic ‘entitlement’ (who’s twin-sister is, of course, that of ‘nihilism as liberation’) is, thankfully passing away, becoming remolded in the blinding light of new-media.

When the tools of production are shared around more liberally, so many have realized that the sublime joy of ‘art-making’ is not merely the preserve of the rich, famous, nihilistic or ‘chosen few’. As sure as birdsong exists, and the shamans countless cultures have spun in ritual abandon, we ARE all the artists, and we are all the art.

Commerce is, another matter entirely. Hugh says that ‘the industry is hurting’. In terms of ‘industry’, especially in its traditional incarnation, he is, of course, correct.

But ‘the industry’ never was one of stasis, and any security it promised was found only by traversing dark hallways, rigged with trapdoors, tripwires and cold, unrelenting fluorescent lighting.

The ‘industries’ golden-years of commerce were also accompanied by a distinctly ‘closed model’ of advertising and distribution - radio-play monopolists, advertising strategists and media-format pimps all drunk at the same swingers-nights, and a wider culture of western aspiration not yet fundamentally frayed. When media is so centralized, we’ll buy anything, and we’ll become easily co-opted into moralizing about what is beyond morality. Our stories.

The wider-reality is that, in terms of job-security, all who work in the western-world, especially those who trade in information, have been used to the reality of multi-skilling for decades now. I experienced this for years as a designer/digital-whore, and much more so did many of my contemporaries, particularly those on the cusp of the ‘gen-X / gen-Y’ divide, who neural-pathways weren’t seared with digital literacy from their first years. Adapt or die. For better or worse, this seems like a radical contrast from the faith in corporate-loyalty, which my grandparent’s generation took for granted.

Enough already. I’m almost in Miami….

Some new dates just confirmed:

9 Jul 2010  (USA) The Cleveland, Miami
10 Jul 2010 (USA) Privelege Club, Naples, Florida
17 Jul 2010 (DE) deepchild @ Trapez Labelnacht, Cologne
24 Jul 2010 (DE) Berghain, Berlin
23 Sep 2010 (US) deepchild LIVE @ DECIBEL Festival, Seattle
30 Sep 2010 (MEXICO) - LIVE set AM CLUB
1 Oct 2020 (MEXICO) - D- set JAGER ROOM
7 Oct 2010 (US) deepchild, DJ-set @ Endup, Sanfrancisco

Tags: deepchild, Florida, Miami, novitech

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