Dance Music Collaborations #1

Digital audio. 9:08 minutes. 2010

Concept and Research: Terence Gower

Producer: Kid Ginseng

Installation View: 7th Mercosul Biennial in Porto Alegre, Brazil

The 1920s

“A time is coming when a collective passion will be capable of stirring an epoch.” This sentence, from Le Corbusier’s 1925 book Urbanisme, describes the intense creative spirit, both collaborative and competitive, of artists and designers in the 1920s. It was a period of huge creative renewal in which a new sense of artistic empowerment was married to new ideas of social progress. Artists and designers were swept up in a “collective passion”.

The 1980s

I’ve been interested in dance music since the 1980s, a decade I wasted on the dance floors of clubs in New York and London. I became interested then in the unique social chemistry of the dance floor and the social solidarity that manifests in this context. This solidarity—sometimes explicitly referred to in song lyrics—creates a sense of well-being, love, even altruism towards the group, or towards society as a whole. I’ve always maintained a belief that the strong collective spirit of the dance floor has the potential to generate the “collective passion” described by Le Corbusier in the 1920s.

The Project

My project has been to compose a club anthem to draw a connection between the collective passion described by Le Corbusier and the collective passion of the dance floor. The anthem is a classic House track. Samples include fragments of Le Corbusier’s speeches, and samples from early twentieth century avant garde music, the whole mixed together in a classic House format.

The track is 9:08 minutes long and is designed to be played back in a discotheque or in the museum as a simple dance-floor installation: Four speakers, lights, and a mirror ball. Five minute breaks separate “performances.”