Samuel L. Session Brings Dance Music Back to the Beach

Ironically Session credits the very thing criticized in "Can You Relate" with letting him put the new stuff on the market. In deep, vocoded admonishment, Paris the Black Fu, of the Detroit Grand Pubahs, intones, "What happened to the techno? What happened to the underground?... What happened to the funk?... New minimalist techno producers ... insist upon flooding the market with hits...."

Minimal techno arose as a reaction to the hard, fast stuff that irks Session, and as played by famous proponents like Richie Hawtin and Ricardo Villalobos, it's about a fierce, essential groove. But the seeming competition to pare it down has become a joke on the international dance scene. And the music's buttoned-up, dry, Teutonic image has scared many in Miami away from techno as a whole.

Now the springy, robo-soul bounce of "Can You Relate" has made it a hit across the dance spectrum and is winning people back to the genre, even here.

"I've had a lot of local DJs tell me that they're sick of playing commercial stuff like all the other DJs in town," says Nova. "With 'Can You Relate,' people that I think would normally be playing progressive house or other forms of dance music were inadvertently playing a techno track. And techno's been such a bad word here for such a long time."

In other words, some of the supersplintering of dance music that helped to debilitate it in Miami might be reversing itself. Session's Saturday-night gig — which promises a good dose of Gothenberg's summer mega-energy — is one of several lately to bridge a gap, to look back in dance music as a way of moving forward. Now can Miami relate?