Excerpts from the article Detroit State of Mind: Kyle Hall and Anthony “Shake” Shakir Keep Things Moving Forward. Reposted with permission.
Aaron-Carl, who broke out of the underground in the mid-1990s with homo-erotic club hits “Down” and “Dance Naked” is producing, performing, and—most importantly, he says—engaging the Detroit dance communities by reminding them just why they got in the business. He’s not content to be a lone wolf in the urban wilderness. He wants to see the music gather steam here, and be that much stronger when Detroit rolls out its talent around the world.
Aaron-Carl “Down”
“We don’t love each other the way we must to keep moving our scene forward,” Aaron-Carl says. “We get so much of what we need overseas that we believe we don’t have to work at it when we’re home. But we do.”
So Aaron-Carl decided to turn up the temperature and form a collective called W.A.R.M.T.H.—what he calls a revolutionary movement bringing techno and house closer together on its home turf. Yes, that warming trend you feel spreading out over global clubland is an organic product of Detroit’s basic DNA. But it’s getting a little help from its friends who want to make sure homegrown vibes keep coming at you in the right direction.
“I feel I’m in a good position in my life to do this now,” he says. “Detroit has a spirit that you can’t really see but you can feel it. The only way I can put it is it just is. We don’t have marketing or media, unless we do it ourselves. We primarily just make the music, sometimes by accident, because it comes from some place I can’t explain. Can you?”
No, but I like where this is going. Scratching it out with little money and more love, pushing the Detroit vibe by any means necessary to who knows where. But they’ll know when they feel it, Aaron-Carl says.
“People need real soul music in their lives. They are hungry for it because they can’t find the real thing anywhere else,” he says. “It’s something unique inside us we can share. And we do it through house music and funky techno. Take our emotions. It’s a gift, from us to you.”
Aaron-Carl says W.A.R.M.T.H. has already hit a nerve in Europe, where chapters are forming in the UK, France, Spain, and Sweden. The group has tentative plans to buy a building in Detroit for parties, talks, memorabilia.
“Our goal is to bring music back to where it belongs, back to people who have passion in their hearts for it,” he says. “That’s how it first happened in Detroit. People started with nothing but love, and look what we made out of it: something that keeps getting deeper and stronger—something we believe just never goes away. It’s finding people all over again.”
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