Afrojack and Richie Hawtin on electronic dance music

Now that the winds of Las Vegas' Electric Daisy Carnival have died down, and the fluorescent furry boots have been packed away for another year, the conversation on electronic dance music can turn from the genre’s economics and festival culture back to the actual music. On June 9 at EDC, I talked separately with two major EDM artists, the English/Canadian/Detroit minimalist maven Richie Hawtin and the Dutch pop-inclined producer Afrojack. They each offered distinct, and sometimes competing, visions of the genre’s storied past and promising future.

In a lobby bar at the Mandarin Oriental hotel on the Las Vegas Strip, Hawtin is hanging out in his usual uniform of a cut-off black T-shirt and messy blond bangs. For a guy who made his reputation pioneering the brittle, chilly and handmade take on electronica that defined the Detroit dance music sound, it’s a bit surprising to see him instantly encircled for photos by a gaggle of short-skirted Vegas party girls. But such is the reach of Hawtin and EDM today, when even the Vegas pool-mob scene gets a bit doe-eyed in his presence.

At the closing artist panel at the EDMBiz conference in Las Vegas on June 7, Hawtin was the lone curmudgeon, saying that he didn’t necessarily want dance music firehosed into mainstream America and that his introduction to the genre felt  individual and isolated, even in crowded clubs. In a way, he experienced techno the way Detroit experienced America.

“Detroit was isolated from the U.S. Unless you were in the automotive industry you had no reason to go there,” he said. “Detroit music had a lot of soul, but it was also futuristic and robotic and metallic. It’s music from an isolated city. So as we threw parties, it became about speaker worship. We’d transform spaces so people became detached from reality. As the scene has changed today, I often try to go back to that original place, finding the right room, the right warehouse.”

Atlantic's Craig Kallman talks on Big Beat, electronic dance music

This post has been updated, as indicated below.

Giving the keynote address at the inaugural EDMBiz conference in Las Vegas, a confab about electronic dance music, Craig Kallman of Big Beat Records said it was a thrill to see the music business come back around to the artistry of the DJ.

One of the biggest imprints in today's dance music, indie record label Big Beat was founded by Kallman in 1987 when he was an avowed house scene gadfly. It turned heads in the New York electronica scene before eventually folding into Doug Morris' Atlantic Records in the early '90s, bringing with it a roster of dance and hip-hop artists. Kallman eventually rose to become chairman and chief executive of Atlantic Records, and his ascent at the company dovetailed neatly with the popular rise of the electronic dance music that was his first passion.

So when Atlantic wanted an imprint focused on EDM in 2010, reviving Big Beat seemed an obvious answer. It clearly worked -- it's home to Skrillex, possibly the most vital artist in electronica right now, alongside a stable of cred-building dance bands (Metronomy, Chromeo) and singles-smashing producers (Martin Solveig).

"If you slice me open, I'm just a house DJ inside," he said. The return of Big Beat was "born out of the incredible innovation coming out of the electronic music space. The technology is so advanced and producers are crafting such exciting sounds. It's been such an interesting migration of creativity, and this was a moment to activate it again. The first person we identified for it was Sonny Moore, who became such a transformational artist as Skrillex."