About 12:30 a.m., we visited this place and found approximately 5,000 people, colored and white, men attired in women’s clothes, and vice versa. The affair, we were informed, was a “fag/masquerade ball.” This is an annual affair where the white and colored fairies assemble together with their friends, this being attended also by a certain respectable element who go here to see the sights.

This is an excerpt from a 1928 report filed by investigators with the Committee of Fourteen, a citizens group that fought to crack down on illegal alcohol sales inside New York City hotels. The investigators had stopped by a club in Harlem one night in February, unwittingly dropping in on a gender-bending bacchanal: the Hamilton Lodge drag ball.

Affairs like the Hamilton Lodge ball were a precursor to the modern ballroom scene, a performative, queer and largely African-American counterculture that still thrives in many U.S. cities, including Baltimore. The documentary Paris Is Burning captured the scene at its height in 1980s New York City, and Madonna — riding a wave of house music that soundtracked ballroom performances — got everybody voguing like a ballroom star with her 1990 hit “Vogue.”

Oct. 15, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art celebrates ballroom culture with a half-day event dedicated exclusively to the art form. The featured guest is Keith “Ebony” Holt, a veteran ballroom performer who’s also a youth outreach coordinator for Baltimore’s health department. He represents the Baltimore chapter of the House of Ebony — essentially a clique, or a family, of gay black men who perform in ballroom competitions.

Bandwidth spoke to Holt and the Smithsonian’s Nicole Shivers in advance of Saturday’s soirée. The event promises to borrow a grandiose aesthetic from Nigerian-British artist Yinka Shonibare’s short film, Un Ballo in Maschera, on view now at the museum.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Bandwidth: Keith, can you talk about what ballroom means to young, gay black men? 

Keith “Ebony” Holt: Ballroom, basically, was created for [them]. It was a place that we could call our own [where] we felt safe. [In ballroom,] you could be whatever it is that you wanna be. As we all know, when a lot of young, black gay males or transgenders come out to their families, sometimes their families are not with it. They may out them or they may be like, “We no longer want to communicate with [you].” And for a person that may be 15, 16 years old — or basically whatever age you are — that really hits you hard. So the ballroom scene … gave you another family outside of your biological family.

“With this event, we’re in one of the biggest museums in the world. Now our form of underground art is being welcomed into the mainstream.” —Keith “Ebony” Holt

OK, so the film Paris Is Burning documented the ’80s ballroom scene in New York. When we talk about ballroom now, what are we referring to?

Holt: We’re talking about the whole entire scene. Voguing, of course, gets the most attention because it’s fun to watch and you have people like Madonna that came out with it, or you have Vogue Evolution on America’s Best Dance Crew. However, it’s so many other categories — such as runway, or realness, which is basically how well a transgender person may be able to blend into society. Paris Is Burning … is kinda outdated. The younger generations definitely took it and made it their own. So it has completely, completely changed. It’s not the same underground scene that it once was in Paris Is Burning.

Do you still do a lot of performing?

Holt: I do perform. I still walk. Voguing really isn’t my category. My main category is actually runway. You can kinda look at it like Project Runway mixed with America’s Next Top Model. Runway at the Smithsonian [requires you to take] a piece of African art. It can either be a painting or a sculpture, and you have to make your outfit basically represent whatever art that you chose to create. It really takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of brain energy for you to really sit and really create something such as that. Then… you actually have to walk like a model would.

Nicole, why did the Smithsonian want to do a ballroom event?

Nicole Shivers, National Museum of African Art: As the curator for performing arts, I’m always looking for something new, innovative and engaging to dispel the myths, the clichés of Africa. Being a big fan of Yinka Shonibare and especially this video piece, Un Ballo in Maschera, which looks at the grandness of things, what better fit than to look at the ballroom scene, where they can show off and show out?

Can you talk about the African influence within ballroom?

Shivers: The traditional masquerade, or the traditional theater-in-the-round [are African influences]. Also, it’s a way of conveying a message [and] honoring someone, so I think those are the two main similarities.

Holt: And I think that with just the LGBT community, we wear so many masks on a daily basis, especially when we go out. So many people look down on the LGBT community for various reasons, so we have to put different masks on when we just walk outside our house. With this event, we’re in one of the biggest museums in the world. Now we can finally take our masks off and say that we are finally being accepted. Now our form of underground art is being welcomed into the mainstream. Even if it’s just for one night, it’s still the beginning.

The Voguing Masquerade Ball begins with a panel discussion at 4:30 p.m. at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art. The ball starts at 7:30 p.m. Free and open to the public.

Shown at top: A still from Voguing For a Cause, produced by Great Big Story

Growing up outside of Detroit, the birthplace of techno, Servito had plenty of peripheral exposure to underground dance music, but it was at Club Heaven, an after-hours spot at Woodward and Seven Mile, where he first witnessed the full power of a gay club environment. “It was queer, it was inner-city, it was black, it was trans. You walk into a place like that, being a kid from the suburbs, and it’s predominantly black and gay and Ken Collier is pumping incredible records,” he remembers. “Just being able to witness that energy was special to me.”

Heaven closed in the early ’90s, and Ken Collier passed away in 1996 (due to complications from diabetes), but he was part of a pioneering generation of queer DJs that ushered dance music through its earliest days. Alongside legendary figures like Larry Levan, Frankie Knuckles and Ron Hardy, he operated during a time when these beats were largely being created, played and, most importantly, danced to by queer people of color. Storied clubs like the Paradise Garage in New York and The Warehouse and The Music Box in Chicago featured undeniably brilliant tunes, but they were moere than just sites for dancing and ushering in influential musical movements — they were places of respite for the queer community. Long before any notions of “safe space” had entered the mainstream, these dance floors also played host to conversations, both verbal and non-, about exactly what it meant to be queer.

In contrast, today’s celebrated dance culture seems almost overwhelmingly straight. Although queer artists continue to lead electronic music’s push into bold new directions, the sounds being created by young contemporary acts like Arca, Lotic, Total Freedom and others tend to eschew traditional dance floor formulas in favor of something more abrasive, experimental, future-facing and conceptual in nature. Compared to what this new generation is coming up with, the sounds of house, techno, and disco have been labeled as downright conservative — and, given their relatively static formulas, the charge certainly carries some weight.

“Those genres are in an era of refinement, not so much innovation,” says Carlos Souffront, a San Francisco-based, Detroit-reared DJ who, like Servito, was also lucky enough to see Ken Collier work his magic at Heaven. From a compositional standpoint, these classic dance floor sounds may no longer seem revolutionary, but they do represent a marked improvement over the ostentatious, Euro-flavored circuit music and Top 40 fodder that has dominated queer nightlife for much of the past two decades. “It was dreadful,” says Souffront, thinking back to his younger days in Detroit. “If I wanted to hang out with gay people, I had to tolerate the worst music that everyone else seemed to love. I always felt like an outsider in queer spaces, but I was desperately drawn to them.”

Honey Dijon, a transgender artist raised on house music in Chicago, shares a similar sentiment while reflecting on her experiences DJing in New York during the late ’90s and much of the ’00s: “I had to make a living as a DJ … so I had to do a lot of compromising and incorporate a lot of [pop] music into my sets. It was really painful for me because I consider pop music to be corporate music …. I respected Madonna and the work she did, and I liked her earlier work, but I felt that if she put out a record, it was something that I had to play in order to appeal to people, especially to gay audiences, [regardless of] whether the record was good or bad.”

Simply put, from the mid-1990s forward, much of queer nightlife suffered from a deficit of taste, something that can be traced back to the devastating impact of AIDS. “A lot of people might have bridged the gap with an oral history of where I came from, but there are not a lot of people left from that generation to hand that down,” says Chris Cruse, who organizes an underground, queer-oriented party called Spotlight in Los Angeles. “There are some, but maybe they weren’t as hedonistic as the people who ended up disappearing in the ’80s and ’90s.” Ron Like Hell, who DJs as one half of Wrecked and works as a buyer at New York’s Academy Records store, remembers the impact that one mentor, a DJ from St. Louis who died in 1992, had on him back in his hometown of Albuquerque. Ironically, he can’t recall the man’s name, but the knowledge passed down remains fresh in his mind. “We had many great long conversations about clubbing and his personal life,” says Ron Like Hell. “He really loved records and clubbing and told me about [Chicago house legend] Larry Heard — no one else did. If he had kept on living, he could definitely be carrying some of that fire into today’s conversation about queer history.”

During the height of the HIV/AIDS era, circuit parties played a central role in queer nightlife, initially as benefits during the worst throes of the crisis. Over time, however, they grew in size and scope, many of them becoming massive “fly in” events dominated by commercial music and what some found to be an alienating aesthetic. “For a lot of us, the imagery on the flyer — the shaved, smooth guy and shirtless, beautiful boys — isn’t really our identity,” says New York’s Ryan Smith, who works as a booking agent and serves as the other half of Wrecked. “We didn’t really feel comfortable on those dance floors. They didn’t feel like home to us, so a lot us were going to see parties in traditionally straight venues.” His DJ partner Ron Like Hell concurs: “60-80% of my club life has been all about preferring to go to more straight parties because of the musical talent [they brought]. These guys were preserving more of our gay disco dance music history than gay DJs were at that time.”

That history is important, and a new crop of queer DJs and promoters are taking steps to reclaim it. Most prominent among them is Honey Soundsystem, a San Francisco collective that simultaneously pushes new sounds while celebrating the legacy of queer dance music. Often explicitly. Through a series of parties and well-received reissues, the crew has been instrumental in spurring the resurgence of interest in synthesizer wizard Patrick Cowley, a brilliant Bay Area songwriter who collaborated with the disco star Sylvester and tragically passed away in 1982, an early victim of AIDS. In 2015, Honey Soundsystem teamed up with Red Bull Music Academy for an event celebrating four decades of queer nightlife at the long-running San Francisco gay club The Endup, and used its DJ residency at Chicago’s Smart Bar as a platform to create a multi-faceted exploration of gay culture called Generators.

And Honey Soundsystem is by no means alone in its efforts. In recent years, a network of like-minded queer and queer-positive parties has developed across the nation, including A Club Called Rhonda and Spotlight in Los Angeles, Wrecked in New York, Dickslap in Seattle, Macho City in Detroit, Honcho in Pittsburgh and Men’s Room, Queen! and Hugo Ball in Chicago, with additional club-nights continuing to pop up all the time. These events are by no means uniform, yet they do seem to share an affinity for tastefully curated programming, transitory environments, uninhibited sexual freedom and a soundtrack of classic (or at least classics-inspired) dance music.

While the music at these parties is in many ways looking backwards — some of the records being played are literally decades old, and even the newer songs on offer are often designed to emulate, or at least reference, the salad days of dance music — they can’t just be written off as exercises in nostalgia. Honey Soundystem co-founder Jacob Sperber cites the intrinsic value of playing a song that’s “written by a gay man, about a gay man,” while Cruse points to the artists that produced these records and the voices that populate them, even in sample form: “A lot of them are black women or black gay men. Those voices are important.”

Of course, queer history and culture goes well beyond music and nightlife, and for much of the past decade the dominant narrative has centered on the drive towards mainstream acceptance. The 2015 legalization of gay marriage stands as this movement’s crowning achievement and queer people are seemingly more visible and accepted than ever before within the context of American culture. Still, not everyone in queer circles is happy with what they see as the increasing normalization of their community. “I have no desire to be accepted or validated by someone who is heteronormative,” says Dijon. “If you look, [straight] relationship models haven’t worked out so well. Their gender issues haven’t worked out so well. They’re still arguing about the differences between men and women.”

“I’m interested in holding on to our culture,” says Cruse. “I don’t aspire to a heteronormative life, so I think it’s important to keep creating these queer spaces, because if you don’t, you’ll see everyone get whitewashed, assimilated — it’s so boring. The desire isn’t for us all to be the same.” His Spotlight parties reflect this sentiment, and not just in terms of the clientele or the impeccably curated music — the environments themselves run counter to the mainstream. Exclusively staging his events in loft and warehouse spaces, off the usual club grid, Cruse puts just as much effort into piecing together the sound system as he does the construction of the darkroom, a key element of every Spotlight party. “They’re there if you want to use them,” he says. “It’s not mandatory. It’s just acknowledging that we have a sexual side to us. If you need to slip off into the darkroom, you can, and come back with a new friend — it’s not frowned upon or embarrassing.”

Chicago’s Men’s Room parties, which require all entrants to remove either their top or their bottoms before they walk through the door, are even more intensely sexual. “We only do our parties in spaces that allow sexuality to take place out in the open,” says resident DJ Harry Cross. Currently held at a venue called The Hole, the party previously took place at the Bijou Theater, the country’s oldest gay adult cinema and sex club before it closed in 2015. Over in Pittsburgh, the monthly Honcho events happen at Hot Mass, a party space inside of a gay bath house. “As gay culture has become more mainstream,” says Honcho founder Aaron Clark, “we needed to have the option for not everything to be family-friendly. It’s probably the only place that people can party in this city, find someone to hook up with, and get a little bit dirty in the club.”

It wasn’t long ago that this kind of overtly sexual attitude was frowned upon in the queer community, at least publicly. Even as new treatments have lessened the level of devastation, the psychological scars of AIDS continue to be felt. “Since the AIDS crisis, the message has been clear: There is only one way to have sex without getting HIV,” says Sperber. “For gay men specifically, as intrinsic as it is to put a wig on, is the fear that sex might kill you. Imagine taking a pill that changes all of that — it is some sci-fi movie s***.” He’s referring to the recent appearance of drugs like PrEP and Truvada, which drastically reduce the risk of transmission and have been credited with helping to reinvigorate the sexual element of queer nightlife. “In many ways, Truvada has created a ‘glory days’ feeling in the clubs,” says Sperber.

“There’s a level of freedom that’s not necessarily present in other parties, a freedom towards hedonism,” says Steve Mizek, a Chicago DJ who heads up the dance-music record labels Argot and Tasteful Nudes, and previously helmed the influential electronic music website Little White Earbuds. “There are a lot fewer inhibitions about body image and really letting go and dancing and doing whatever you want with whomever you want.”

At Los Angeles’ A Club Called Rhonda, a more mixed event which often bills itself as a “pansexual party palace,” being comfortable isn’t necessarily about hooking up — it’s more about being fabulous, with a crowd known for its over-the-top attire and outlandish behavior. “You see the queer people up on stage,” says co-founder Gregory Alexander, “in various forms of dress, with fans, dancing, voguing all over the floor, then you’re going to want to be part of that, because you realize that’s welcomed and put on a pedestal at our club.”

Rhonda’s elaborate decorations are another essential ingredient, as Alexander explains: “We like to go the extra mile and not only make an environment that feels free and interesting, but looks free and interesting.” Sperber takes a similar approach at Honey Soundsystem, stating, “It’s the last thing that certain promoters think about, but for a gay man, it’s just kind of instinctual to want to create a more pleasurable space.”

“It goes back to the stage, the theater,” says Ron Like Hell. “Lights, makeup, wigs, costumes — people love a show. Artists have always been uninhibited, whether they’re homosexual or not, and queer culture goes back to the days of classic, true, amazing entertainment — the spectacle of people being more than themselves, and unashamedly so.” There’s a political element too, as Sperber points out. “The culture of drag and the culture of parades,” he says, “and the idea that liberation came through these things that made people uncomfortable but were actually really theatrical and have been around forever … it intrinsically follows into the party spaces.”

“There’s something in the struggle that creates great art, music and community,” says Nathan Drew Larsen, co-founder of Chicago’s Hugo Ball. A self-described “polysexual, oppositional, surrealist” party with a political bent — its manifesto rails against “carpetbaggers, sanitizers and cultural dilettantes” — Hugo Ball was also conceived to combat the fractured nature of the city’s nightlife. “We just wanted to create something where people could get away from that and mix,” says Larsen. “We’re not a men’s party — I’m transgender …. Our whole point is to be open to just everybody across the spectrum.”

When it comes to inclusion, there’s certainly more work to be done. “Even in the alternative part of the underground, white men still dominate,” adds Larsen. Still, there are reasons to be optimistic. Souffront, Dijon and Servito — all three queer people of color — have seen their profiles rise significantly as of late, both in the U.S. and abroad, where they regularly play at top-line festivals and vaunted nightspots like Berlin’s Panorama Bar. (Last year, Servito was even voted onto Resident Advisor’s annual — and highly influential — DJ poll.) Honey Soundsystem has also seen its gig calendar dramatically spike in recent months. These artists are flying the flag for the queer history of American dance music. “Disco and house music, it’s all derived from the gay community,” says Servito. “A lot of us feel strong about that and more connected to it than ever. The way things are in dance music today, in club culture, it’s predominantly straight. It’s just a matter of time before [queer] people start to latch on and take what’s theirs.”

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Before you listen to Basar, the excellent debut album by Africaine 808, some context is necessary.

Global dance music has made deep inroads into European clubbing in recent years; focus even slightly, and it’s everywhere you listen. London has long been a post-colonial melting pot of sound, where influential radio DJs such as Gilles Peterson champion world culture. Yet in the last decade, with Internet-enabled music exchanges flourishing, the city’s bass, U.K. garage and funky scenes have incorporated dance styles floating upward from West and South Africa and the Caribbean — as have producers and DJs (and labels and club nights) in Bristol, Manchester and Glasgow.

In Portugal, Lisbon’s vibrant scene is built on lo-fi electronics, hip-hop and interpretations of digital-era rhythms such as Angola’s kuduro. Paris and Amsterdam are home to reissue labels specializing in rare African grooves, with sleek new remixes of makossa, rai, soukous and various Ethiopian music, and with parties that mix house, disco and pan-African sounds. Even Berlin, long considered merely an outpost of Teutonic techno and house, has hardly been as mono-rhythmic as often described, with city mainstays such as Mark Ernestus (one half of Basic Channel) and Daniel Haaksman (of the Man Recordings label) promoting global inclusivity.

Africaine 808 (A808), the Berlin-based duo of Dirk Leyers and DJ Nomad (Hans Reuschl), is not new to this trend — or, more precisely, to its historical antecedents. Leyers was half of the Cologne/Buenos Aires-based Closer Musik, having spent the early ’00s exploring one intersection of techno and global polyrhythms alongside Chile’s Matias Aguayo. Reuschl, on the other hand, was a musical disciple of Italy’s legendary cosmic disco DJ Beppe Loda. A street-art/photography mainstay of the German music scene for more than a decade (his Keith Haring-like drawings adorn Basar), he adopted the Nomad name in the late ’00s and began DJing at a Berlin party called Vulkandance, which featured an eclectic global soundtrack. The two started making music together in 2012, with two rules: the incorporation of a Roland TR-808 drum machine on every track, and a commitment to a cultural exploration of dance music’s worldly threads. Even the names of the duo’s early singles — “Cosmicumbia” and “Lagos, New York” — spelled out a desire to transcend Berlin’s dance-music norms. Yet they also brought to the fore more challenging questions of cultural tourism. So how do a couple of talented, knowledgeable, (presumably) well-meaning Europeans incorporate the sound of the world without repeating mistakes they’re ostensibly trying to correct?

Basar does so by painting a broad canvas grounded in the historical idea of the diverse, inclusive, democratic dance floor, and goes looking far deeper than Leyers and Nomad did in their singles for evidence to prove the thesis. One answer lies in the drums, in how A808 mixes programmed beats and their live counterparts — played by the Ghanaian highlife percussionist Eric Owusu and the Congolese/German vocalist-drummer Jean Dominique “Dodo” N’Kishi, best known for his work with Mouse On Mars.

The other is in the fact that A808’s search for the perfect beat takes it not only toward far-flung locations or exotic sounds, but also toward early-’80s Brixton (“Language Of The Bass,” a cusp-of-Acid-house story narrated by Alex Voices about “soundsystems” and such), to some Caribbean-ized Bayou previously inhabited by Ninja Tune’s sampledelic producers (“Crawfish Got Soul”), and to smoky nightclubs with Balearic trip-hop (the ballad “Ready for Something New,” featuring the Israeli singer Ofri Brin). The result is an album that transcends dance-music stereotypes through extreme juxtapositions, moving beyond journeys “into sound” or “around the world,” while still fully conscious that it’s doing those things, as well. From its grandly titled opener, “The Awakening” — a mix of squiggly jazz and space-age pop that melts into acid-fusion skronk — it’s music for listening as well as movement.

There is, of course, plenty of globetrotting boogie to be had — and yet where such clichés can form creative cul de sacs, A808 finds exquisite escapes. “Ngoni” begins with the titular string instrument playing wonderful melodies while a kick and an 808 hammer underneath. Then, halfway through, something strange happens — the ngoni itself disappears, and its melodic line is taken up by jarring industrial echo (a dubstep kind of sound, but far more supple), as if the two musical worlds were conversing. The title track is akin to an un-abrasive take on Aphex Twin‘s acid classic “Didgeridoo,” a synthetic re-creation of an imagined memory; whereas “Yes We Can” brings together an actual didgeridoo (or, more likely, one played via keyboard), a steel guitar and a second-line/batucada that gets swallowed up by electronics. Maybe best of all is “Rhythm Is All You Can Dance,” co-written by N’Kishi and featuring his myriad voices; what begins as a kalimba-augmented shuffle explodes into an electro anthem via TR-303 bass synth.

Is it fair to attribute Africaine 808’s acclaim (however small-circle) to European club culture’s momentary fascination with the rhythms of the world? Indisputably. But Basar is more than another simple bit of evidence of “trending.” It is the result of two globally informed dance-music imaginations trying to save themselves from the insular thinking of the status quo, by looking outside. As long as the samples were cleared and the guests got paid, this is exactly the sort of culture-swapping worth celebrating.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

When the music of Norwegian producer Prins Thomas began to be heard outside of his native country back in 2005, it was crafted in collaboration with his friend Hans-Peter Lindstrøm. The material was deemed “cosmic disco” — a fitting tag, as the duo loved both the moon-boot-stomping beat of 1970s disco and the ARP- and Moog-heavy head-trip tracks made by the likes of Giorgio Moroder, Herbie Hancock and Klaus Schulze, which hinted at the firmament high above the dance floor.

And while Lindstrøm and Prins Thomas haven’t collaborated together since 2009’s album II, Prins Thomas has continued to mine that fertile ground between the heady and the body-moving as a solo artist. Last year’s overly generous dance mix, Paradise Goulash, clocked in at nearly 60 tracks and moved from the bubbling Balearic of Wally Badarou to the minimal techno of Robert Hood, emphasizing the “disco” side of the equation. But for his fourth solo album, Principe Del Norte, Thomas is firmly focused on the “cosmic.” The nine tracks expand to nearly 100 minutes of music, soundtracking a voyage into the deepest spaces of the mind.

Which is not to categorize Principe Del Norte as merely an ambient excursion. The album’s first two-thirds do evoke zero gravity, which can be exhilarating and anxiety-inducing in equal measure. Layer after layer of arpeggiated synthesizers stack up in “A1,” building to almost dizzying heights. Each new synth line and shift reveals a new array of patterns, creating density that brings to mind Terry Riley‘s early electric organ explorations. Warmer and slower keys open “A2” before gently gliding into a slow, flanged drum-machine beat and distant chiming guitar. And the 14 minutes of “C” strike a balance between drift and dissonance.

Prins Thomas calls this his ode to late-’90s ambient music, and while it does love the tones of folks like Pete Namlook, The Orb, Black Dog and Spacetime Continuum, it also hearkens back to Prins Thomas’ beloved ’70s prog, especially the Virgin Records back catalog and side-long tracks. It’s a good fit, since Thomas has a knack for remixes that often extend into double-digit runtimes, and he’s comfortable working on such a grand scale. Some long, mesmeric sections draw on Faust’s playful and noisy song, “Krautrock” from Faust IV. With its spindly guitar melody, throbbing modular synthesizers and careful build, “B” evokes Steve Hillage’s Rainbow Dome Musick, while the pinging, percolating blips of “D” sound like something Ashra’s Manuel Göttsching might have concocted in the late ’70s.

Almost an hour in, one of Prins Thomas’ telltale stomping beats finally appears in “E.” Over the last half-hour, Thomas gives his spacey tracks some propulsion. Album highlight “G” keeps all the ethereal washes of vintage synthesizers and tingling arpeggios aloft while also coupling them to a two-note bass ostinato and thumping beat — in the process proving that 10 years on, Prins Thomas can still craft some thrilling cosmic disco.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

The performance produced something special, the sort of moment that rationalizes and romanticizes the club experience for clubgoers. The dance floor is often regarded as a place of subjective imagination — disconnected from the performer, solely for the dancing audience — but Moufang and Czamanski hit their mark by taking a shot at something different and special.

Techno pioneer Juan Atkins has said that he intended for the genre to be music that “sounds like technology” — that is, the medium that one uses should be exemplary of its distinct function. If “electronic” music is going to be a thing, then it had better extend musical possibilities to a place beyond imagination. If this recorded performance has a thesis, that’s it. Sharing a name with John Coltrane‘s seminal live album, Live In Seattle carries a bit of context and exists in a similar place, using the inherent qualities of a genre to move past its usual confines.

Few consider electronic music a live form, but here Moufang and Czamanski take that idea head-on and challenge it. The music itself is miraculous given the amount of ground covered over its immense 100-minute run time, and given the fact that the duo had never previously used these arrangements, let alone this equipment. The two producers are patient for the duration of the A-side, slowly building from an innocuous cymbal tap, finding their footing and bubbling up to a steady beat with squelching 303 lines whipping around the stereo field. From there, the tone gets foggy, though decidedly influenced by the sound of “Detroit” (i.e. futuristic and assembly-line-oriented), with jazz chords jammed on warm keys that sporadically cascade over percolating, unraveling synth patterns, all anchored to a brisk, inspiring tempo.

The idea of a live techno album might meet with derision from fans of more presumably human and virtuosic music, but Moufang and Czamanski have helped define what that platform could represent for techno. You can easily look to classics like Shackleton’s Fabric 55 mix from 2010 or Suzanne Ciani’s musique concrète collaborations with Sean Canty of Demdike Stare and Andy Votel (as Neotantrik) to hear more of the possibilities for live electronic musicians, provided they’re quick-minded machinists who love surprise and a good challenge.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.