This week’s Best in Class squeaked in just before the cutoff. This morning, Leith Ford put an ear to the ground to catch some of the beats fresh off the assembly line in Detroit. Enjoy reading about Ford’s involvement in the Detroit Movement music festival.
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Some of our older readers have no doubt heard electronic music before. It’s prevalent enough in modern culture that you ought to have heard just enough to be able to complain about it, maybe going as far to dub it “racket” or “noise.” Perhaps you’re not wrong to do so.
For the second year running, Ford has contributed to the Detroit Movement festival by allowing two electronic artists access to one of their manufacturing facilities. In a press release, the company said:
“Detroit is uniquely tied to the origins of the electronic music scene. In the 1980’s variations of electronic music stemmed from inspirations of industry, including the automotive sector. With the Movement festival this weekend, Ford collaborated with techno promoter Paxahau to pay homage to the history of the genre – while combining it with Detroit’s other claim to fame: auto manufacturing.
We took Movement performers Ataxia and Secrets to our Michigan Assembly Plant where we build our Focus and Focus Electric cars and turned them loose. They captured the sounds of the car being built, and transformed it into tracks that will debut live at Movement. These tracks capture the sounds of assembly, delivering a music experience which once again ties the automotive industry with electronic music.”
Maybe now it will make more sense the next time you hear your teenager blasting EDM in their room. You could be justified in calling it noise because at one point it was. We think there’s something profound about that, though. It’s a distinctly human response to convert the diegetic sounds that surround us in our day-to-day into something melodic and mellifluous. It takes an artist to tease the hidden rhythm out of an assembly line and manufacture it into music.
https://soundcloud.com/secrets/secrets-focus-pokeus-ford-movement-promo
So maybe you don’t know the difference between house and hardcore, or trance and techno, and you may not enjoy listening to them in the least, but you can appreciate where much of it came from. Electronic music is, like anything else, a product of hardwork and innovation. That’s a movement that Ford and Leith Ford can get behind.