Vice Discusses How Jam Bands and DJs Forged an Unlikely Union

Feb
08

February 8, 2016

React Presents - News Flash

Vice connects the dots of electronic music melding with jam bands and how festival promoters used this formula to create a unique experience for fest goers, paying homage to festivals like North Coast and Electric Forest.

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From Vice.com:

During the late ’00s, the promoters at Silver Wrapper were booking a steady slate of jam bands at Chicago’s now-defunct Congress Theater. At the same time another local independent company, React Presents, was bringing big EDM shows to the same venue. Inevitably, scheduling conflicts arose, but the two sides figured out an interesting solution. “Two acts would be going for the same night,” Silver Wrapper’s Michael Berg explains, “and instead of giving it to one or the other we started combining the shows together.”

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It was quickly apparent that they were onto something. “We were noticing that some of these combinations were actually working,” Berg says, so they kept booking hybrid bills, catering to a community of ravers and a community of hippies that were starting to look increasingly similar. “If you put these acts in Venn diagrams together, there’s gonna be some fans that are shared by both—and at the outer edges, there’s gonna be people who are more loyal to one side than the other. But the longer we did shows like that, we saw that middle section was getting bigger and bigger.”

It was around that time that rave culture finally consummated its relationship with jam band culture thanks to EDM’s exploding popularity. Groups that were part electronic and part acoustic started filling the lineups of a new wave of festivals—Electric Forest in Rothbury, Mich., Lightning in a Bottle in Southern California, and North Coast Music Festival in Chicago’s Union Park.

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On the surface, it seems like a wildly incompatible pairing. Jam bands are rooted in organic sounds, improvisation, and arrangements full of complex chords and tricky time signatures. Dance music, on the other hand, is all about synthesized tones programmed via machines and relentless four-on-the-floor beats. Jam music is mellow; dance music tends to lean towards assaultive sounds. Hippies wear hemp; ravers deck themselves out in plastics that won’t biodegrade.

If you pull back and look at them from a broader perspective, though, there are a lot of cultural similarities between the two sides. “Jam band culture and rave culture are both strongly rooted in community, respect, and good vibes,” says Pasquale Rotella of Insomniac Events, who along with its flagship Electric Daisy Carnival festivals also books Electric Forest. “There’s a kindness and a feeling that comes with both communities that you won’t find at a rock concert.”

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“In the live setting, both of these genres are totally experiential,” Berg says. “Jam bands never play the same show twice, and there are DJs that do the exact same thing—except instead of jamming out, they spend all afternoon programming their set to make it different from what they played the night before. You have to be there to experience it, or you miss it. People are always chasing that experience.”

As Rotella points out, musico-cultural mix-ups like this didn’t always fly. During its first Stateside blossoming in the late ’90s, rave culture took its genre lines seriously. “It used to be that you liked house music or you liked drum and bass,” Rotella says, “and you didn’t like anything else.”

On the flip side, the jam band community has always been more accepting of stylistic blends. Rooted in acid rock, the scene has absorbed bits of jazz, funk, and bluegrass since the Grateful Dead helped coin the term in the 1960s. While jam bands like Disco Biscuits and Sound Tribe Sector 9 were incorporating elements of house and techno as far back as the early ’90s, for the first decade or so they represented a minor current in the scene, vastly outnumbered by more traditional instrumental acts. Continue reading ..

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