“Love makes you see a place differently, just as you hold differently an object that belongs to someone you love. If you know one landscape well, you will look at all other landscapes differently. And if you learn to love one place, sometimes you can also learn to love another.”
– Anne Michaels
Dinamarca (co-founder of Staycore), discussing a new track from his Holy EP, tells The FADER, “I started this track in Stockholm but I could never quite finish it until I got to São Paulo. Everything fell into place in that weird magical city.”
I’m fascinated by this relationship between music, place, and love. It’s always seemed to me that one’s sense of place is holy, that a relationship with a specific land and its peoples forms a special bond, one that especially impacts artistic output. Now, I don’t know whether Dinamarca loves either Stockholm or São Paulo, but his saying that a unique magic exists in the latter speaks to the notion that sense of place affects both creativity and the ways in which it is experienced.
As the internet grows in strength and scope, it seems like the world shrinks and our sense of place becomes less important. But when it comes to dance/rave music, I have a feeling that sense of place will always be paramount. The dancefloor grounds you to a specific location, forces you into your body, puts you into an ephemeral state where nothing matters except the singular experience of sonic motion. When I listen to “Juguete” off of Dinamarca’s Holy EP, the track we have the pleasure of premiering below, I’m reminded that raves and dances are beautiful precisely because they create a unique sense of place. In a way, then, the dancefloor is sacred. Indeed, the late house music legend Frankie Knuckles once told The Chicago Tribune that “God has a place on the dancefloor,” and whether you believe that or not, I find it undeniable that the dances and raves that inspired this EP can indeed be holy.
Dinamarca’s Holy EP will be released in its entirety on December 2. Sample the wonderfully energetic “Juguete” below.