Sep. 29, 2010 - Issue #780 : Dave Stone

Just dance

David Stone's 10 years at CJSR have been full of ups and downs

In the late 1990s, rave culture in Edmonton exploded, filling warehouses nearly every weekend with heaving bodies, blinking lights and pulsating music. After-hours clubs popped up in basements and back rooms and DJs supplanted rock 'n' rollers as the keepers of the night.

One of the DJs at the forefront of that explosion was David Stone, who is celebrating the 10th anniversary of his electronica-centred radio show BPM on CJSR. Having got his start in 1988 DJing at a teen club called Studio 82, by the late-'90s as electronic music began its ascent Stone found himself at the centre of it all.

"We were getting booked for every party, every gig, every major event they wanted us ... At one point [we] were playing this night at the Rev—which had turned into Lush—called Turbo Saturdays and we were playing for, like, 700 or 800 people just jammed into that room, just raving. It was amazing, those were great times."

A chance encounter in 2000 with a CJSR sales rep at the record store he worked at led Stone to the broadcast booth.

"He wanted to get us to advertise and he said, 'Well, if you want you can sponsor a couple of hours on CJSR,' so we asked 'What if we wanna do a show?' and he said he'd try to get us a time slot," Stone recounts. "I don't know if that was above-board or not, but it turned out they had Wednesdays at 1 am available. So one cold fall night I went and started doing BPM."

The beginning of the show was also the beginning of the end for the explosion of rave culture in Edmonton, however—police crackdowns on events and after-hours clubs ground the scene to a halt and pushed it underground. All across North America, a moral panic set in and its target was dance music. While the form lived on in Europe, through much of the early-2000s dance music disappeared from popular culture.

"Right around the time I started BPM we had the Ascension rave and up to that point there hadn't been anything bigger than that. It was at the Sport-Ex on the Northlands grounds, which is now gone, and Paul Oakenfold played, Max Graham, there were three rooms, it was huge," Stone reminisces. "Unfortunately it also attracted some negative media attention. The lynch pin was that some people had seizures at the party which they attributed to the strobes, but some people attributed it to the fact that people were taking a lot of drugs. It's no lie that there are drugs in this scene—it exists. It exists in rock 'n' roll, it exists in country music, but in rave music it has somehow become part and parcel of the experience, or it seemed to be at that time."

For Stone personally, the show provided an outlet during trying times, letting him stay in touch with the dance-music scene even if that scene had receded to the underground. Eventually, however, electronic music would make its inevitable comeback and BPM would be there to document it, to help push it along to the prominent place it now holds.

"That show enabled me to weather a very bleak period in the scene here, where raves were getting shut down, the whole culture was under attack, there were some really dire times," Stone says. "That show allowed me to weather that storm and explore a lot of the music that was coming out at the time, like the rise of electro—and some would argue the descent of electro. To chart the rise of guys like Deadmau5 and MSTRKRFT and other artists that dominate dance music at the moment. BPM, in its way, charted that path with the music that I was playing and introducing to people."

Stone isn't just celebrating 10 years at CJSR, however: he's also helping celebrate the fifth anniversary of Level 2 Lounge and his Friday night residency there. Though the radio may disseminate his message to the masses, nothing teaches a DJ what works and what doesn't like a club gig.

"That's what's great about my Level 2 residency and being there every Friday night and playing for them and having that opportunity to play a new record for people and go, 'Do you like this?'" he says. "Having a place to play every week that's small and safe is awesome because on the radio you can't tell. It's pretty amazing that we have a place like this in Edmonton, because a lot of cities don't have a place like this and Edmonton needs a place like this, it deserves a place like this and I'm very proud to be associated with a place like this."

Ultimately it's not the radio show or the DJ gigs that keep Stone interested: it's the music itself. Though he admits to having moments where he needs to turn off the stereo and think about something else, the pull of music is strong with the lure of the next clever melody that he can use to connect with people is overpowering.

"It never fails to amaze me when I get a record and the first time I hear a tune and something comes into it that I've never heard before, or it's clever, I love that, I love finding those moments," he says. "I find that electronic music as a whole is a much more creative genre than people give it credit for—you're only restricted by what kinds of sounds you can make. There are no strings, no physicality to it. It's something that exists in electrons and that's what's amazing. You create one sound and steal a sound from somewhere else and twist it and bend it in ways that no one has imagined and all of a sudden it's just, 'Wow.'" V

Sat, Oct 2 (9:30 pm)
David Stone
With Groovy Cuvy, TZ, Tianna J, Neebz
Level 2 Lounge, $8 vueweekly.com comments: powered by Disqus