It’s a bit rare around these parts for DJs to get their due. But, the odds are, if you’re on this website, you find yourself in the presence of a DJ–whether it be a club or bar or house party–on a weekly basis. How many times have you looked up from your drink, and wondered aloud “who IS this” and meant “who’s mixing this?” Not many? Or maybe so: maybe you chase around Portland hunting out the best of them, the ones that wear your feets into stumps, or twist your brain into paralysis, or set your vibe just perfectly. In any case, welcome to LC’s weekly space on the Portland DJ. It’s an evolving thing (it doesn’t have a name yet), but expect every week a “who” or “where” of some sort.

Last Wednesday, I sat down with music scribe and DJ, Philip Sherburne–who happens to be on an extended hometown break here from his adopted city of Barcelona–for a broad chat about dance music in Portland, selling techno to rock kids, and staying up all night…

WW: Have you been keeping up with Portland’s music scene?

PS: In electronic music. I’ve known Paul Dickow, Strategy, for a long time. We had him play at the Treble parties [in San Francisco] years ago. We figured out the Portland connection then, and have stayed in touch since. So, I follow Community Library really closely, and I’m a big fan of ORAC as well, which is Seattle, but there’s the Northwest connection–free Cascadia–and I’ve met Copy here and I’ve seen him play. I definitely get the feeling there’s an interesting little scene here.

Do you have enough sense of things here to compare its progression to the larger US techno scene?

In some ways I’d say that Portland is representative of it. I get the same sense that here in Portland people are taking influences from elsewhere, from abroad from German electronic music or whatever, and rethinking them, morphing them into something else. That, I think, is Community Library’s strength: not its eclecticism, but that it will draw from anything, not neccessarily a particular sound or idea.

At the same time, everything in their catalogue is pretty unconventional, from Evolutionary Jass Band to Solenoid. How does a label like that sell itself to what’s historically a rock town?

Candidly, I think they have trouble selling themselves because they release on different formats, and different styles. I don’t think they’ve had an easy time with sales.

Broadly then, how does one go about selling electronic music to a rock town?

I’m definitely seeing more a crossover and more of an interest in the rock community in electronic music. Like, Brooklyn Vegan–very, very indie–and they just launched a weekly dance column. I think the Ed Banger stuff, DFA, MSTRKRFT…all of this help to connect with a crossover type of audience. I’m really intrigued by–they’re launching their tour here in Portland which I find weird– that MSTRKRFT and [trance/house producer] John Digweed are touring together. Apparently, they chose Digweed for their tour, which I find really weird. That would seem to indicate that they’re trying to break out of the indie-crossover audience, and tap into a purist dance audience. I would have seen it going the other way. I’m just curious to see how that goes over. I don’t see them connecting to an purist or experienced dance or club audience so much. I’m intrigued to see it, and I’m intrigued that it’s starting here in Portland.

I’ve been to a couple places lately. I went a house party this weekend, a Berlin themed party. You know Matt: M. Quiet is his DJ name. He used to do Kulturezene over at Dunes. He’s been telling me he’s been doing a lot of house parties and there’s a younger generation of kids that are curious and intrigued, and they’ll book him to do more rock-dance stuff, and then he’ll drop a long set of Villalobos and they’ll just go crazy for it. The information is starting to get out there.

But, I really like the experience of a techno club, open very late and DJs having really long sets, and a certain flow to the night. I think in the rock scene, things are much more broken-up. What I’m looking to see develop is a sense of that context where things tie together more in a town that doesn’t have a really established techno scene.

So, kind of how it sounds is that the solution is compromising both scenes. Blending in the middle…

I think that’s the de facto. That’s what’s happening.

Do you see a negative to that?

I think techno–which I use as a catch-all term–has evolved in very specific kind of context. I like long mixes, I like a 4/4 beat all night long, I like that stylistic consistently. And, that’s what I see being lost, that sense of being lost in a room for eight hours in…controlled madness.

How do you protect that?

I don’t think it’s a question of protection. I think it’s how you promote it, is venues that can create that vibe, that atmosphere. I think there’s a huge difference in rock presentation and creating a dance atmosphere. I would say even Holocene, which I love–I’m a huge supporter of this place, and I would say that even if I weren’t playing here–but the night I played with MSTRKRFT, they were booked in that room, so was Copy, and I was booked in this [front] room with Brian Foote, and it really broke up the night. There was this shuttling back and forth that killed any sense of continuity. But, then again, that’s my prejudice: I like a very immersive environment where you go in at eleven or midnight, and you stumble out at six, and you’re like “what the fuck just happened in there?”

Let’s step back into something pretty broad: on Friday, Matthew Dear is playing a DJ set in this room, rather than a “live” production set…what’s the difference now between the two?

I would say the question is where’s the line between DJ and live performance maybe…I think there’s a real difference between someone who mixes records live on stage, and someone that sits in their studio and produces records that get released. I think the modes of performance are really blurring because now you have a lot of people that are not DJing vinyl, that are using [software programs] Serato Scratch or Final Scratch. And then there are people mixing Ableton Live and a MIDI controller, so there’s no more beatmatching, it’s just dropping your files into Ableton Live and then using the MIDI to drop stuff in and from there it’s a very short step to live performance, which is just taking premade audio files in Ableton Live and tweaking with the controllers. The only difference is someone that’s playing their own music and someone that’s playing someone else’s music. And even when Matthew Dear plays live as Audion, he’s still just paging through preconstructed things, and doing a little bit of delay or a little bit of filtering. There’s not much live-ness to it. The only people I can think of that actually play live are like Reanimator or Eats Tapes–I think Solenoid does too–that have a shitload of machines: beatboxes and whatever, and they’re firing ‘em off willy-nilly.

How do you sell the idea of pretracking at all to a rockist?

Well, you could take a rockist approach and say that DJing is real because someone is actually mixing something in real time, whereas playing an Ableton Live set is not so real because it’s just playback. I take a pretty nonjudgemental view because, I mean, I’ve seen [Karlheinz] Stockhausen play live. And seeing Stockhausen play live is literally a DAT–Digital Audio Tape–and a big fucking mixing desk and then tweaking in real time in a theater. There’s nothing live about that, him taking this thing that took probably thousands of hours to construct and tweaking the filters on it a bit. It probably doesn’t matter that much. Live performance is just not its reason for being…

But, part of its reason for being is maybe not live performance, but live experience.

Totally. I’d be perfectly happy, in fact happier, to go dance at a club if we weren’t looking at the stage and the DJ were in a booth somewhere in the corner, and it was totally black, and you’re just dancing. The sort of the myth of the DJ, and I think it’s true, is that the DJ looks at the crowd, feels the crowd, reads the crowd, is constantly interacting with the crowd. So, whether or not you’re staring at the stage, he or she is feeling what’s happening on the dance floor so it really is a real time kind of thing.

But, how do you sell a rock kid on the validity of that? Give em’ ‘E’….

Yeah, I’ve tried that. It works for the night.

The extreme extreme example is Jamie Lidell. If he wants to start from nothing, he can. That’s someone who’s really a master of his instrument, even if it happens to be a computer with a bunch of boxes attached to it. And, ironically, that’s what rock kids really seem to enjoy.

I mean, rock is a performance based aesthetic. I grew up on New Wave, Goth, and then Punk. And I had a shitload of synthesizers and drum machines when I was a kid, and then at some point, I sold them all because I’d gotten really into hardcore, and I was like “fucking keyboards man, that’s totally fake. That’s not real music.” I’m kicking myself to this day.

That’s sort of the opposite way it usually goes…

Yeah, yeah, I guess it’s a generational thing too. There was a time where I didn’t like any records with perceptible overdubbing. I was like “they totally just did that in the studio. I can tell where they overdubbed that vocal line. That’s totally bullshit. It’s totally fake.” And now I can laugh at that. It’s one particularly rigid way of looking at music, and I can understand why people feel that way.

Maybe the answer is then not to push it. Let this music persist, and let the walls crumble on their own…

I think people are going to come to it. I really believe if the music appeals to them on a gut, visceral level, they’ll grapple with the aesthetics of performance. Techno is still grappling with that.

DJ Philip Sherburne performs tonight at Holocene with Matthew Dear and 31 Avas. 9 pm. $8. 21+

Sherburne’s blog.