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The ‘no phones on the dance-floor’ debate is pretty undisputed within our circle. Of course no DJ wants a flashing light beaming in their face whilst they’re trying to mix. Equally no DJ wants to find a throng of people engrossed on luminescent screens whilst they’re trying to cultivate an atmosphere of togetherness.
Venues like Berghain, Trouw (RIP), Fabric (support them here) have had long-standing bans on phone photography for this reason, but also to protect the party-goers themselves who want to feel safe and comfortable indulging in whatever hedonism they wish to.
This is all elementary and fairly uncontroversial, but the danger is when party throwers and DJs err on the side of dogmatic thinking in their quest for that untainted utopic night of ‘no phones on the floor’ – no matter what. Phonox seems to understand this middle-ground well, with a statement on the club’s website reading “Please avoid using phones or cameras to take photos: our dance-floor’s for dancing”.
But being berated for capturing a video by the side of your leg to track ID later is short-sighted and idealistic. The argument goes that for DJs trying to foster a united environment, the mere presence of a phone can deflate the harmony of a room in a second. Of course you must respect the environment and the community in that space, but enforcing blind rules goes against the intrinsic nature of partying. Clubs are meant to be spaces where you’re free to do as you want (in your own personal space), and if people are scared to pull out their phones on the dance-floor we are in serious danger of sanitizing the whole experience.
Theo Parrish made a statement that “everyone knows there are far too many phones on the dance-floor, and far too many solitary fist pumpers. The association is a reminder that the DJ, the song, and the people need to move as one at the dance.”
That ‘holy moment’ he’s talking about is spine-tinging, and hopefully you’ve all been lucky enough to be part of a night where the atmosphere was all too magical for anyone to dare pull out a phone for a track ID. And that does still happen, but it happens organically. It’s a function of illusive variables – the space, the personalities, the collective mood – and trying to attain that by draconian measures is simply misguided.
The whole being on your phone the whole time is a little bit annoying. I’d rather see no phones when you’re playing music. But it’s okay – it’s just a generational thing I guess. People do a lot on their phones and I kind of get it, I can live with it! – Max Graef
Much is made of the phone’s disruptive force looking back with nostalgia, but if we expand on Max Graef’s attitude of embracing their omnipresence, we can also find value. Hearing accounts from Tony Humphries and Mike Dunn in our Saturday Mass series provides a fascinating contrast to how club music used to be consumed. Record stores would get shipments in every week and DJs would crowd around the front turntables; listening, judging and claiming their favourites for their sets that weekend. These sessions would lay the foundation for what passed through the needle at Ministry of Sound, Warehouse, Zanzibar and countless other clubs across America and Europe, and because many other DJs would be present at the sessions too, popular records went on heavy rotation. We wince at Radio 1 playlisting these days, but the principle here was the same and tracks were broken week in week out using that system.
Fast forward to today, and the volume and variety of releases across digital and physical formats makes this process harder to replicate. It’s democratised music consumption but has also shifted the focus away from the DJ as a key source of new music discovery. The purists may recoil, but track ID culture has offered a way of replicating this process for the modern day. Take the Identification of Music Group, for example; a Facebook community started in May 2015 and, in just over a year, has grown through word-of-mouth to over 20,000 members. Fed by a daily supply of videos recorded on-the-sly inside clubs, it’s the digital embodiment of IDing culture. This is a space free from label marketing teams, Facebook advertisers and radio pluggers. If a track gets traction, it’s because the people decree it so, and it holds a tremendous power in being able to break new club tracks and influence DJs, dancers and even labels about what works and what doesn’t. So, while some may argue this IDing obsession is disrupting the dance-floor, it also holds significant power to shape its very fabric.
For better or worse, phones are now an extended limb of our generation. And actually, it’s in the eye of the beholder how you want to look at it. We think it’s for the better. Using our phones as an accelerated music discovery tool to track ID sets actually enhances the experience on the dance-floor. It allows us to relive and share memories in clubs and at festivals, to uncover artists that might place us on a different dance-floor the next week. Of course moderation, subtlety and respect is paramount, but we can only celebrate what we see as just another beautiful facet of the dance-floor experience.
