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The song of the summer is an elusive beast under any circumstances, and in dance music, it is even slipperier. A true song of the summer is a pop phenomenon, for one thing. It requires consensus, the knowledge that on beaches and in cars from coast to coast, people are playing the same song and feeling the same thing—even if it's just thinking, “Now this, this is the song of the summer.”
Dance music has no such monoculture. Not only is dance music split by the all-but-unbridgeable divide between commercial EDM and everything else, it’s split into a bazillion fractions and overlapping factions based on geography, demographics, history, stylistic quirks, tribal allegiance, petty grievances. To come up with one song that would satisfy all those constituencies, you’d have to be Prince, Donna Summer, or Michael Jackson in their primes. And that ain’t happening.
So instead of trying to place our chips on a single song or artist, let’s think instead in terms of community—because what is dance music if not an expression of a collective spirit? To that end, we’ve highlighted one label, one sound, and one festival trend, all of which sum up the best of dance music for summer ’17.
Hot Sound: Back to the Jungle
Nostalgia for the golden age of rave has been creeping back into dance music for years now, often bubbling to the surface in breakbeat form. Think of Special Request’s hardcore flashbacks, Zomby’s and Lone’s respective rave throwbacks, or Four Tet’s paean to pirate radio. Lately, references to classic jungle have been seeping even deeper into house and techno’s firmament. Burial’s mournful fixation upon the “distant light” of yesterday’s underground has mellowed, and today a wide swath of the dance music scene basks in vintage jungle’s rosy glow.
What’s interesting is the way that jungle, long walled off by tempo and rhythmic cadence from other corners of dance music, has broken back through into contexts where you never used to hear it. Why is this happening now? Waning tribalism probably has something to do with it; YouTube-savvy clubbers who are accustomed to having the whole history of dance music at their fingertips are less likely to be dogmatic about tropes and tempos than the genre purists of yore. And then, on a simpler level, breakbeats simply sound great, particularly when slowed down, and they provide a welcome respite from long stretches of four-to-the-floor. This is especially true come summertime, when jungle's pulse-quickening rhythms only add to the general air of giddy euphoria.
You can hear it all over the place. DJ Sports’ “World” tips its hat to the liquid soul of LTJ Bukem, Peshay, and Alex Reece, but subs in the Danish producer’s own beats in place of classic breaks—a move similar to those heard on SW.’s untitled 2016 album, wherein the German artist drizzled new age keys over broken-beat grooves. Bristol native Shanti Celeste pays tribute to her hometown’s drum ‘n’ bass tradition with her upcoming single “Make Time.” Physical Therapy turns sharply away from the bare-knuckled techno of his recent releases, sinking into pneumatic breaks and dreamy keys on “More Sugar.” That house-tempo revamp of breakbeat hardcore is in keeping with Polish producer the Phantom’s gorgeous remix of Photonz’s “Parque de Liberdade” last year, which went all-in on easy-listening piano and ersatz sax melodies. If sunset beach parties came packaged in aerosol cans, they'd come out smelling exactly like that Photonz remix.
You hear the jungle revival in mixes, too. Last year, lo-fi househead Mall Grab dug into his collection and came up with an entrancing mix of classic jungle tunes pitched down to where they felt woozy and watery; in a brain-melting recent set, Avalon Emerson takes a pause from house and techno to indulge a hands-in-the-air passage of exuberant breaks. And Call Super’s Fabric 92 nodded obliquely toward the breakbeat tradition with cuts from Photek and Two Full Minds, too.
Expect to hear plenty more of the sound this summer, from the beaches of Croatia to the rocky crags of British Columbia. As summer sounds go, a well-placed breakbeat is as refreshing as it gets: It’s the lime in the coconut, the bubbles in the spritz, the sand between your toes.
Hot Label: Stockholm’s Studio Barnhus
Places that routinely endure brutal winters know how to make the most out of the summer. Take Stockholm, where every weekend from May to September, unpermitted outdoor parties spring up across the city’s outskirts like mushrooms after a heavy rain. “Basically, you get in a cab in the city center and go 15 minutes in any direction, and you’ll end up in the archipelago or an enchanted forest,” says Kornél Kovács, one of the co-founders of Stockholm’s Studio Barnhus.
It’s not hard to see how Stockholm’s unbridled summer spirit has influenced the Barnhus crew, which also includes co-founders Axel Boman and Petter Nordkvist, aka Pedrodollar. A certain strain of insouciant quirk has been an essential part of the label’s identity ever since their first release, the 2010 mini-compilation Good Children Make Bad Grownups, and over the past seven years, they’ve grown up as childishly as possible, with a cheerfully DGAF attitude that has resulted in one of the most inspired catalogs in house and techno.
No two releases are alike, though all share a mixture of misty-eyed sentiment—squishy synth pads, melancholy samples, romantic declarations—and genially off-the-wall humor. The latter might manifest in a druggy Italo-disco reference, a low-riding Foreigner/Mariah Carey cover, or even a totally unabashed sample of one of the biggest reggae crossover hits ever, cut with a few lines of Eazy-E, because why not?
Listening to the entire Barnhus catalog on shuffle, which you can do via their Spotify playlist above, feels a little bit like flipping through snapshots from the best summer ever. Sometimes the vibes are decidedly vintage: Mount Liberation Unlimited’s “Double Dance Lover” cues up chipmunk soul over conga-line breaks; Pedrodollar’s “Theme Song” might be a scratchy jazz 78 you found in the attic of someone’s beach house. Elsewhere, they flash back on the glory days of dance music. Carli’s “Lights & Strobes” evokes Eurodance at its most ecstatic, while Your Planet Is Next gets straight to the point on the hip-house anthem, “Do You Wanna Freak”: “Do you wanna pop some pills/Do you want cheap thrills/Do you wanna go real hard/Or do you wanna chill?” The artist born Arvid Wretman might just be talking about a 7” Harald Björk put out on the label in 2015. On the A-side, he remakes Derrick May’s summer-rave staple “Strings of Life” as a blippy chiptune miniature, while the flipside features a beatless synth etude, clear as a mountain stream, suffused in birdsong. The title? “Summer Anthem,” of course.
Hot Event: Going Back to Nature
If the Fyre Festival fiasco taught us anything—well, besides the fact that American cheese and iceberg lettuce on Wonder Bread does not constitute a “meal”—it’s that many people have tired of the obvious entertainment options, and they’re willing to go to extreme lengths to find something new. Many are looking for a different kind of musical experience: smaller, less hectic, and, to be frank, more conducive to taking acid without risk of a bad trip. At the opposite end of the spectrum than the Fyre crowd—you know, those impressed by supermodels’ derrieres, exclusive-sounding VIP packages, and Major Lazer—you’ll find a growing set that prefers communal vibes in a bucolic setting, soundtracked by left-field electronic music.
The idea goes back to the underground raves and free parties of the late ’80s, and some of the most iconic destinations in the current crop of alternative festivals date back to the ’90s. Fusion Festival, an annual experiment in “holiday communism” since ’97, aims to create techno’s utopian “parallel society” on the grounds of a former Russian airbase in rural northern Germany. Nachtdigital, also founded 20 years ago, brings weirdo house, techno, and ambient—including Jeff Mills, Aurora Halal, Matias Aguayo, and Kara-Lis Coverdale this year—to a lakeside sleepaway camp outside Leipzig.
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The upstate New York grounds of Sustain-Release, which asks not to be called a festival. (Photo by Kayla Waldorf)
Fortunately, you don’t need to go all the way to Europe for events like these. Sustain-Release, now in its fourth year, takes over a summer camp in the Catskills for three days, combining top-shelf house and techno—previous artists include DJ Sprinkles, Lena Willikens, Optimo, and Honey Dijon—with a “positive, communal attitude” free of “sexism, racism, homophobia, aggressive behavior, and bad vibes.” And for those who really want to get away from it all, this June sees the launch of Shaker Mountain, a mountaintop fest in upstate New York featuring underground New York DJs (Galcher Lustwerk, Yaeji, Working Women), camping, and complimentary meals prepared from produce grown on-site.
Many of these events go to great lengths to distance themselves from mainstream festival culture. Fusion refrains from publishing lineups beforehand, believing that the DJs' identities are secondary to the communal experience. (“Holiday communists” they may be, but Fusion's organizers remain pragmatists, however: “Sure, you will find show dates on the websites of some artists,” they helpfully acknowledge.) Terraforma, held in the woods of Villa Arconati outside Milan, aims to “reduce the distance between life and art” with a mixture of experimental music (GAS, Suzanne Ciani, Donato Dozzy), talks and workshops, sustainable architecture, and eco-friendly waste management. Waking Life, which debuts in Portugal’s Northern Alentejo this summer, also combines experimental techno with a minimized environmental footprint. Beloved Welsh festival Freerotation, which evolved out of a free-party collective in the early ’00s, is a non-profit, members-only affair, making its pastoral setting and top-notch lineup (including Objekt, Ben UFO, and RAMZi) all the more tantalizing.
Even more mainstream acts are blazing new trails in this arena, as artist-curated festivals continue to rise across the live music industry. In July, the xx will host the third installment of their Night + Day series, a traveling festival previously held in Lisbon, Berlin, and Brixton. They pair acts with broad pop appeal—Earl Sweatshirt, Sampha, the xx themselves—with leftfield dance types like Hunee, Call Super, Avalon Emerson, Axel Boman, and Robag Wruhme. The whole thing takes place at Skógafoss, a waterfall carved into the cliffs of Iceland's former coastline. If you were looking for a fitting symbol of the spirit of rejuvenation running through the most adventurous festivals right now, you couldn’t do better than the site’s verdant expanse of spongy moss and boundless rainbows.