LA underground enigma DJ TY presents a love letter to strange bed-fellows: garage and trance. Defying received DJ wisdom—that the two don’t mix—and embracing their intricate mutual reverberations, The Long Decay is a show about extending forgotten dance-oriented sounds into new futures. Crafted vinyl mix artifacts intended for repeat listens only.

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Several weeks ago, I had the privilege of visiting Detroit, Michigan for DEMF / the collective of parties that orbit around people in town for Movement Festival. Many of the sets I saw there have buried themselves so deeply in my brain that I’m only beginning to experience them as memories. In the mean time they had done a kind of shifting and exhalation through me, even while I was not cognizant of them, folding so elegantly into the fabric of reality as to seem completely continuous with it. But still there, exerting influence.

It’s been difficult to continue business as usual, as a DJ. I’ve changed, I’ve gotten better, but I’ve also felt like I have so much further yet to go. Somehow the status quo of whatever once seemed like optimum DJing now feels insufficient, and this has pushed me to explore darker and rougher textures in the mix where previously I would have maintained only a certain tapestry of positive “vibe building”. Patience lacks, standards build. Oh well. I might have always thought I was paying lip service to Detroit’s music in my DJ sets, but it feels good to reckon with the fact that I wasn’t anywhere close.

My dad is from Detroit, and his sister passed two weeks before Movement. We went out for the funeral, our first time back in almost ten years. Something funny about memory is that it can sometimes be hard to distinguish from lived experience for the opposite reasons that an affecting experience of art or music can engulf you: a past memory’s isomorphism to the present can reveal the absence of change in a place. Driving from Detroit airport to Milan, Michigan, where my aunt’s family has remained and held her service, I was struck by how exactly identical the landscape in 2023 looked to the one I saw in 2013. I saw virtually no economic development, no progress, no new businesses or jobs. Where homes had once seemed like fairly new developments, with massive plots of land between them, there was no new construction, but the same structures bore rust, paint chipping, toys sinking into the lawn. To be an alien visiting this scene of neglect was to be slapped with reality in the way the heartland of America has of decades late has experienced it, a subject I had probably thought about twice as much, or more, than I’d actually experienced it for myself.

This is a letter about the recontextualization of influence. Returning to LA, my rhythmic brain kept grasping for tones and resonances in my town’s underground dance music palate that told a similar story. While LA didn’t invent techno—Detroit did—it did perfect its own brand of hard, driving dance music animated by similar impulses. Many different genres of music have reestablished themselves here, but few feel so boldly declarative and indigenous the way techno does to Detroit as hard house feels to LA.

Much maligned now, the provenance of deeply expired cheese, whistles and droningly slapping beats, hard house nonetheless has a special relationship with Los Angeles that I can date to my earliest memories of underground dance music, when it soundtracked one of the only raves I went to in high school. At the time, there was no “Arts District”. The meth epidemic was in its first act. Skid Row-adjacent warehouses felt truly like the lawless domain of the forgotten, where graffiti writers painted with impunity. To me, the music of hard house is sometimes, at its best, the autochthonous translation of house music—invented elsewhere—into a SoCal version of itself. It is to say that that house instinct to rejoice and collectively dance must come after we look with terror at the fact that our car-fueled fantasy of the American Dream that is Los Angeles actually turned out to be accelerating climate catastrophe and humanity’s self-destruction. It’s hard not to see something familiar in the story of Detroit.

I am not a hard house connoisseur, but I dig some entries that flirt with that style, and I like how fluidly it can blend with Detroit techno, Chicago acid and the darker corners of West Coast breaks, to create a kind of solidarity between frustrated cities full of disillusionment, something to fill the vacuum when utopianism is revealed a farce. And as someone shaped by a land many people find tacky and superficial, I think a DJ shouldn’t be a music player free of cheese. That’s boring. Rather, for me, it’s always been about how good your cheese is.

New music from ASIP, Peak Geeks, Rosati, Data Memory Access.