Electronic Music Scholar Shawn Reynaldo Is Coming to Holocene – Willamette Week

Shawn Reynaldo started First Floor as a placeholder. When Red Bull Radio shut down in 2019, taking the longtime music journalist’s radio show with it, Reynaldo decided to turn it into a self-published newsletter.

“[I thought] I’ll just do it for a while until my next job comes along and then I can stop,” Reynaldo says. Then the pandemic hit—and “at that point it was pretty clear no one was going to hire me for a music industry job anytime soon.”

First Floor is now Reynaldo’s full-time job, with more than 10,000 subscribers on Substack paying monthly or yearly for the 43-year-old’s essays on electronic music. And thanks to Velocity Press, a selection of Reynaldo’s essays and interviews is now available in book form. On Sept. 29, Reynaldo will discuss First Floor Volume 1: Reflections on Electronic Music Culture in conversation with Portland musician Spencer Doran at Holocene, in tandem with a performance by Barcelona-based producer Colleen.

This unconventional event—a combination of a book talk and electronic music party—also features a DJ set by Andrew Neerman of local label Beacon Sound. “It’s kind of an unusual lineup with like this talk happening,” Reynaldo says, “but hopefully it will all flow together and be interesting.”

Doran, a onetime First Floor guest whose project Visible Cloaks pays tribute to the Japanese “environmental music” of the 1980s, isn’t the only artist who will be speaking with Reynaldo on his U.S. book tour. Rather than other journalists and critics, Reynaldo decided to enlist musicians and artists to moderate.

Laurel Halo, the inventive and idiosyncratic electronic artist who recently discussed her new album Atlas with Reynaldo on First Floor, will speak with Reynaldo in L.A. And in Miami, Reynaldo will sit down with Nick León, a major figure in the Miami dance music scene known for his massive 2022 club hit “Xtasis.”

“There’s tension between artists and music journalists a lot of the time,” Reynaldo says. “So this is a chance for them to kind of flip the script a little bit and ask me whatever questions about my work that they might have in mind.”

Born in San Jose, Calif., Reynaldo has been immersed in electronic music since the ‘90s, during the early years of Bay Area rave culture. More than a decade before Facebook and Instagram, ravers looking to access illegal do-it-yourself parties had to actually pick up flyers and call a number to find the location.

“Most of the locations were warehouses in Oakland that probably should not have been events going on, especially with thousands of teenagers and young people doing drugs,” Reynaldo says.

He didn’t plan on a career in journalism, attending UC Berkeley for political science and joining the campus radio station KALX. His interest in radio led to a gig hosting Subsonic, an electronic music show on Bay Area alternative rock station Live 105.3.

Reynaldo’s break in music journalism came upon joining the staff of Bay Area arts magazine XLR8R in 2008 as a part-time contributor. By 2011, he was editor in chief, a position he held until 2016.

“Most people know me as a journalist,” Reynaldo says, “but I did radio for probably a decade, ran record labels, DJ’ed a lot. [Journalism] has kind of inadvertently become the main focus of my professional life, but it wasn’t something I set out to do as a kid.”

During his time at XLR8R, Reynaldo learned to write in an “editorial voice” that avoided the first person. However, he attributes much of the success of First Floor to its first-person perspective: that each of his insights is “Shawn Reynaldo’s take,” rather than some kind of objective truth about music.

“Once I started First Floor, it was pretty obvious that it was just me, so it would’ve been silly for me to pretend that I was some larger organization,” he says. “So I leaned into that.”

Reynaldo also allows himself the freedom to work outside the new-music press cycle, focusing less on hot new releases and trends than on broader issues within the electronic world of music. The essays collected in First Floor Volume 1 are divided into four sections: “Things Have Changed,” “The Broken Music Business,” “The Electronic Music Press” and “Applying a Historical Lens.”

Among the issues Reynaldo tackles in First Floor Volume 1: the dwindling role of the album in the streaming era (“The Album You Made Might Have Been a Giant Waste of Time”), the role of regional music communities in the hyperglobal internet age (“Maybe Local Scenes Don’t Matter Anymore”), and reflections on the state of music journalism itself (“The Overwhelmingly British Music Press”).

“I try and think about whatever issues are itching in my mind, and I just kind of dive into them and ask what’s going on here? Why is this changing?” Reynaldo says. “It’s nice to have that level of freedom, and I think it’s pretty rare in the music media landscape these days.”

SEE IT: Shawn Reynaldo and Spencer Doran, who share a double bill with Colleen, appear at Holocene, 1001 SE Morrison St., 503-239-7639, holocene.org. 5:30 pm Friday, Sept. 29. $20. 21+.