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September 12, 2007

Music

Off the Scale

Decibel Festival Can't Help but Turn Things Up

by Eric Grandy

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Collage By Aaron Edge

The joke about Seattle's Decibel Festival, now in its fourth year, is that the annual electronic music event was going to "scale back" for 2007. Not only have Sean Horton and crew—Seattle techno savant Jerry Abstract works with him as the festival's creative director, and other local players help out as they can—not downsized, they've booked the most populist and impressive lineup of the festival's short history.

"Believe it or not, it was [still] my intention only four months ago to scale back," says Horton, Decibel's founder and sole bankroller. After three years of putting his own ass(ets) on the line to make the event happen, Horton was looking for other options. And at one point, the 2007 festival was never going to happen at all.

Stranger Personals

"This past spring, I announced that there would be no Decibel Festival this year," he says, "because our plans to become a not-for-profit organization wouldn't be operational until 2008."

But Horton is an irrepressible promoter and a proven risk taker, and inspired by the energy of Seattle's electronic scene, he found a way to float the festival on his own one more time.

"Over the past three months—about half the time I normally spend on planning and curating the festival—things just seemed to fall into place, starting with a couple zero percent interest-rate credit cards," he says. "The combination of good credit, strong momentum, and club nights like Broken Disco—things just grew exponentially over the past few months. I guess you could say I failed miserably at scaling back."

Indeed. The festival kicks off with a bigger bill than any previous has seen, an opening-night party featuring Simian Mobile Disco, Diplo, and Switch.

That combination may only sound incredible to DJ heads and music nerds out there, but consider the roster of artists that those three have produced, remixed, or collaborated with, and you get an idea of how influential they are, at least on the periphery current indie and pop music: M.I.A. (both Diplo and Switch work with her), Klaxons, CSS, the Rapture, Spank Rock, Gwen Stefani, Arctic Monkeys, the Go! Team, Hot Chip, Teddybears, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Bloc Party, Air, Peaches, the Futureheads, Les Rhythmes Digitales, P. Diddy.

Diplo and Simian Mobile Disco aren't exactly flying under the radar themselves. Diplo, when not recording mixes for Fabric and Pitchfork, managing his one-year-old polyglot party-jam label Mad Decent, or traveling the world with his nonprofit music initiative Heaps Decent, still finds time to drop the occasional record, such as the recent Hollertronix #7, a gleeful mash of bootlegged pop, club breaks, and rare gems from his deep record crates. And after a series of killer singles and remixes, Simian Mobile Disco's recent full-length debut, Attack Decay Sustain Release, has placed them among 2007's most high-profile electronic musicians this side of Paris and Berlin.

But Horton doesn't see this year's lineup as any more pop than previous years.

"I don't consider [Diplo or Simian Mobile Disco] to be popular to the greater public," he says. "But then again, I'm not too hip as to what mainstream entails these days, either. If you consider a station like KEXP to be mainstream, then I agree there's a certain amount of synchronicity with their recent electronic music programming—i.e., the Field, Trentemøller, Matthew Dear, SMD, Justice, etc. I do feel that radio and popular culture is once again embracing electronic music like they did in the '80s."

But if popular culture is coming back around to electronic music, Decibel Fest isn't moving too far toward the mainstream. Beyond the opening-night party, there are still only a few names the casual KEXP listener might recognize: L.A. blog-house darlings Guns'n'Bombs, 2006 Decibel highlight Speedy J, maybe dirty-house producer Claude VonStroke. The festival has long booked headliners that are, at best, underground favorites, and, at worst, merely obscure, acts like Portland's Strategy, critical DJ Philip Sherburne, Ghostly industrialists Kill Memory Crash, and British Neu! ravers Motor.

"I have hugely eclectic tastes as a curator," Horton confesses. "But obviously there's only so much you can do while still retaining your creative vision, which is always the toughest part—not everything fits."

Some things Horton hasn't been able to make fit this year are the workshops, daytime performances, and installations that have in previous years taken over the Broadway Performance Hall.

"Part of the original scaling-back plan for 2007 involved cutting out the daytime [events]," Horton says. "Once we achieve our nonprofit status in 2008, the DB Conference—panels, product demos, booths, workshops—will be back in full effect." In the meantime, Decibel will be hosting just a few workshops Saturday afternoon at the OseaO gallery.

But with the 2007 lineup stronger than ever and nonprofit status right around the corner, the biggest sign yet of Decibel's expansive energy may be an online store and record label set to launch in early 2008.

"There's so much untapped talent in Seattle that deserves exposure," Horton says. "[A label] seems like a logical progression considering how many of those artists perform at Decibel. We're currently accepting local submissions for an internet label, and if things go well with the net-based releases, we'll move into creating physical product—CDs, 12-inches, DVDs, etc.—later in the year. Seattle definitely needs more electronic music labels. It's something I felt has been lacking for some time, but the festival has taken precedence."