The Wrap up from Today DEMF From The Detroit Free Press

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Sound expert boosts the fidelity at techno festival

May 27, 2006

BY BRIAN MCCOLLUM
FREE PRESS POP MUSIC WRITER

Hear something good at Movement on Saturday? More to the point: Did you hear something well?

You can thank Michael Fotias.

As production manager of this year’s electronic music festival at Hart Plaza, where the three-day party kicked off Saturday, Fotias is the primary set of ears responsible for sound on the fest’s five stages. He’s a co-owner of Burst L.L.C., a Detroit concert audio company, and is enjoying his first year supervising the Memorial Day weekend vibrations at the plaza.

“Enjoying” was the right word as of midday Saturday, at least, where the 38-year-old Detroiter was all smiles even as he navigated such temporary crises as a blown set of amps at the Pyramid Stage. Delegating duties, hollering instructions into a radio mouthpiece, zipping around in a motorized cart — it’s been Fotias’ world since Wednesday, when he began directing a Movement crew of about 100 riggers, technicians and specialists in sound and lighting.
During a quick pitstop Saturday at the tented mixing booth straddling the plaza’s main bowl, Fotias’ confidence was as crisp as the nearby state-of-the-art PA system he’d helped design.

“This festival hasn’t been poorly produced in the past,” he said. “But it was never produced by our yardstick. What the festival hasn’t had is consistent fidelity.”

With input from audio designers at Eastern Acoustic Works in Massachusetts — which supplied Movement’s speakers — Fotias set out to remedy that with a combination of subtle precision and sheer size.

His most noticeable tweak: a towering stack of 40 subwoofer speakers under the main stage — nearly triple the past number. The mandate had come from Movement chief and longtime friend Jason Huvaere — “We needed the thump, ya know?” — and was enough to elicit this description Saturday from veteran sound mixer Peter Thompson: “It’s like a monster subsonic storm.”

All that bass-by-the-pound is the fruition of a 20-year tenure in the techno scene for Fotias, who was “drawn to the technical stuff” while friends such as Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson and Ritchie Hawtin began to make their names as DJs. While other young tech-heads gravitated to rock ‘n’ roll, Fotias came to learn the unique intricacies of presenting techno to a live audience. At Movement, for instance, there’s a keen awareness of the music’s most basic instrument: the record turntable.

“When you have turntables running through a really loud sound system,” he said, “you’ve got to have the chops to avoid feedback — that low turntable rumble that everybody hates.”

After earning his reputation on the Detroit scene, Fotias became a go-to live production man for Hawtin, one of electronic music’s most notoriously picky audiophiles.

“Back then, no light or sound company would pay attention to the DJ gigs,” he said of the scene’s early days. “We’re into this music, we know this music, we know how to mix this music. You have to care about the DJs.”

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Notes and news from the Movement techno festival

May 27, 2006

Email this Print this The latest edition of Detroit’s electronic music festival got itself off the launch pad Saturday, drawing a steady stream of fans to Hart Plaza through the afternoon for the first of three hot days downtown.

With sunny skies and temperatures in the low 80s, Movement kicked off with an extended shot of house music on the main stage, courtesy of sets from Detroit DJs Jennifer Xerri and Minx. Organizers said first-day ticket totals won’t be available until Sunday morning, but the growing crowd size late Saturday afternoon appeared on pace with previous techno fests at the plaza.

So far, so good, said first-year Movement producer Jason Huvaere, who credited his team’s meticulous advance planning for what he described as a smooth on-site flow.

“It’s working,” he said. “We’ve got a really clean system here.”
-- By Brian McCollum


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About 40 percent of Movement’s 161 performers are hometown artists, a number that is slightly down from prior fests, particularly the Detroit-heavy ’04 and ’05 events. That has provoked quiet grumbling in some corners of the city’s storied techno scene. But Huvaere defended the show’s musical direction, pointing to massively successful electronic music festivals in places such as Spain and Germany.

"There’s a whole world circuit of festivals that have run like clockwork, every year, for a long time,” he said. “We’ve wanted for a long time to find a way to plug the Detroit festival into that circuit, to be part of that current. Not only do we want to show Detroit to the rest of the world, we want to show the rest of the world to Detroit.”
-- By Brian McCollum


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You don’t have to be a teenager or college hipster to enjoy the electronic sounds taking over Hart Plaza this weekend.

“I like to dance with my mom,” said 3-year-old Grace Holden of Ferndale, taking a quick rest before beginning to dance again in front of the Pyramid Stage near Detroit’s riverfront.

Actually, the focused little girl who was attempting some break-dancing moves was doing more dancing than her beaming mom, Genevieve Padgett.

This is Grace’s second techno festival, having accompanied her mom in 2005.

“She’s a techno baby,” Padgett said. “This is pretty much what I listen to: techno. So she’s around it a lot. I brought her to the festival last year, and she was dancing right away.

“And she gives out flyers.”

Sure enough, Mom handed Grace a stack of flyers hawking “Girls Gone Vinyl,” a collective of female DJs playing at Detroit’s Buzz Bar on Sunday. She Grace promptly ran over to a throng of people, handing the papers out to smiling festival-goers.
-- By Tim Pratt


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At about 5 p.m. Saturday, a tiny basement record store was buzzing with about a dozen shoppers, with a few visiting from as far away as Europe.

Submerge Records, a distributor and manufacturer of Detroit electronic music, is typically one of the essential stops for techno tourists.

This year, business has been comparitively light at the shop located in the New Center area. During previous festival weekends, lines often snaked out the front door.

The store generally is open by appointment only, but is open all festival weekend to the public, including 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Sunday. (After this weekend, Submerge will be open for regular business 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Monday through Friday.)

On Friday, several customers from Japan and Sweden cleared the shelves, buying hundreds of records. The store is known for making select records available only at the shop, in addition to its online inventory at www.submerge.com.

“Yesterday it was a nice amount, but not as many as last year. A lot of people when they fly in, they come through,” said Bridgette Banks, Submerge Recordings office manager. “When they come they’re not trying to hang out, they’re buying records.”

She said the lower number of visitors might be a product of the artistic lineup at this year’s festival, which features more international artists, many of the minimal style.

“I think it’s the type of crowd. There are techno fans here, but for the most part, the type of music they listen to, it’s more minimal.
It’s noticeable.”

Erin Martin, 24, of Rochester is a techno fan who stopped in to Submerge en route to the festival with friends.

“I’ve never been here before. I didn’t know where it was located, but I will come back. I like that it’s kind of hidden, that you wouldn’t even know it was here.”
-- By Tamara Warren


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Electronic music is once again drawing the world’s attention to Detroit. More than 150 journalists are credentialed for Movement, said festival publicist Shannon McCarthy, including representatives from Spin and Urb magazines, Italian television and the British outlets BBC and Sky TV.
McCarthy said Sunday night’s scheduled tribute to the late hip-hop producer J. Dilla has drawn particularly heavy interest from visiting media.
Reflecting the festival’s youthful demographic, about one-third of the contingent was made up of writers and photographers from online publications. “I’ve credentialed a lot of events,” said McCarthy, who worked for Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick’s administration during his first term. “By far the percentage of electronic media is higher here than any of them.”
-- By Brian McCollum


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Just five hours into the festival on Saturday, a pair of Detroit-connected artists now based in Germany provided sets that will likely to stand as highlights of the weekend.

Poland-born Magda and Detroit native Daniel Bell both heated up crowds with propulsive techno performances simultaneously on separate stages early Saturday evening. Longtime Detroit underground artist Bell kept the fans moving with an epic techno set on the Pyramid Stage. Magda, a frequent collaborator with Windsor’s Richie Hawtin, held court with a hard-driving, minimal techno set for a packed crowd in the Beatport Stage, which is tented facility on the south side of Hart Plaza.
-- By Tim Pratt