Sly One

Blog #2: Whatever happened to good filler?

There has been a change in the way I feel that dance music is DJed in the last 10 years. Particularly trance, but while researching this article, I also spoke to a breakbeat DJ who felt the same way about his genre. The problem can really be summed up as: it feels like hardly anyone writes good filler anymore.

By “filler” I mean:

• The kinds of tunes that don’t get massive reactions from the crowd, because they’re not meant to. They often don’t get asked about; they will often pass peoples’ conscious minds completely; they are the stabilisations in energy, the moments when a crowd can get it’s breath back, the opportunities to groove away and have happy exchanges with all the cool people around you and think “man, I’m having such a good night”.  And yes, maybe for attention to wander a bit, for the toilet to be visited, the drink to be replenished. Such things are necessary, despite our fragile DJ egos thinking that our mad spinning skills should compel people to inflate their bladders until they can be kicked like a car tyre.
• Or even more difficult to get right - they might be the kinds of lynchpin tracks that take a set from one place to another.  Tracks that might start with a drop in energy and slowly, imperceptibly build, layering up percussion and simple melodic parts. I’m talking about tracks that can shift a set from one style to another smoothly, or shift a set up a gear without taking centre-stage.  These tracks for me have always been the DJ tools of trade, the absolutely essential but unheralded swiss-army knives required for crafting a memorable set.
• Another kind of filler might be the kind of track that slowly tightens the grip on the dancefloor – a DJ can watch it happen. They’re really getting into it, and it didn’t take a string of peak-time bangers to do it. The room subtly fills, the dancing gets more insistent.  The odd “whoop” can be heard.  Nobody’s rushing up and asking what the tune is – they’re too busy dancing and laughing and smiling at each other.

A really good piece of filler for the situation might keep the crowd simmering, but not boiling. It should keep people interested, even captivated, but not enslaved. The whole point is that when the next big tune comes on, it is when the DJ decides it is the right time to grab the entire crowd by it’s balls and say “have this”.  The explosion in energy at moments like this is what people will remember at the end of the night. The entire crowd move as one and that sense of partying together really takes hold.

YES!  This stuff gets me going! For me, the best fun in DJing and working a crowd is not about arriving with a walletful of thumping anthems and just letting them have it – it’s about that feeling of taking a crowd on a journey.  And I don’t feel like the music scene is providing those sorts of tunes in the abundance that it used to.

The problem is: somewhere along the line “filler” became a dirty word.  Another way of calling a track an “also-ran”; a footnote.  If it’s not a big tune, it’s not a tune at all, or worse, in my book: if it’s not a big tune, it would be a “better” tune if it were bigger. How did we get to this stage?  If a DJ plays non-stop big tunes for 2 hours, he desensitises the crowd, and the big tracks stop getting the big reactions.  We all know this.  DJs need filler to make sets work.

Filler, for me, does not mean a crap tune!  A crap tune is a crap tune, plain and simple.  A good bit of filler is just a different kind of tune.

Here are some awesome past tunes from my library that I’ve used for this sort of thing.  Track them down, and love them as much as I do!:

• Paul Van Dyk – Forbidden Fruit
• Illuminatus – Hope (Salt Tank Remix)
• Empirical Labs – Turtle Beach (Outback Remix)
• Ambassador – The Fade (Fade Remix)
• Odessi – Moments of Space
• Son Kite – On Air (Lemon 8 Remix)
• Bissen – Night Terror (Terror Mix)
• Max Graham – Airtight
• Digital Nature – Oasis (John Askew Mix)
• Jochen Miller – Chromatic (Miller Dub)
• John O’Callaghan pres. Mannix – Acid Rain
• Foreplay – Supposed I’m Leading
• Dan Stone – Made In Bahrain (Orkan Remix)
• Mesh – Trancefixion
• Onova – Platitude (Sebastian Brandt Remix)

“Hang on, there”, you say. “There are plenty of trance DJs out there playing sets with clear rises and falls in energy.  Not everyone is trying to beat the crowd to death with massive tunes”.

I agree, there are.  DJs are a creative bunch.  I like to think I’m doing the same thing too.  This isn’t an exercise in writing excuses, I’ve already done that.  If I felt like I couldn’t play a decent set anymore, I would have quit by now.  I think, by and large, we do a good job.  However, I know a couple of excellent carpenters, and I know that if I gave them a small coping saw, two used rawlplugs, a piece of chewing gum, a copy of  a Davina McCall exercise DVD and half a cucumber, they would be able to fashion me a set of shelves and fix my roof.  If you’re good at your job, you can make a square peg fix a round hole.  A good workman blames his tools, leave no cliché unturned etc etc.

What I meant (before I disappeared up my own proverb) is that the trance DJ community has found ways of working around the absence of custom-written filler by appropriating different kinds of music and using them as filler. To return to my slightly rambling analogy one more time, we have just sharpened the cucumber and got on with it.

The two standout mechanisms that seem to be used are:

• Alternating trance and tech-trance (2 on, 2 off and variations on a theme)
• Playing prog (progressive trance, a slower, groovier, often melodic but definitely not anthemic form of trance) at the same speed as the trance.

I’ll start with the latter, because it’s just reminded me of something.  Progressive Trance.  I almost think the change in meaning in this term has become a perfect example of the point I’m trying to make.  It used to be, that for me as a trance DJ, progressive trance was the go-to style to find great filler.  These tracks were very much “proper” trance; the energy was all there; these were tracks meant to be danced to.  They sounded like trance.  They were just not all written to be the biggest tunes in a DJ’s set.  Progressive trance was music that was designed to take a dancefloor on a progressive journey.

Progressive trance now (or just “progressive” to use its sanitised form) has metamorphosed into what to me sounds like much more of a distinct genre in itself.  It’s slower, it’s often got more than one eye on listeners rather than dancers (unsurprising given the numbers of listeners that internet radio stations now have compared to the numbers in clubs)  and at the moment, leans heavily on electro and minimal tech influences for its basses and grooves.  I love loads of this stuff, but for me it misses the mark when sandwiched between two big trance tunes.  It works well on its own, or paired with tracks with a similar energy, or as a buildup to trance, but when played in between trance tunes, the energy usually seems to be in such a different space that it doesn’t often fulfil my criteria for being good filler.  It’s simply great music of a different genre.

Interestingly, I worked out a while back where loads of excellent progressive trance producers must have gone around 2002.  Psy-trance.  There is the most unbelievable wealth of fantastic progressive psytrance out there, it blows my mind.  There is only one downside; as a whole, progressive psytrance is, again, just a little too low-energy these days  to mix well with trance.  There are excellent exceptions, but they’re nowhere near as numerous as I’d like.

Tech, I feel, suffers less from this dichotomy of energy.  For many high-energy DJs, it’s like manna from heaven; hi-octane tunes that the crowds love, that’s great fun to DJ, has credibility, mixes reasonably well with trance and can be used to break up the big trance peaks.  Yes, to all points.  There’s only one problem: these are all still big tunes!  I would quite happily peak with tech-trance!  The pattern seems to be: play constant big tunes, but alternate the style of the big tunes.

To be honest, this works well.  In fact, I think it’s probably the best way to play at 2am-6am.  Non-stop floor fillers but without a tired dancefloor.  Exactly what any dancefloor would ask of the headline DJ.

But it’s not what I’m talking about.  As I’ve strived to make clear, I still think DJs are doing a good job; I just feel like there’s a kind of set which you don’t hear so often anymore, and I’d like to hear it again.

So what happened?

I think it all boils down to the following factors:

• Commercial pressure
• Web forums and internet radio
• The digital format
• A change in the makeup of clubland

Commercial pressure: less tunes are sold than ever before.  Dance music has passed its heyday (at least in the UK), and digital downloads are claiming a chunk of the revenue.  My music has been rising in profile in the last few years (in terms of recognition, plaudits and big-name DJ support), but my tunes now sell less than half the units of my first ever release.  It was released on vinyl, on our own label, with no meaningful distribution. We had to hand-deliver copies to record shops around the UK and it retailed for six times the price of a modern download and yet it sold as well as some big tunes manage now.  This for me highlights the pressure that the industry is under.

With this massive pressure driven by low unit sales, it becomes imperative for artists to write big tunes, and equally imperative for record labels to select and release only the tunes that they are sure will be major successes. How many really great pieces of filler are getting lost in the wringer as producers and labels strive to turn every track into a dancefloor anthem?

Web forums: with clubbers and music lovers now exchanging playlists with such ease, it all seems to be about the tunes “that everyone is talking about”; which frankly is rarely going to include good filler.  Again, it is going to favour the memorable tunes.  Where is the DJ forum where trance DJs talk about the “tunes that no-one remembers but are fantastic for moving from tech into uplifting if you’re starting in A minor and moving into C minor”?  There isn’t one.

The digital format: a.k.a “whatever happened to the B-side”?  The time was that the best filler came from the B-sides of otherwise big-tune releases, but with vinyl now cast on the scrapheap, each tune stands alone.  OK, tunes are released with some remixes, or with another tune to create an EP, but it’s much rarer to see a tune released with something a bit more obscure and interesting on the other side; it will tend to be the less popular of two relatively similar tunes.

Clubland: So, clubland is much smaller (particularly in the UK) than it was 10 years ago, but is very much alive and kicking.  If anything it’s back to its roots as an underground movement, and that’s no bad thing.  However, perhaps it does mean that the crowds are just that bit more hardcore, and so filler just isn’t needed anymore?  Maybe DJs can just bend a dancefloor over their knee these days and give them an 8-hour thrashing (and if they can, you can bet they will).

The ban on smoking in public places in the UK (and elsewhere in the world) certainly doesn’t help either. DJs are now under pressure not to let up the energy even for a second, for fear of losing half the dancefloor when they all rush out to have a cigarette.

For me, this last one has been a thought for quite a while.  If I think about all those classic dancefloor moments when the energy lulled, people all around me would have been lighting cigarettes, pausing and taking it all in.  This just isn’t an option anymore.  A smoker (and let’s face it, most clubbers are smokers, even now) has the option of dancing so hard they don’t notice, or having a fag outside.  Maybe for them, filler is now a lost art.

Having said all that, I do genuinely believe trance (and dance music in general) is in a fantastic place right now, and has even benefitted from being able to play to the audience that appreciates it most. There are lot of producers out there making fantastic music and DJs crafting great sets; I enjoy DJing as much as I ever have. I guess I’m just trying to provoke some debate on different ways of crafting that musical journey.

Let the debate begin, people!