INTERVIEW: EMILY WITT
TALKING TECHNO WITH THE AUTHOR OF ‘HEALTH AND SAFETY’
In case you can’t tell by the frequent errors and confused attempts at contemporary slang, John’s Music Blog doesn’t often interview staff writers from The New Yorker. But when I found out that friend of the blog Emily Witt had a book dropping about her time in the 2010s Brooklyn techno community, I had to try and put plans in motion for us to chop it up.
The book is called Health and Safety and it is about a lot more than just techno. It’s a clear-eyed chronicle of Witt’s life as a writer and raver between 2016 and 2022. Witt hits clubs in Brooklyn by night and covers Trump rallies by day. She goes on focused drug missions at warehouse parties and endures an intense breakup during a period of pandemic-era social unrest. Witt started raving in her mid-30s, which might partially account for her ability to be both within and beyond the scene she inhabits. It was refreshing to read something about drugs, music, and politics that wasn’t bogged down by romanticism or posturing.
Around eight years ago, I was asked to DJ a party for Witt’s book Future Sex. Beforehand, we had lunch at a diner in East Williamsburg. At the time, she was new to the Brooklyn techno scene—the one whose components include the venue Bossa Nova Civic Club, the festival Sustain-Release, and a general obsession with the city of Berlin—so it was cool to catch up with her eight years later at the same damn diner. Health and Safety had me thinking about all sorts of shit, but since this is John’s Music Blog, our talk focused on music. Will I be the only person to ask the writer, who grew up in Minneapolis, about her history with the Midwest backpack rap scene?
It’s funny that you asked me to DJ your book release party, because if there's one DJ that could alienate both literary snobs and techno snobs, it's me.
I don't think that's what happened. I think it was just the groups of people. First of all, I don't think I should be throwing parties, like, ever. And it's funny because now that I'm back in the same place with this book, I had to think about whether to do a party and it's just like, no, I think that's not what I'm meant to do.
But, still, you're a seasoned raver. After the pandemic lifted, have you found your tastes reflected less?
Yes. Or I don't feel that comfortable anymore at the party. It's kind of like what you've talked about in your newsletter before, now there's just this ecosystem of clubs and even warehouse parties that cost 40 to 70 dollars to get into. You can still go there and hear good music, but whatever it was that really drew me in, I'm finding less and less of. Whatever it was that felt kind of secret and funny and creative, that feels like it's become a little bit harder to find. But I'm happy everybody's getting paid more.
It sort of seems like what I imagine the late ‘90s in New York to have been like, where there's Twilo, these big super clubs, and DJs playing very extended, streamlined dance music.
Yeah. I haven't even been to Basement since before the pandemic. Even though DJs I really admire play there all the time, it's just like why would I go there?
Looking back at that 2010s Brooklyn techno scene, I think I took a mildly contrarian stance against it, but I think that was partly because my life wasn't in the right place to engage with it.
I wasn't really around at this time, but like, don't you think from 2012 to 2014 it was all pretty mixed up? Like, you would go to a Bunker party at Trans-Pecos, the kind of Silent Barn, Secret Project Robot—Bossa wasn't separate from that. Like, it was all in Showpaper.
I remember noise musician friends of mine were starting to make rhythmic music. It was definitely this weird interzone, but I think by 2014 or ‘15, it sort of shook out where it was like, Okay, for lack of better words, the hipster era is over.
Yeah.
There’s this new athleisure techno reality on one side and then on another side I saw younger people reverting back to a very earnest brand of indie rock. With dance music, everybody after a certain point got serious and reverent.
And that's what we talked about eight years ago, because I think I was a new enthusiast. And that's what I remember you saying, was that you found it a little too pious. Everybody really kind of ditched their Converse and started wearing—the clothes changed too, they got much more austere. The first year I went to Sustain when I had distance from it and I had no idea really what I was going to or participating in, I had just gone to Burning Man because some friends got married there, and I found that Sustain was very serious.
And I get that scene as a reaction to the indie dance era where a lot of people didn’t take the system or DJing too seriously. It makes sense that people were like, No, we're going to actually figure out the history.
It also felt, and you see this when you watch Meet Me in the Bathroom, or whatever, it was really male and very straight.
For sure.
Even though you're in New York City and there were all kinds of people at that moment, there seemed to be only one kind of person in that scene. And it was nostalgic, performatively. And that was another thing about Meet Me in the Bathroom, actually, that they were like, Oh, New York was so boring. Like, the early 2000s kind of sucked here. I came to New York maybe once or twice in like 2002 or 2001, but I wasn't clued into anything. But in 2003 when I moved here, I still wasn't clued in, I wasn't a person with a lot of friends and a big social life. But it felt like the city was just dominated by Vice magazine and like, and those people turned out to be Nazis.
There was more of a punk rap thing happening, too.
Like who?
There was this group called Ninjasonik, kind of forgotten, but they were the first rap group, as far as I know, to make a song about wearing skinny jeans.
Okay.
There was that sort of Brooklyn warehouse era where a lot of styles were mixing up. But it’s true that the Vice sensibility did define a lot.
I mean, in the 20 year trend cycle, it came around right again, right on time, with Red Scare and everything. It was the exact same sense of humor.
After reading your book, I went onto some Berlin techno Reddit threads. I'm sort of fascinated by jam band culture.
Oh yeah.
And reading the techno threads, it kind of reminded me of Phish fandom. It's sort of this myopic…
I mean, there's a real thinkpiece to be written about the similarities.
Do you know about jamtronica?
No, but I can imagine.
Sound Tribe Sector 9? Disco Biscuits?
Okay, yeah.
That's the weird sort of convergence of the two. A lot of nitrous.
Yeah.
Reading your book, it didn't seem like nitrous was a major drug in your scene.
Well, I went to that party, The Great Beyond in Southern Minnesota, and there was a lot of nitrous. That was the most nitrous heavy party I've been to.
There’s this East Coast crew that provides nitrous to a lot of jam band festivals called the Nitrous Mafia. And I feel like your scene is pretty tight with who they let in, so maybe the Nitrous Mafia just never even knew enough to try to run up on a Sustain-Release.
Yeah, I think I've seen like one balloon at Sustain-Release, at the end of the party, ever. [Editor’s note: Witt can report back that people were handing out balloons during the closing set at Sustain-Release this year.]
That's very minor.
Yeah, exactly. Compared to, I mean, at Great Beyond, because it's in this farmyard and there's goats and roosters around, the sun would be coming up and you'd be hearing the cracks and hisses of whip-its and roosters crowing.
Thinking about your history with Burning Man and this techno stuff and then thinking about jam bands, it was a reminder to me that this stuff is really about duration.
I recently saw this vinyl DJ named Djrum who was just very, very good, mixing on three turntables, the whole thing, it was excellent by any standard, but a friend of mine described the experience of listening to him as like being batted around like a cat toy—that was what my friend enjoyed about it, but I realized that even though that DJ set was just about as mind-bending as anything I’d ever heard, and I sound like a huge jerk even saying this about someone who is that skilled, it would have been weirder and trippier to me if it hadn’t jumped around quite so much. I joked to my friends that Djrum was what you would get if this acid DJ named Carlos Souffront had a baby that turned out to be an X-man. I was at that party on nothing but cold brew and I was enthralled but I was just wishing he would let a little more time seep in. So it’s not just the length of the party itself but also the speed at which the music is mixed.
You need that length for it to take on a certain kind of meaning.
Yes. I think that's absolutely true. The other part of it is that I like LSD and an LSD trip lasts ten or twelve hours. And that's why I kind of don't get the Dead & Company experience because it's only three or four hours. Well, there's a lot of reasons I don't get it. But one is just trying to have any kind of psychedelic experience in the Ticketmaster environment. And the second is like, yeah, it's three hours and then you go home.
The Dead played the Acid Tests, which were probably one of the closest things to a rave in the 1960s.
It was a much more informal and less structured environment. I think that's part of what I'm dealing with right now is like, I don't really care about a party where it ends at four or at six. The party doesn't get good for me until four or six. There's a kind of process that happens and you kind of have to go through the process. I know McKenzie Wark naps and then goes to a party at four, but I like being there when it's peak commotion hour, but you're not really locked into any experience yet.
I think it's just a party philosophy. The thing I’ve heard about London is that you have a very definitive end to the club night. Which is different from Berlin or Burning Man.
I definitely am on the jam band end of the techno spectrum. It's also like, Okay, you listened to really, really difficult music for a long time and then you deserve to have four or five hours of fun music, because usually at most parties at the end, it'll go into Andrew Weatherall-style eclectic.
The Balearic shit.
Yeah. And that's the catharsis, but if you haven't been through the part where you're listening to really challenging techno it doesn't really have the same meaning.
Your scene in general, it wasn't a young scene, right?
No, people were in their 30s.
Which is just a totally different dynamic.
To go back to it being a little pious, it was very cerebral, I think. Definitely people that were looking for something, not just a drinking experience, whereas now it doesn't feel like that. I think if you move to New York now and you're 22 that's just what you do.
That kind of ecosystem didn't exist 15 years ago.
Yeah. But it's less special or something. New Year's Day this year I went and saw D.Dan at Nowadays, it was New Year's Day at midnight into the day after New Year's Day, so people that have to go to work theoretically are winding down, but at midnight all these young people showed up, they were wearing really nice clothes—this isn't the people that I was hanging out with eight years ago. It made me wonder where the younger people who don’t go to the big clubs are hanging out.
My general understanding is that in the 2010s Brooklyn techno scene, there were a decent amount of people who had done time in some kind of subculture beforehand.
That was also the impression I had.
Like, I'm done playing in an indie rock band or doing my noise project, I'm going to live in New York City and I'm going to get a decent paying graphic design job then I'm gonna rave on the weekends.
Or a tech job. A lot of people worked in tech.
It’s almost adjacent to Burning Man where—I felt this way when I read Future Sex, I was like, Oh these people have their shit together in a way that I never could, these are all professionals who are actually in some ways so competent, they’re people who can handle partying and still keep an adult life. I mean, obviously, it can catch up with you.
And there's a lot of people for whom it’s really caught up with. I think New York, when you compare it to Berlin, where people really do lose themselves, like, people get there and lose all perspective on when you should and shouldn't do drugs, I do think in New York the demands of the city make it difficult to fully—you have to maintain a little bit in New York.
I saw a tweet from Lindyman that was pretty much, like, in Berlin you can be 24-years-old forever.
People's whole lives are spent on this cycle between partying and recovering and partying again. But the upside is that you can be a person in your 50s at the club in Berlin and nobody would notice or care.
Maybe it’s not as much like this now, but the cliche is that they're paying 300 euros a month and they have to work two afternoons a week at a coffee shop to pay their rent.
Yeah, at a very moderate pace. I think I am a little bit susceptible to cult thinking. Anybody who feels a little bit alienated maybe is drawn towards a group that shares a communal philosophy or something. Sometimes I'm like, did I join a cult? Like, low-key.
You never had a financial motive in this world, which must have made it easier for you to remain excited about it and keep a purer outlook.
Yeah, not only financial but just even intellectual or artistic. I’ve never tried to be a music writer, I'm not a track ID person, I don't know what BPM is playing, I don't really care, it's either thumbs up thumbs down, like, I don't really try to get more knowledgeable about it than that. I think I want to be dumb like that.
I think a lot of people have this honeymoon phase, but then they start participating and the realities of these systems start to come into place. I bet it's probably like that for you with literary stuff.
Yeah, with books I don't like anything. I mean, I love a lot of books, and I don't want to name names of particular books, but whatever book is being hyped at the moment, 95 percent of the time I can't stand it.
You start to love something and then you want to engage with it then you learn too much. But you had your day job and then you had your raving and they were just totally bisected.
And there were no writers hanging around for a long time. Or at least none of the writers I knew. It was kind of after the pandemic that I started seeing a lot more overlap. I'm sure there were writers, but I would never see a young person that worked at The New Yorker at the party or something.
In the book, you mention sort of glancingly that you went to backpack rap shows in Minneapolis when you were in high school.
That was the main scene for us at the time, it was either that or the all-ages Sunday night dance parties at First Avenue.
I'm curious why you didn't drink the Kool-Aid on that, the way you did with techno much later.
Oh I did. Yeah, in 1999 and even into the early 2000s.
So, like, Atmosphere.
Atmosphere, Eyedea and Abilities. My friends were in this group called Oddjobs. I went to college in Providence. I would go see Aesop Rock. And I also liked just regular rap music. I liked it all. I mean, that was like a really good time for rap music.
That was such an interesting moment. You had Eminem, who would battle with someone like Dose One. You had really arty characters and then you had people that would become pop stars and they were coexisting for a few years.
The melodrama of the lyrics wasn't apparent to me and the cringy sincerity of them. It felt very good.
Well, like any emo music, the thing that ages the best about is often the most ridiculous part of it.
Yeah, and I think the politics felt important. There was a lot of racial tension at my high school and you had people talking about it directly in the music. When I was 17, I was an exchange student, I went to Chile for a year and my friends would send me these mixtapes from Minneapolis that I would listen to on my yellow sports Walkman. I was homesick and the music felt really current. And yeah, I mean, I’m a nerd and Black Star's quoting Toni Morrison and it just all kind of made sense to me. And then when I came out East, initially what I wanted to experience was, like, Rawkus Records. But then I found out that was funded by Rupert Murdoch's son.
There’s probably a lesson about America there.
Yeah.