Transcription
Foreign people digging means different things, but in a certain corner of clubland, it is both the ultimate term of admiration and the aspiration of every DJ. Whether you're partying at Resolute in New York, attending some waves and Bucharest, or hitting Club JB in Japan, there's a global cohort of diggers looking for 90s records that are groovy and introspective, often subtle and understated. They straddle the boundary between techno and house, with the occasional tinge of electro.
That the world of digging has at times garnered a reputation for being overly political, building a set of unspoken rules and boundaries, is true. In this video, we'll go deep into the culture and uncover why 90s records continue to be so loved. Foreign digging can take many different forms: clicking through endless rabbit holes on Discogs, getting swept up by the YouTube algorithm, or, as the name suggests, spending hours thumbing through the bargain bins of record stores. But no matter how you do it, it's all about looking for forgotten and under-appreciated records. More often than not, the best discoveries come from one of dance music's most fertile eras: the 90s.
It was a time when music had started to shed the cheese of the 80s, when new production tours were emerging, and Chicago House, Detroit techno, and European brands of both genres were starting to converge. "That's why I didn't mix the record from their time to me is so special because it really expresses the feeling of their time," this excitement, it was something new; it was a complex; it was a kind of like musical revolution and also cultural revolution in that sense, and and like you could you can hear that in this music, you know that it was like it was fresh, it was like like in a way experimental. You feel the energy of that time in that music, you know.
These tracks were written years before Ableton, when it wasn't just about watching tutorials on how to replicate every single hi-hat or re-space line. There weren't a million plugins available at the click of a mouse, but these limitations created a rawness in the music. "There are more possibilities um being computer-based, but within that almost infinite amount of possibilities you got to get lost in that." So back in the day, "had a fairly minimal setup and just trying to learn every single Nuance of the equipment and really pushing it to the limits." Yeah, some wild tunes came out. The goal back then wasn't to churn out another record with an extended intro and outro, but to really push new ideas and sounds. This was partly down to the technology, but part of it was economic. Many of these producers, Devonte included, didn't have access to huge studio budgets and had to make do with what they had. In that particular time, "producing for me was almost exercising, getting to know my equipment and just expression."
During the late 90s and early 2000s, a new generation of DJs emerged. Loosely connected to the minimal house and techno scene, artists like Ricardo Villalobos, Zip, and Nicholas Lutz spent countless hours hunting down old music. While the specific style and sounds that each played varied, what they shared was a love of old records, and what they all did so well was make these records sound completely new by mining the weirder corner of the 90s dance music cosmos.
But back then, digging was a completely different story. Even if you could find out the name of a specific record, actually tracking it down was hard work. Was your local record store going to have the latest imports? If it was an old record, where could you even find it? But the virtual secondary market changed all of that. First eBay, and then the emergence of Discogs meant that if you had the name of the record, you're not only able to find it, but you can easily buy it. This created a currency around the idea of hunting down a fabled track ID; some through SoundCloud comments, check beneath an Instagram post, even clock the steady stream of punters Shazamming at a party. Everyone seems to have one thing on their minds: track IDs.
Gene on Earth is someone who is constantly barraged by continual requests for IDs, and although that's how he started off, he sees a downside to this as a sole method of discovering new tracks. "I think it's more exciting to find a track yourself, and if you're just playing out track IDs that other people have played before you, you're just going to sound like other people; you're not going to sound like yourself." So if you want to really make your DJ set sound unique, the way to do it is to find your own tracks and develop your own taste. An obsession with finding every track played by your favorite DJ is endearing, but Gene's point is that this leads to a bit of regression: everyone sounds the same if everyone plays the same records. So this quest for your own sound, for your own digging philosophy, has become the ethos of this scene.
Of course, most DJs, Gene included, will still happily share IDs, not only because they can be a great gateway for finding new artists and labels, but because it's important to see producers get credited for their work. "I personally love it when people come up and ask for track ideas, maybe not necessarily if I'm like really in the groove, but um it's all about educating and sharing. I didn't make the music; I want to get these people that are doing this high-quality work, give them the recognition that they deserve."
This need to provide recognition to those that have fallen by the historical wayside has inspired some, like Dr. Banana, to start labels dedicated to reissuing these records. "I mean, generally it's yeah, I've been trying to get obscure records into people's hands. I know I want to play them because it's a shame for them to just be sat in obscurity, like you know, just maybe there's like 100 copies ever produced and only 50 of them still knocking around, and like the people that have got them just hold on to them and don't even play out, so it's just to be able to like give the music like a chance to be you know, listened to."
It's hard to deny the importance of reissuing records. These are vital entries in the clubland geological archive. But for some collectors, reissues pose something of an existential crisis. The record that they had spent hours chasing down, spending large amounts of money on, and deploy as a secret weapon in their sets, significantly depreciate some value overnight. What this means for the rarified world of digging is that people begin to find ways to go deeper and deeper, finding records that are rarer and rarer. It also means that the secondary market has made rarity itself a commodity.
"It happens a lot that a good record has been discovered whatsoever, it's been played out in public and it gets a hype, and some people are very quick at buying the whole stock and then putting it out, you know, even for a small price, maybe the record was not even that expensive. You notice this artificial price hack, it's like the stock market, you know, and somebody buys all the records, all these all the copies and then they put them out for like five times the price or even more, you know, and and like and then somebody is getting rich like selling music often and the artist maybe doesn't hasn't even seen anything of that money."
The endless quest for track IDs, in other words, has had the impact of valuing the rarity of the record over the actual music itself. "I can see how people might come to the conclusion that you know the work they've put in to find a record is worth something, but labor as a DJ is not just limited to finding rare pieces of music. If you're good at DJing, you're good at selecting and playing music; you're good at telling a story; you're good at drawing music from all over, whether it's rare or not. All of that stands for something and is valuable, and so you don't necessarily need to rely on rarity or obscurity."
"I sometimes feel there is the music what you're doing there, you know, is it more important to impress with a record that nobody knows, like it's a rule almost, you don't play records anymore that people already know, you cannot play a record anymore that you use in a podcast already, or you know, like stupid, like like unwritten rules in the Tigers movement, and I find so silly, you know, like it's good music is good music." Vera is critiquing an unwritten set of rules that has emerged around digging, another of which is that producers whose records have been rediscovered are expected to still be playing that sound from their early productions. Devonte has seen this firsthand. He is someone who is just as interested in a new release as he is exploring the earlier side of his record collection, and he finds it frustrating when he is booked as something of a legacy act.
"I personally appreciate that people respect what has occurred in the past, to their hat to it, plus thank you for for all that, um but also winning to constantly evolve and keep up and keep keep pushing boundaries." This boils down to a central tension in dance music more generally: how do you balance innovation and nostalgia? We are constantly awash in a series of revivals, and while, as Devonte says, it's important to pay respect, does that make dance music somehow regressive? This is counter to the initial ideas that help nurture dance music in the first place. "You know, techno was always a culture that was looking to the Future; it was a very future, it was futuristic music in the 90s, you know, and now it's it's so weird, you know, that now it like it all goes backwards and not so much forward anymore. There's no forward vision, which of course is also difficult, you know, because it's like a lot has been done already, you cannot reinvent the wheel, but still there's many ways of putting something personal into a record, and nowadays I feel um the focus is more about producing a record, making a product that serves you like or disturbs the dancer, but it's not so much anymore about just expressing a feeling."
This brings us back to why people hunt for these records in the first place. For many, digging offers a way of returning to the roots of dance music, outside of modern TikTok reels and PR campaigns. [Music] DJs play a vital role in rediscovering forgotten gems, and most know that the real value in these records resides both in the quality of the music and the creativity of the artist playing them. [Music] How many great 90s records are yet to be rediscovered? No one knows the answer, and so the only solution is to keep on digging. [Music]