One of dance music's many great attractions is the standing offer of leaving behind the world's darkest tendencies and day-to-day squabbles for a few hours. Yet the primary reason such an offer is consistently valid, and more therapy than escapism, is that beneath what seem to be a simplistic, always-having-a-good-time veneer, dance music reflects the world that it is created in. In fact, at its best, dance music transcends it, becoming a possible model for organizing society's moving parts.
I doubt that anyone who first heard about the so-called "Brexit," the referendum that found the United Kingdom voting to leave the European Union, contemplated how this reflected the continent's dance-music scene. But if you look closely — from the digital cross-border collaborations to the highly internationalized scenes in its urban melting pots — the people on the dance-floors, and the artists who've been making the sounds that fill them, have been at the forefront of creating a multi-cultural EU. For these beat-driven participants, integration is a given and isolation is a creative death-spell.
Which is why this month, Recommended Dose focuses on new music not simply by artists based in the European Union (and yes, we do still include England in that ideal), but collaborations between them — and in a couple of cases, musicians living in Europe, who have arrived from distant lands. Because Brexit or no Brexit, this international miscegenation is the club's natural mix, and the digital globe's obvious future. Whether you vote for it or against it.
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