Checking In: Dylan Cameron Revisits the Rave Music of A Jilted Generation

A skittering upbeat overlays melodic ambiance on Dylan Cameron’s Holodeck Records single last month, “Dust Lust.” Meanwhile, its video dusts off the motherboard of your mind. A second generation ATX vanguardist, the electronic music producer both stimulates and soothes our raw nerve endings.

Haviland Lake in the San Juan national forest

Austin Chronicle: Where are you sheltering and under what circumstances? Who else is there and how’s that going?

Dylan Cameron: I am sheltering in a rented house in South Austin with my life partner, Vi Ly. We are very much in love and being together all the time is going quite well. She is patient with me getting up at the crack of dawn to start working on music and we make dinner almost every night. I have converted the third bedroom of our house into a crowded and messy studio where I record my machines, and also do mixing and mastering work for other people.

AC: At what point did C-19 shut down operations for you, and what went down with the ship, so to speak, both personally & professionally?

DC: In March, I did an open-air event called Resistor at Kenny Dorham’s Backyard in East Austin and that was the last thing I played live. I had already decided not to participate in SXSW in 2020, so that really didn’t hurt much, although I had friends who were invested in the afterparties. I had a feeling once the data really started coming in for U.S. infection rates that we would not return to crowded, mind-altering warehouse parties in the for a very long time.

Unfortunately, those were the kind of shows I really enjoyed playing.

In Austin, there were already very few places, let alone venues, where these parties could actually happen, so the real loss here comes in not being able to look forward to playing in other cities or countries for a year or two at least. Both personally and professionally, there is no longer anything to speculate over in terms of future bookings or events, just the ever looming task of creating better music. In terms of loss, I fear that most of the cooler music venues across the entire country will never open again, so there's that.

AC: As a global culture, people employ music for every purpose imaginable, obviously spanning religion to entertainment and everything in between. What happens to communities like ours when people can no longer access it in person?

DC: Unsurprisingly, Austin skews in a very unserious direction when it comes down to the actual execution and dissemination of underground dance music. It does serve a purpose here, to be sure, but continues to suffer from a sort of ongoing identity crisis. People continue to compare parties in Austin to other places, but really that's unfair when you think about the actual population coming out to events here.

There is a running joke about bringing in a high-dollar headlining act to town so that the 50 people there can go outside and smoke cigarettes while talking to each other. This is no joke. By removing the ability to socialize, there is nothing left to posture over, so I think the positive impact of the shutdown is that a lot of culture vultures will starve out of the scene.

There is a historical warmth to instrument-driven music shows here in Austin that has been eroded out of underground dance events, and perhaps now the people here who wish the parties were "more like the ones in Brooklyn" will leave. It would also be nice to see more of an actual creative community developing around underground parties, and I think this is actually possible because whatever events we have in the future are going to require, at the very least, a greater degree of mindfulness.

AC: Everyone’s had to shift or drastically alter their work situation. What does that look like for you?

DC: Not that much actually. I have been seeing a slight increase in mastering requests since the pandemic started, so I get the sense that I’m not the only one who’s using this time to finish some recordings. No one was really making any money here in electronic music, so that isn’t actually that big of a deal to me.

What are you going to do with $150 in Austin? With $50?

How are clubs supposed to pay both their staff and the artists who play there with rents skyrocketing and profit margins that were slim to begin with? We have already lost both Plush and the North Door, and surely more will bite the dust soon. I blame the tech and real estate industries for failing to address the wealth inequality they have created here, and the lack of reforms around this issue coming from the City Council and Mayor Adler.

We need new leadership. Soon only very affluent people will be able to participate in the Austin music scene, which would make it dreadfully boring.

AC: What’s your soundtrack for the apocalypse and what role does music play for you as a fan and scholar of it in times of hardship?

DC: I find myself listening almost exclusively to ambient techno (or just ambient) as the apocalypse continues. I have also been going back to early big-beat/rave and Music For the Jilted Generation by the Prodigy is on heavy rotation. That record provides a detailed blueprint of everything that is sonically missing from most electronic music today.

I find it so much more impressive than what people are up to now.

We have reached a point of unprecedented saturation in the market for user generated media. In other words, there is a never ending stream of free electronic music of every fathomable sort being released independently that is completely unnecessary, if not unwanted, to the rest of the human species. This can be a pretty grim scenario when trying to release your own music, especially now, so I would say that during times of isolation my love and respect for my favorite recordings keeps me going as an artist.

Check out the entire Checking In series.