Gang Mentality

Gang Gang Dance kindly asks us to stop shopping and start jungle shaking.
by Michael Mannheimer

Experimental music, at its most basic level, stems from the need to create something new—a need that sometimes caters more to the creator than the audience. And often there is no middle ground: You either dig the shit or you don’t. Dance music, on the other hand, isn’t usually so deep, aiming primarily to get people to shake their asses. So when an outsider band like Gang Gang Dance that has been tagged as “neo-tribal” talks about making music for the rave crowd, you know something strange is going on.

“The stuff we’ve been writing lately is way more, kinda, all about rhythm and dancing,” says drummer Tim Dewitt. “It’s beats and dub bass and something that you can bob your head to and dance to. We really fantasize about making a record that would translate to a rave.”

Gang Gang Dance’s dream rave probably looks little like a commercially sponsored Fatboy Slim set, but the bones of the short-lived electronica boom of the ’90s resonates in the sounds of the Brooklyn-based four-piece, a group of weirdos making schizophrenic dance music that clearly speaks to the freak-folk set. Combining the repetitive, hypnotic grooves of German krautrock bands like Can with short blasts of psychedelic noise and tribal pounding, they have created a free-form, improvisational take on making asses move. Bizarre, off-putting dance music, but dance music nonetheless. The common denominator? Rhythm.

“We are always trying to heal ourselves with our music. Healing always starts with the rhythm,” says Dewitt. “The more we experiment with it, the more we are getting into even simplifying it and letting it be more trance-inducing rather than math-y and cut-up collage-feeling.”

Gang Gang Dance’s origins stretch back to the late ’90s, when Dewitt and bass player/keyboardist Brian DeGraw moved from Washington, DC to New York. Bumming around in the local scene for a few years, the duo met vocalist Liz Bougastos, guitarist Josh Diamond and now-deceased fifth member Nathan Maddox to form the group’s lineup. While their music is constantly changing, the emphasis on rhythm and movement stems from a long-lasting relationship between Dewitt and DeGraw. The two have been playing together for over 12 years, making music but never feeling totally comfortable until finding a group where they don’t serve as the backing to someone else’s vision.

“Our language is really special and unique because we’ve played together for so long. I think it kinda starts with that dialogue that we have. We can sit down and make things that blow our minds so easily,” says Dewitt.

From the beginning they knew that they wanted to skate the boundaries of what a band could or should be.

“We are not into the traditional ways of being a band. We are kind of depressed by that thought in general, even though that’s the way it always is and probably will always be,” says Dewitt. “There are so many possibilities out there, and so much music happening all over the world. And the world is so fucked right now, and I feel like—not to be overly political or something—I feel like it’s so important to be conscious of other sounds that are happening out there and to try to listen to those sounds and try your best to interpret those sounds and then spit them back out to the world in hopes that they reach the corner that you heard them [in].”

The primitive, foreign element to Gang Gang Dance’s sound is indebted to a life spent listening to, and learning from, the music of non-Western countries. Their songs incorporate tribal drums and marimbas and other worldly touches—traits that not only distinguish them from other “dance” acts, but from the notion of being a marketable indie band at all.

A lengthy summer European tour allowed the band to play its first bout of festival shows to a growing audience of admirers everywhere from Croatia to Japan, where audiences are often more receptive to the stranger jams. Dewitt remembers these recent shows fondly as some of the most freeing performances simply because the audiences weren’t aware of the band before they took the stage.

Part scripted, part improv, the band’s live shows are built around loose grooves that originate from hours-upon-hours of jamming. “Our shows are kinda tighter in general; our audiences are getting bigger and it’s becoming more gratifying to play something that they can sink into, and we are feeling more satisfied by that as well,” says Dewitt. “Sometimes we tend to overdo it with smartness and now we are trying to overdo it with pure pulsation.”

That result is unpredictable and epic, but still tight, held together by the ever-present percussion and also their continued spirit to plug along in the vein of all great experimental artists, in the push to create something new.

“Sun Ra had this sorta mantra—‘It’s after the end of the world. Don’t you know that yet?’—this thing that would be chanted at some of his performances, and that’s the kind of idea we look to,” says Dewitt. “We are part of that school of thinking where it’s just like, man, everything that has happened already has failed and we need to keep trying to find new ways to make music do really big things, instead of making music that makes you want to buy a certain style of jean.”