20 Watts Magazine
Published: Spring 2008
Tonight is Euphoria Friday, a weekly club night at Trexx in downtown Syracuse, and a mix of electro-house, drum and bass and trance music is thumping out of the speakers. Everything is set up for a dynamic dance party -- the bar is stocked, the smoke machine is on and the lights are flashing. But on this Friday night, the club is dead, and it doesn't do the place justice. Jamen V is spinning UK smash hit "Yeah, Yeah" by Bodyrox up in the DJ booth. This song would normally incite mass pandemonium in clubs all over Europe, but the four people on the Trexx dance floor are just standing around talking, completely unaffected by the music.
Syracuse’s electronic music scene has been on life support for years, ever since a major drugs-and-weapons bust in 2002 that targeted Button’s Arcade, a popular local dance venue. Angry parent interventions and the decrease of available venues further contributed to the clampdown, causing promoters to lay low for a couple of years.
It didn’t use to be this way. In the early 1990s, Syracuse was a major player in the U.S. rave scene. There were all-ages dance “parties” (a euphemism the scene uses for the outdated term “rave”) staged at empty spaces and warehouses all over Syracuse – even in Thornden Park and Marshall Street.
Chad Roy, a DJ at Ohm Lounge and veteran of the scene since 1993, used to throw parties at the space that is now Maggie’s Tavern nicknamed “The Rave Cave” in the mid-90s. “It was completely underground. We packed 300-400 people into that space, and the concrete floors would get so slick with sweat,” Roy says. “They were the best parties – it had a good vibe.”
These days, there are only a few venues in Syracuse that offer regular electronic music-only club nights: Trexx, around the block from Dinosaur Bar-B-Q, and Ohm Lounge and Awful Al’s in Armory Square and the Opus Restaurant and Lounge on Walton Street.
Still, with electronic-indie acts like Daft Punk, Justice and Hot Chip seeping into the pop-music mainstream, this could be the right time for Syracuse’s dance scene to make a comeback. Syracuse DJs are already seeing the changes – there have been an increasing number of fresh new faces at their club nights every week since a New Year’s dance bash earlier this year.
“We aren’t playing Alice DeeJay, here,” says Andrew Taylor, a DJ who runs Visionary Mindz Recordings in Binghamton. He’s referring to the Swedish group that came out with the 1999 club anthem “Better off Alone,” the “techno” song by which Americans seem to define electronic music. DJs in Syracuse play some serious electro music from all ends of the spectrum: trance, hardcore, drum and bass, gabber, deep house and hard energy, just to name a few.
Parties are planned and funded by several production crews located in Upstate New York, including Vibrant Soundz, Direkt Influence, Ephx, Elite Tribe, Visionary Mindz and DAC Productions. The crews, which act essentially as DJ and promoter alliances, network together to scout new artists and venues, create lineups and publicize the events to draw in big-name DJs. User Friendly, a recent event at Trexx, featured 16 top DJs from across the East Coast, including Black Mamba from Miami and Dietrich Schoenemann from New York City.
The crews use the Upstate Underground Network forum online to share music and keep each other up-to-date. One post from Krypt0 reads, “i just found out who d74 is booking for this event, and once he posts you guys are gonna cream your effin pants…STAY TUNED homies.” But despite the enthusiasm and support, DJs and promoters are still struggling.
“Most of the events now are collaborations, not just one crew doing something,” says Sean Place, a DJ at Trexx and founder of Vinyl Beat Productions. “We have to pool our money together – it used to be really competitive, but it’s not that way anymore.”
Every member of the scene speaks highly of the DJ that started it all, Phato, who once threw a rave at the New York State Fairgrounds at the height of the dance movement for 1,500 people, and then, according to Place, “disappeared mysteriously somewhere in D.C.” Parties haven’t been that big since – they’ve become much smaller, and to the dismay of devoted promoters, much less lucrative.
“It’s not worth it to spend $2,000-$3,000 to throw an event and only have 250 people show up,” says Rob Liadka, a DJ who runs Elite Tribe, one of the oldest running production companies in Syracuse.
Smaller parties also mean fewer opportunities for big-name DJs to play in Syracuse. “I’ve come across DJ contracts stating there had to be at least 3,000 people (at an event),” says Liadka. “Now, you’re lucky if you even hit 500-600 people.”
If only more people attended parties. Syracuse DJs have discovered that it’s difficult to get suburban club-goers into the music. “We’ve tried many different avenues of promoting house music,” says Todd Kilburn, a promoter who organizes Quikk Fixx, one of Syracuse’s biggest yearly electronic events. “We even tried to scheme up a way to have a pirate radio station just to expose people to it.”
Roy says that Ohm could be packed with 300 gorgeous sorority girls in heels and clean-cut frat boys in blazers, but there’s hardly any dancing. “It’s very rare that people come here for the music. I’m constantly getting people coming up to the DJ booth and asking for us to play a song from the radio. Well, they’re not going to hear it here,” he says.
Using MySpace as a marketing tool definitely isn’t the answer, although it would be tempting to say that it helps. “It doesn’t work as much as going up to someone and saying, ‘Hey, party tonight, fucking, come to this party,’” says James Menges, who runs Ephx Productions. “You have to do the legwork.”
Promoters are trying to make parties more successful by finding out what the crowd digs. Liadka found that sexually-themed events “kind of based on Girls Gone Wild,” mixed in with a rave theme generally draws in more people. The promoters of User Friendly hired a group of sexy female dancers dressed in naughty schoolgirl costumes to get the crowd moving (and it seemed to have worked – by the end of the night, the girls’ garters were stuffed with singles).
Members of the scene are discovering that their crowds have not only been increasing, but diversifying – the parties include a hodge-podge of middle-aged couples, members of the gay community, high school Goths, punks, Candy Caners (what the scene calls the ravers) and students from Le Moyne, OCC and SU. There’s an obvious discrepancy between the actual electronic music fans and bored kids just looking for something to do.
But for the dedicated DJs and promoters that run the scene, that doesn’t really matter. “We just want people to enjoy the music, come back and say that they had a lot of fun,” says Place. And that certainly sounds like the makings of true comeback.
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