After The Breakdown

Q: How do you experience a subculture of music intrinsically linked to drug use when in the opinion of a qualified medical professional “you fall into the category of people who should never, ever, ever, ever, ever take drugs ever again”?

A: I've been doing it for four-and-a-bit years and I've still got no fucking idea.

But when the Universe thrusts a full-time work opportunity revolving around dance music under your nose at precisely the moment that 13 years of thrusting whatever you can up it catches up with you, you've just got to suck it up (so to speak) and sort it out. Fast.

Clubland can be a fickle beast. It can chew up and spit out punters in the midst of their first 'summer of love' quicker than you can say “where's the drop, brah?” if their motives are impure – and by impure, I'm talking that subtle difference between “mangz, I am so fucking sideways” and “mangz, I am so fucking si…. Faaaark, how good is this TUUUUUUUUNE?!?!”

I've seen more summers of love than most, worked my way through three or four distinct eras of clubbing buddies, have been around long enough to remember when hard house, prog, breaks and electro house respectively rolled like juggernauts across the land, and am now in the position – with 3D World, whose final days I was at the helm of, having long since headed to that great gurn in the sky – of having half a lifetime of electronic music knowledge and appreciation behind me and no real idea of how to properly express it.

My days of being upfront are long gone, but I do know this – it's way too early to be calling for a rewind. See? I even remember some of the lingo.

So what to do next? Promote? No thanks – I've altruistically sunk enough of my cash into that particular money pit for one lifetime, and am far too respectable a gentleman to shift dimebags to help keep the books balanced at this stage of proceedings.

Produce? I peaked with a bootleg of Farnesy's Age Of Reason in December '09, the only way is down from there. (Though I haven been darkening the door of a studio of late, and it feels good. Real good.)

Perform? Sure – will play drums for beer tickets, occasionally even in time.

The life of the Punter then? Probably not. I've punted my little heart (and poor, poor little brain) all over the globe in search of the dance music dream, from the Love Parade to Fabric to Miami to ZoukOut to Diggers in Auckland to Underworld in Hong Kong to blah blah blah, fap fap fap, aren't I just totally totes fucking awse and shit.

So riddle me this – is there anything to gain from endlessly chasing the same high?

Just because you A) had your head caved by the loopy techno of Cliques on the GoodGod dancefloor surrounded by hipsters half your age, and B) have been mesmerised by the minimal prog mastery of Guy Gerber's Fabric 64 more than once on your mid-morning jog, and C) recently pondered how awesome it would be to play in a live brostep band with two drummers, it doesn't necessarily mean that you're D) secretly Jonesing for a 17th summer of love.

So when music ceases to be the be-all-and-end-all of your Universe, what comes next?

Is it possible to find meaning in something other than music for the first time since you put down the football and picked up the bucket bong? (Figuratively speaking – those things were pretty unwieldy).

Or once you've grown accustomed to a lifetime diet of your bread-and-butter, is it impossible to start eating anything else?

Heavy concepts, man. From the future, like Marty McFly and shit.

Here's the thing. The past couple of times I've set foot on a dancefloor, listening to the sort of progressive house sounds I once enthusiastically described as “the music they'll be playing at the gates of heaven”, I've felt like a stranger – like an ethnographic participant-observer at a place that I used to call home.

But at home the other day, tapping selfishly away on my keyboard as I rolled the new Godspeed You! Black Emperor album for the first time, I actually reached for the sky – lifted my skinny fists like antennas to heaven, if you will – as the euphoria of the rolling chord crescendo kicked in at around the 14:48 mark of Mladic.

So if there's a moral to this story, or even just a point of some sort, it's that the true loves of your life will never leave you. It might feel like they've moved on. You might try to leave them behind. But they're part of you now, so denying them – much like resistance – is futile.

Oh, and drugs aren't bad – but too many of them definitely isn't good.