Movement Music Festival
Memorial Day Weekend (May 24-26)
Hart Plaza, Detroit
“I can feel my boogers vibrating.”
That’s the best description I heard from Movement Music Festival, which Detroit locals call “techno Christmas.” It’s now in its 25th year of celebrating electronic music in its rawest form.
Yes, the name has changed, ownership has changed, the ticket price has gone up -- but it’s still in its 25th year. (Major love to the Detroit Free Press for this wonderful oral history.) The festival has always taken place along the Detroit River, which provides a welcome breeze washing over the concrete, urban park jungle of Hart Plaza, which is truly a perfect venue for a festival like this.
Even though the festival has gotten less weird and less experimental over the years (lesser acts blend together until the real talent reminds you why you’re there), it has taken the bizarro currency and exchanged it for a deeper embrace in recent years of the very Detroit acts that helped form the genre of techno more than 40 years ago.
The satellite parties around the city have gotten so vast, so high quality and so plentiful that it has begun to overshadow the actual festival itself. But there’s really no match for the sound quality and lights that Movement offers. It was, by far, one of my favorite fests yet – and I’ve been going for 16 years straight.
And since we’re Americans, our understanding of electronic music is a far cry from that of Europeans, who embrace it to the point that it’s relatively mainstream or at least way more respected and understood in common culture than it is here in the states.
I’ll give you a quick description of the sound, or at least how it makes me feel: A constant thump, a feeling of bass inside your bones, a hypnotic repetition that becomes mesmerizing. Sometimes atonal and mechanical; sometimes soulful and rich. The variations you can take from there are what make it exciting, as the youngest genres often are. (We still don’t know where we’ll go with this sound.) The wealth of releases (under real names, under fake names, under one-off projects, under aliases) are overwhelming for a completist, but don’t worry about it – embrace what you like and go from there.
Originators of this techno sound -- the more heavy, atonal, mechanical variety of the many subgenres of electronic music -- like Jeff Mills and Kevin Saunderson (this is the real talent I was talking about) provided the most dynamic sets at Movement this year, likely because they helped create it in the first place. When you’ve got six stages and 115 acts, to point out two as far above the rest is necessarily a great sign. But in fairness, I couldn’t see everything. (There’s a lot of overlap on set times.) When I point out those two, know that’s it’s coming with a lot of regard for the shows they put on.
The sound system from the main stage was such a force during Jeff Mills’ sci fi- drenched set that even from the farthest back you could go, the bass was still rocking your rib cage and, yes, for one festival goer, their boogers.
The aura and collective energy of people losing themselves in dance (some sober, most not) is what really makes Movement such a special thing. I'd never call the music secondary, but the camaraderie is special. I particularly loved one take I saw from a local reporter who wrote on Twitter: "detroit is the greatest city on earth but you have to like techno to know that."
I think that's true. And remember – ear plugs are mandatory. I forgot mine again for the 16th year in a row.
What’d you say?
