NSDTCM:RA:INTERVIEW
Daniel Bell: The nomad
He's travelled a long way since his DBX days in Detroit, but he's back in the city for the DEMF, and back as DBX. Lee Smith profiles minimal techno pioneer Dan Bell.
Music people - media, artists, fans - love to define styles of music by geography. Nowhere is this more common than in electronic music, which is always quick to sniff out and hyperbolise the latest emerging sound of this or that city. It's an approach which gives journalists and listeners the opportunity to neatly define often quite abstract music with tangible signifiers, be they the crumbling expanses of post-wall Berlin, the urban decay of Detroit, or the smog-tinged industrial heritage of Sheffield.
So where does Daniel Bell fit into this scheme? Not easily. If you had to pick a city that his name was most associated with, you would choose Detroit, and the creative flowering of techno which blossomed there in the '90s. But then again, consider his Button-Down Mind mixes from the early '00s, which are widely seen as responsible for shifting techno's focus onto the then unexplored territories of Germanic minimal. Or indeed, his current deejaying schedule: Bell is just as comfortable supporting the scene in Virginia or Philadelphia as preparing a new Thursday night residency in Berlin this summer. So while Bell's most famous work is instinctively linked with Detroit, it's worth remembering that he's not even originally from that city, and hasn't lived there for years. In fact, he claims he's not from anywhere in particular.
He's travelled a long way since his DBX days in Detroit, but he's back in the city for the DEMF, and back as DBX. Lee Smith profiles minimal techno pioneer Dan Bell.
Music people - media, artists, fans - love to define styles of music by geography. Nowhere is this more common than in electronic music, which is always quick to sniff out and hyperbolise the latest emerging sound of this or that city. It's an approach which gives journalists and listeners the opportunity to neatly define often quite abstract music with tangible signifiers, be they the crumbling expanses of post-wall Berlin, the urban decay of Detroit, or the smog-tinged industrial heritage of Sheffield.
So where does Daniel Bell fit into this scheme? Not easily. If you had to pick a city that his name was most associated with, you would choose Detroit, and the creative flowering of techno which blossomed there in the '90s. But then again, consider his Button-Down Mind mixes from the early '00s, which are widely seen as responsible for shifting techno's focus onto the then unexplored territories of Germanic minimal. Or indeed, his current deejaying schedule: Bell is just as comfortable supporting the scene in Virginia or Philadelphia as preparing a new Thursday night residency in Berlin this summer. So while Bell's most famous work is instinctively linked with Detroit, it's worth remembering that he's not even originally from that city, and hasn't lived there for years. In fact, he claims he's not from anywhere in particular.
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