The closure of public life has laid bare the dependence of the artist on her circumstances. In the world of electronic music, the DJ — along with the bouncer, audio engineer, bartender, and host she works with — are anxious about the future of the infrastructure that provides them an opportunity to work. Many clubs won’t reopen, although which ones are not yet apparent. The fate of employees at these establishments is tied to the fate of the larger economic climate upon reopening — as is the DJ’s, to a degree. But the forward march of technology has untethered performers from the need for a venue: the ease of streaming, coupled with the ability to cultivate one’s audience online, has reopened the possibility to work while under social isolation.

So local and established DJs took to streaming their sets nightly, though the spread of this content on various platforms made access difficult: streamed through Instagram, Youtube, Facebook, or Twitch, with or without high-quality sound or video, the initial creative response to quarantine had a charming amateurish quality. Some shows were archived, but the prevailing atmosphere was that DJs were spinning partially for themselves, to feel the experience of going out. This has passed somewhat as living rooms and studios were cleaned up and converted for broadcasting, so now the sets sound better, and DJs post their weekly schedules.

But the professionalization of streaming (e.g., virtual club nights, payment integration, and equipment upgrades) is only the reproduction of the status quo ante: artists are left as entrepreneurs, while businesses can grow their online presence. What is new in practice is the DJ’s added onus of competing for viewership and “support” not only with other DJs globally, but with record stores and nightclubs, the more tech-savvy of whom have incorporated livestreams into their fundraising activity. The resultant competition only deepens the process of fragmentation, precisely by integrating the producers, however they choose to combine and stream, into the various streaming platforms as individuals. 

The proliferation of streaming DJs is the result of unfortunate circumstances in the present, but streaming club music has a longer history. March of this year marked, in fact, the ten-year anniversary of the advent of the form: Tokyo’s DOMMUNE and London-based Boiler Room both started broadcasting publicly around March of 2010. The former, which began test broadcasts in October of the previous year, predated (and found success during) that other period of enforced dormancy for club culture in Japan, the era of the fuzoku laws. [1] Boiler Room, though originating in the UK’s pirate radio traditions, quickly outstripped these to become a cultural entity of its own. Both broadcasts continue to this day.

A four-hour DOMMUNE show is made up of an interview in the first half and a performance in the second. There are broadcasts Monday through Thursday from a basement club with room for about 50 people to dance on what is presumably a small and cerebral dance floor. Founder Ukawa Naohiro hosts guests from a broad cultural milieu, often international touring DJs who will go on to play bigger shows that weekend, but also local Tokyo musicians — and not necessarily techno DJs. The shows are often surreal, with nervous camerawork and quick, edgy cuts. Ukawa archives every show, but the recordings are not made public. He has said that “live streaming to me is an aura of sorts, [...] a method to express the ‘now.’” [2]

Boiler Room started with less of a Dadaist angle and professionalized with an ear towards London’s bass music scene. It started as nothing but a single-shot video of a DJ set. It quickly took form as the premier Traveling-Stream-Party. Following a meteoric first year, international broadcasts began in August 2011, retaining the trademark streaming format: a steady shot facing the DJ as they mix, the crowd behind them. This formal consistency allowed for what was criticized as techno tourism; parachuting into Bratislava, Seoul, or São Paulo on a given week to showcase a slice of the local sound. While Boiler Room can be accused of making some superfluous broadcasts, these criticisms misrecognize its archival role: its truth was never a comprehensive (or authentic) display of the Slovakian or any other dance scene, but the reproducibility of the global culture industry in any locale which wants to join the world economy.

Both tendencies understood, then, that they played a secondary, intellectual role to the scene itself. DOMMUNE still won’t broadcast on Friday or Saturday, so as not to disturb the Tokyo club ecosystem, and the stereotypical Boiler Room broadcast of six different stages from three different festivals rendered interference moot by expressing its virtual character. In this sense, both DOMMUNE and Boiler Room sought to offer a reflective engagement with club culture at large; individual DJs performing their music as usual would be placed in dialogue with artists unknown to them. The resulting abstraction of the club experience, if more remote in physical terms, afforded the possibility of comprehending global club culture, at least in thought. 

It is this mediation of the artist with her larger milieu which is at risk of being lost today. The critical-intellectual origins of DJ streaming, a widening of the moment of reflection otherwise inaccessible in the club atmosphere, are reversed in favor of a supposed technological immediacy with one’s audience. This is an accommodation, not an artistic response. The first wave of club streaming ten years ago was not under the illusion of providing background music for listeners at home, but something else entirely. (The same could be said of podcast series like Resident Advisor, where artists sought to elevate the aesthetic qualities of a mix in opposition to its functionality as a live set.) The conscious or unconscious efforts of individuals to collapse this distinction, to compete with Facebook feeds and Spotify playlists, casts doubt on the survivability of what is referred to as an underground altogether.

What will remain, of course, are people who want to go out and dance. The transformations of the post-neoliberal world, only accelerated by the pandemic, will play out in a rocky new equilibrium between the big clubs and the underground, physical and online spaces, and artists and proprietors. Social distancing will have to change: DOMMUNE’s micro-capacity might prefigure the new standard club’s size, and Boiler Room’s invite-only parties its new audience — this is already the case, unwittingly. The closure of public life provides a moment to reflect upon its usual reproduction, a question the club culture has not felt tasked to answer. The failure to do so will leave the artist unaware of her position in a marketplace caught in a moment of dissolution and reconsolidation. //

[1]   From late 2010 to mid-2016, post-war Japanese anti-prostitution laws which regulated nightlife broadly were re-implemented to curb what were perceived as the excesses of club culture on a national scale. One immediate cause was the death of a clubgoer in Tokyo in October 2010. The period was marked by conditions of semi-legality. Large clubs were forced to cease operations after midnight or 1am, and small clubs without dance permits put up “No Dancing” signs and stopped patrons from moving during police raids. 

Analogy between the Japanese experience and that of COVID is limited, as the two situations are dissimilar in origin, appearance, and socio-political stakes. It is not inconceivable, however, that social distancing will require similarly bizarre social enforcement elsewhere in the world. The contradictory persistence and transformation of present phenomena more generally is the theme here.

[2] Ukawa Naohiro Interview

Thumbnail image from J. Bhatt.