88 Music Blog

I’m writing this post on the heels of an incredible night spent at Gallery in Silver Spring. This is a new venue with promoters bringing in classic house music DJ’s from around the country and presenting them in a stunning setting in suburban DC. This seems to be a first for this area: a suburban promoter bringing in what is inherently an urban affair. Judging from last night’s turnout, the future seems bright for the face of dance music.

Roy Davis Jr., of Large Records fame, and the creator of countless house anthems, headed up the festivities. Yours truly was also fortunate to have been permitted to open up the evening with two full hours of down and mid-tempo goodness. My set almost didn’t happen, as I was scheduled to play outdoors as part of the 88DC Daylight Dub Sessions outside on Gallery’s patio. At 8:15pm, three tracks into my set, a bolt of lightning arced across the sky and put an end to my little party.

After setting up inside Gallery, I stepped up to the decks again and dealt out over 2 hours of groovy tunes for a crowd composed equally of diners and early clubgoers. This was a treat, as I was DJing in a new venue on a brand new mixer, Pioneer’s new DJM-800. Without going into many details, this new piece of kit is a beast of a machine, with many effects and other customizable adjustments built in. The really great thing about this mixer is that it still retains Pioneer’s relative simplicity and ease of use. It only took a couple minutes to fully absorb its many functions and get on with the business of revving the evening up.

Roy took to the decks promptly at midnight and proceeded to tear the place apart with a methodical mix of classic sounding Chicago-esque tracks as well as many other crowd pleasers. My personal pick of the night goes to Prana’s ‘The Dream’, an early release on DC’s own Deep Dish label. This collaboration between heavy hitters Deep Dish, BT, and John Selway epitomizes what house music strives for, namely a fine balance between chunky fresh rhythm and incandescent vocal snippets. Roy’s appearance last night was rivaled only by his set at the now defunct Red in the late 1990’s. Truly a magic evening.

Good day, and welcome to the 88DC Blog! I, Milo, am your humble wordsmith, DJ, and occasional roller coaster chaser. I’m sure I’ll try to work on some of that last one into future posts, but for now all you need to know is that I’m here for you, the reader, the listener, the club-goer. My goal here is to create a dialogue concerning the local scene, plug our own events, and hopefully provide some entertaining reading for you readers. I’m sure we will tweak the format as we progress, but consider this blog to be one of many essential sites to learn about much of the DC electronic dance music scene. Beyond that, this will also be an outlet for my own rants

Welcome to 88’s music blog, where we will nurture, cultivate and reflect on the DC area’s electronic music scene and community. The blog will predominantly focus on the sounds coming in and out of the DC Met, while taking occasional forays into what’s percolating in the world beyond. Please e-mail us with any thoughts, ideas, shows or acts you think we should cover. Cheers and thanks, from all of us at 88.