The New Beat

[June 24th, 2009]

Throwing a big dance party comes easy to Manny Reyes. He’s been doing it for 15 years.

“Me and my high-school friends had a party crew—we’d rent a warehouse, make a flier and spin house and techno for hundreds of teenage Mexican kids,” the 31-year-old Atole frontman says of his teenage years in Las Vegas. “Me and my sisters used to play Prince and Devo on vinyl and dance for hours. I never stopped dancing.”

This weekend, Reyes is hosting his biggest party yet: a two-day, all-ages dance festival dubbed Superfest!, which features 12 of Portland’s most promising and lively electronic acts, ranging from the percussion-heavy dub punk of Explode Into Colors to the warped electronics of the much lauded Nice Nice (playing its first local show in two years). The unifying connection between the bands is that they all create music you can dance to without relying exclusively on a laptop or turntables.

It’s a shift from electronic music’s not-too-distant past, when many artists relied on laptops for their live performances. The old standard of one dude sitting behind a computer has largely disappeared from the local music landscape, and Reyes and others have combined the live instrumentation of a rock show with the energy of a dance club. When Starfucker played the Music in the Schools benefit at Cleveland High School a few weeks ago, it was billed as a headliner over popular Portland hip-hop group Lifesavas—a move justified by 100 kids climbing onstage to dance to Starfucker’s last song. Dance acts with live instrumentation have changed the way much of Portland parties, a phenomenon fueled by the strong local house-show scene and dance music going, in Reyes’ words, “pop”—locally, nationally and internationally.

It’s no coincidence many of the bands in Portland’s burgeoning, performance-oriented dance scene got their starts on the house-show circuit, playing sweaty basements and crowded living rooms to throngs of kids who weren’t afraid to cut loose. Reyes says the younger house-show audience “isn’t jaded by years of indie-rock shows where everyone has their arms crossed, only moving to sip their Pabst or nod their head,” and the palpable energy that comes from knowing the audience is actually dancing to the band translates into his performance.

Since Reyes moved to Portland in 2004, he says the city has come to not only accept dance music but epitomize the idea of a creative, collaborative scene. Superfest! is evidence of that closeness: It got its start when Reyes simply emailed a handful of musician friends—many of whom, like YACHT and Starfucker, can headline much larger venues. He says they all embraced the idea of creating an all-ages festival.

If the community is growing, so is the market for dance music. The current landscape of showgoing kids grew up on dance-rock outfits like LCD Soundsystem, and they lionize Chic and Kraftwerk as much as the Rolling Stones. But dance fans didn’t sprout up overnight: Sometime around the turn of the 21st century, the American indie underground began to accept dance and electronic music—once frowned upon by critics as a less “authentic” form of expression than rock ’n’ roll—into its ranks. And when Kanye West sampled Daft Punk’s “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” for the hook to his own mega-hit, “Stronger,” in 2007, it officially become cool to like electronic music again.

Eric Mast, who makes music and art under the name E*Rock, sees the change. “Bands that would have been called ‘experimental’ a couple years back are getting more attention [now],” he says. “We started out mostly with DJ-ing, but me and Manny and Marius [Libman, otherwise known as local one-man dance band Copy] are all music nerds, and we’ve crated a format that puts the bands in front.”

At its heart, Superfest! celebrates fun artists who dance to the beat of their own drummers.

“I can’t hide my commitment to this music. Dancing is the cheapest, funnest thing for me,” Reyes says. “I just want to celebrate a rad moment in Portland’s music scene and reward homies that stuck to their guns.”