Spring State

Finally the spring semester is over! Only one more year of this school nonsense, then I too can join the great American workforce. Or something. Now, it’s time for some spring cleaning!

First things first, we have a couple changes here at ISM that should make things slightly better for everyone. The most immediately useful change is that we now have a “Mixes” category for posts, so you can easily search through the archives to find all our wonderful mixes in one fell swoop. I can’t really tell you why we haven’t had that category from the start, but whatever. The second change is that our comments now allow replies to specific comments instead of just the original post, hopefully this will allow for even better discussion (and more of it, we’ve had some pretty high traffic weeks recently without many new comments! Come on people, you can do better than this! Tell us we rule, tell us we suck, drop a non sequitur, it really doesn’t matter. We like interaction.). One change you WON’T be seeing is an upgrade of WordPress. It annoys me to no end that I now have to look at a little reminder that I should upgrade when I’m checking ISM, but there is nothing wrong or bad happening right now so why risk upsetting the order? Especially after Vista, I am really sketchy on upgrading software that already does the job perfectly.

On the music writing tip, I have a couple things forthcoming for Resident Advisor, one Q&A type feature and a contribution to another feature. They definitely seem to be doing a better job over there with covering good music: props are due for their reviewers Jacob Wright and Todd Burns who have been pushing a nice variety of good music, but also especially for their recent Robert Hood interview. I’m sure everyone has read this already, but I keep coming back to his quote:

There is no Pro Tools, there is no Serato, there is no compact disc that can outdate my form of music. The way I present it is timeless. It’s in my heart, and it’s in my hands. It’s not in technology.

This ties in directly with a discussion I was having with the Mnml Ssgs boys and Philip Sherburne on a post over at the mnml ssgs blog. I think the heavy link between techno music and technology is very overblown and really kind of incorrect. Personal sounds and expressions is what matters most, and as Rob Hood states, that all comes from him, not from a box or a piece of software. Some of the Q&A piece I did for RA covers that same idea, as well.

Another refreshing viewpoint pops up in this little interview with Patrice Scott over at the Nish blog. He says:

I couldn’t care less about putting out a new record every other month. I’m looking at the quality.

showing that he already has in place a filter that is more effective than even some of the most respected labels have recently (Yes, I’m talking about you, Planet E). No wonder every Sistrum record is at least very dope if not classic!

In other good news for Pittsburgh dance music, my man Paul Dang (who will be showing some previews of his upcoming film!) and I are doing an event on May 10th with Rick Wilhite of the 3 Chairs. It’s gonna be a good time in a cool little spot in East Liberty called Ava which is part of the legendary Shadow Lounge. Here’s the little preflyer:

Also, ISM will be doing very Detroit-centric coverage of the Festival Formerly Known as DEMF. Expect a few cool pre-festival posts about long-time Detroit spots and legends, some short interviews with artists, and coverage of all the dope afterparties that the mainstream dance media never talk about. If you wanna know the real reason that Detroit music is so special and deserves to have its own festival, we are going to do the best job we can to show it to you.

In the meantime, expect some reviews, some more guest mixes and ISM deejay mixes, and some analysis and whatnot. You know how we do.