I went to the Fuji Rock Festival for Saturday and danced to Romy’s DJ and TSHA live sets. ROMY performed the 1990s trance throughout the set, which I previously mentioned in this series “Floor Essence,” and closed with a special version of Ferry Corsten’s “Out Of The Blue” mixed with vocals from her new song “LoveHer.” The moment saw huge enthusiasm from the audience, and the late-night RED MARQUEE stage turned into the happiest party ever. Let’s walk through the music scene of Romy’s generation to get a glimpse of the background of today’s dance beats and the atmosphere of the club music scene.
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Pioneers seeking out new beats in the heyday of EDM
ROMY debuted as The xx in 2009, just as EDM began to boom worldwide, and it was the heyday of flashy festival-ready tracks. Many DJs started to shift their focus from clubs to festivals. The response, especially in the US, was so positive that flashy festival-spec tracks became a worldwide trend. I have to admit it affected how the audience moved. The festival-spec groove, in which people reacted with only their upper body watching the performance rather than dancing, became the norm.
Meanwhile, various underground experiments with beats, mainly grime, and dubstep, took place in the UK. Although many DJs and artists began actively working to create serious and new styles of music that moved between club floors and bedrooms, Burial was a pioneer. Followed by Four Tet and Jon Hopkins, and then The xx debuted. Even if they do not necessarily focus on the dance floor, they have certainly inherited the DNA of the dance scene, and their generation is leading the front line of the current UK dance scene. Bonobo, for example, which came out of the downtempo and left field, has been enthusiastically accepted on the floor, proving that the current scene is becoming freer from the constraints of beats and tempos.
