Welcome to We Learn Dances, an occasional series on the people, parties and (most of all) music that make clubland the wonderful place it is. The focus will be on the slightly more refined, artistically oriented end of the nightlife spectrum—yes, such a thing exists, believe it or not—rather than on the superficial pleasures afforded by either the bottle-service scene or the EDM world. At least, that’s the plan.

We’re kicking the series off with a man who’s intimately familiar with the concept of sophisticated dance music, Dennis “Citizen” Kane. He’s been an integral part of NYC’s nightlife since the mid-’90s, when the Philly transplant hit NYC and established himself in the underground scene as one of its most knowledgeable DJs; since then, he’s since played scores of venues across the city and around the world. He’s established a pair of respected record labels: Disques Sinthomme, which has released a wide range of work featuring the likes of Max Essa, the Beat Broker, Liquid Liquid’s Sal Principato and Richard “Padded Cell” Sen, and an edit imprint, Ghost Town, which has seen contributions from Brennan Green and Bicep, among many other notables. He’s a talented producer himself, with material out on such respected labels as Tummy Touch, Ubiquity and Adult Contemporary (track down his mix of Yagya’s “Rigning Sjö” on that last label—it’s killer.) His website, dsgtnyc.com, hosts a rather amazing podcast that’s featured sets from such international stars as DJ Harvey, Prins Thomas and Greg Wilson. And he’s been toiling in the studio with his frequent deejaying partner Darshan Jesrani (of Metro Area fame) on a new project called Siren, with the first fruits of that collaboration coming out soon on Compost.

In short, the dude is busy—but Kane recently managed to find the time for a quick chat over a couple of beers. And scroll to the bottom of the interview for a great mix from the man himself.

Bruce Tantum: What possessed you to originally get into this world?

Dennis Kane: I think it started when I was just eight or nine. My parents had one of those old-school console hi-fis, with the kind of record player where you could stack the records. I really liked to sit on the carpet in front of the speakers and play records. I listened to everything: my older brother’s Led Zeppelin records, my dad’s Count Basie records, my sisters Bob Dylan and Beach Boys records. And I really liked it all. I would just sit there all day long, drawing and daydreaming and listening to music.

BT: When did you start buying music on your own?
DK: As soon as I got my first job as a teenager, I started going to record stores. This was in Philadelphia, which is such a great music city. Then my older brother got me a mini-turntable—I think it was a Realistic turntable from Radio Shack. It had a built-in speaker; I would listen to records in my room a lot. A bit later, I got my own system, with a Garrard turntable, a little Technics amplifier—and headphones. The headphones were a revelation. I would sit in the dark and listen to Gato Barbieri, I could listen to Joe Jackson…whatever the fuck I wanted to. I was in my own world.

Photograph: Ruth Bartlett

BT: It sounds like, even as a high-school kid, you had rather mature taste.
DK: Where I’m from, I don’t think that was particularly unique. The neighborhood I grew up in had great Latin music, for instance—and I remember the great debate being “are you a Temptations fan, or are you a Beatles fan?”

BT: Was there a racial split on that question?
DK: Not really: Eddie Fields, the kid who lived next to me—and who later went to prison for beating up a cop—was a Temptations fan. He was a white guy. And then there was Ronnie Brown, who was like, “The Beatles are the shit. The Temptations wear those stupid costumes.” There was actually a real discourse about this. I can also remember going to my friend Orlando Mendez’s house, and we’d listen to things like the Supremes and the Spinners. There was just a lot of great music around.

BT: And you were digging all of it.
DK. Yeah! Over the course of the day, I would hear the Spinners and I would hear Crosby, Stills and Nash, who I thought made beautiful music. It was a great way to grow up.

BT: What were your first DJ gigs?
DK: Originally I started playing parties in art school. At that point, I was collecting a lot of soul ballads, so I was essentially playing a lot of ballads.

BT: Nice! Stuff like the Delphonics?
DK: Yeah, and Eddie Holman, Imagination, the Miracles, things like that. A lot of Philadelphia stuff, of course, like the Stylistics. From there, I discovered Jamaican ballads. Finding that relationship between northeastern American soul ballads and the Jamaican versions of that was huge for me. At the same time, a lot of my friends were into things like New Romantic groups; I remember having a lot of hair products. And hair.

BT: Those were the days, when you could play soul ballads to New Romantic fans.
DK: For sure. From there, I was in New York and I started buy records on Canal Street from—what’s his name, Lenny Kaye?

BT: Patti Smith’s guitarist?
DK: Yeah. He used to have these record things at his loft, where you could go in a pick up African stuff and all kinds of things. It was great! I was still playing a lot of soul—more soul than anything—with a little funk and hip-hop. Then I started discovering people like Big Daddy Kane and Eric B and Rakim, which I thought was amazing. I began playing more of that kind of sound, and I started to get more work as a hip-hop DJ. I teamed up with Jeff Mao, and we focusing a lot of funk and hip-hop.

BT: You had narrowed your focus a bit during that period.
DK: Well, to be honest, we were also playing disco, Latin music and whatever. But mainly funk and hip-hop.

BT: But at some point you started phasing hip-hop out a bit of your sets, right?
DK: Yeah. At one point, hip-hop was extremely exciting, and so much fun to play. I remember that around when Fat Beats first opened, there were tons of great records coming out every week. I was meeting all these producers too, because I was digging a lot—people like Lord Finesse and Pete Rock.

BT: That must have been kind of exciting.
DK: Yeah, and I really liked them. It was a tremendous time. So much good music—De La Soul, Kool Keith, Ultramagnetic MCs and so many more. But I can remember playing this midtown club—I think it was Speeed—and I realized that the crowd was changing. The scene just got…dumb. Guys would come up and say, “Oh, I know you got this record. You’re gonna play it.” I’d be thinking, well, fuck that—I’m gonna play Loose Ends instead. Finally, I realized that the whole thing had gotten corny and the music stopped being interesting. And the crowds were even worse. But Jeff really wanted to keep going in that direction, while I was getting more into what you could loosely call dance music. I wanted to play Brazilian music; I wanted to play sleazy Italian cinema music; I wanted to play everything, really.

Photograph: Chris Renzulli

BT: Everything that’s good, at least. You’ve described it in previous interviews as “adult dance music.”
DK: That was the approach I took, even when I was playing hip-hop. I wanted to play in a sophisticated way, to play the music that really mattered to me, and to win the audience over by playing it with fury and intensity. And I think it worked. I managed to get quite a few people who ordinarily wouldn’t have gone anywhere near this music to like it. You have to make an argument for what you believe in, and as a DJ, that’s the fun part.

BT: You’ve also been making that argument as a producer and label boss over the past several years.
DK: Seven years! And I’ve seen the same kind of thing in those roles as I have as a DJ. Whenever anything interesting becomes just a little bit popular, a million people will then jump into it—and then it becomes diluted and uninteresting. Like, not so long ago, acid house got big again, and then everybody was making all these fake old acid house records. And for the most part, it was just shit.

BT: And I take it you try and stay away from that kind of thing.
DK: Both with the label and as a producer, I told myself that I wouldn’t do that. I was gonna make stuff and put out stuff that didn’t fit easily into any trend; I would put out music that I cared about, and do it as well as I could.

BT: You were never actively trying to find an audience?
DK: Nope. Some of our records have found an audience and some of them haven’t. For instance, the Beat Broker and Lars Behrenroth did a twelve for us [2008’s “Cactus Cooler”/”The Beach” split single], and it was a great record. Smith & Mudd did a beautiful remix of “The Beach” and I felt great about the remix that I did for “Cactus Cooler.” But still, nobody noticed it!

BT: That was a great release.
DK: And now, people seem to be finally noticing it. Like, “Oh, shit, that was a good record.” But that was the deal: I was just going to put out the music that I liked by the people that I liked, and whatever happens, happens. It’s the same with the podcasts that we run on the website—just DJs that I really like. I don’t really care about how popular someone is—I just want a good set.

BT: You been busy working on a new project with Darshan Jesrani from Metro Area, right?
DK: Yeah, and we’re really excited about it. It’s called Siren, and we’re deep in production right now. It’s going to be coming out on Compost Records.

BT: I know you and Darshan are friends, but what was the impetus behind producing together?
DK: There was this party at Winter Music Conference several years ago down at the Winter Music Conference; it was just Dar and I deejaying all night. Michael [Reinboth, Compost’s founder] and the rest of the Compost crew were hanging out, and we had such a good time with them. We had quite a few cocktails, I remember. Michael said, “Hey, if you two ever do something, send it to us.”

BT: It was that easy?
DK: That part was. But we’ve been working hard for the past year and three quarters, working on writing some strong original material. The music didn’t seem to fit into any specific genre, but we went ahead and sent it to Compost, and they said, “This is incredible. We want it. Can we have it?”

BT: Which means you now have to finish the tracks up, I assume.
DK: We actually have two tracks done. The first is coming out in September. That one features a vocal from Daniel Chavis of Apollo Heights fame, with a remix by Ray Mang.

BT: The goal is to have an album together at some point, right?
DK: Yeah, hopefully by summer of next year…though things always take longer than you expect, so that might be revised. We’re really going for it; we’re really working on it all the time. And the nice thing is that you can really see the effort and care paying off. The music doesn’t sound disposable; it doesn’t sound like so much music that’s sitting in my inbox.

BT: Can you describe what it does sound like?
DK: It’s strong dance music, basically. But it doesn’t tick off the same boxes as most dance music. It has some spoken word, it has some dark guitar stuff—and the second release is different, more romantic with a Burt Bacharach kind of structure to it. It’s really hard to encapsulate.

BT: Give it a try.
DK: It’s original, adult dance music. It doesn’t sound like what Darshan has done, it doesn’t sound like what I have done. It sounds like us, and it’s something new.

https://soundcloud.com/dsgtnyc/dennis-kane-i-love-ny-mix-for