The Night I Fell in Love With Dance Music: Adam Sellers

In this ongoing series, dance music industry veterans talk about the night they became slaves to the beat.

As the North American manager for Involved Management, Adam Sellers looks after myriad artists on the Anjunabeats and Anjunadeep labels, in addition to working on other high-profile projects including Above & Beyond’s recent album release and corresponding tour.

Today he’s based in Los Angeles, but Sellers first discovered electronic music as a kid growing up in South Carolina, when he rode his bike to the mall and bought the Chemical Brothers’ Exit Planet Dust. This was the first of many journeys that would lead Sellers deeper into that world. Here, he talks about three of them.

South Carolina seems like an unlikely place to get into electronic music. How did you first tap into the scene?
There wasn’t any electronic music around at all when I was growing up; you can imagine South Carolina around the mid-‘90s. The Chemical Brothers album came out in ‘95. I vividly remember buying it in the record store, riding my bike home, putting on the CD player, and hearing the song “One Too Many Mornings.” It made me feel like there was a world out there that I wanted to be a part of. I longed to be connected to a scene that I had never even read about or heard about. I thought there might something else out there that I could feel like I was a part of.

So how did you pursue that interest?
The next big night happened was when I went to my first real show. I was still living in South Carolina, and I was 18. The show was in Atlanta, and it was the first time my parents were really letting me drive to another city. I went to see Carl Cox at the Tabernacle. I remember all my friends were there with me, and we had an incredible experience.

I bet. What was that road trip like?
We were in my ‘92 4Runner with seven people packed into it. It probably had about 160,000 miles on it. It must have been held together by bubble gum and twine at that point. It took four hours to get there, and it was kind of a bonding moment for us. Carl Cox was the first good DJ my friends and I had seen. We had been to small events in South Carolina, but that was the first real one.

What were those smaller events like?
Straight-up raves. I know it’s hard to imagine raves in South Carolina in the ‘90s, but they existed.

What do you remember about the Carl Cox show?
I was wearing an outfit that I would never allow photos of. It might have been a little ravey. I may or may not have owned a pair of UFOs when I was younger. I won’t confirm or deny that fact. We stood in the front and didn’t stop dancing until the end.

What was the difference between the Atlanta show and the raves you had been to?
I mean, it was Carl Cox. He’s arguably the greatest DJ of all time—at least in my opinion. I think to this day, he’s still the best. I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to see pretty much every act I can think of, but when Carl Cox plays, I still to this day stand behind him and just watch how he mixes. People just don’t mix like that anymore. He’s so aggressive, and he emits genius. He just spins in a way that people don’t do anymore. He’s the number-one DJ hero who I’ve admired in my life.

How many times have you seen him play?
Oh, maybe 15 or 20. I travel to all of these festivals now, so I try and catch him whenever I’m there. I just think that he’s such a brilliant mixer, and so revolutionary. He was spinning on three turntables back in the day. It’s incredible to me. He’s also just such a positive persona. He embodies everything that’s good in dance music.

Sellers and Frankie Knuckles

So after this show, you’ve sort of seen the light in terms of really getting electronic music. Are there any more pivotal experiences that came after that?
Yeah, there’s one more. I went to school in Chicago and DJed in school a bit. Growing up, you never think it’s something you’d really do for a living, especially in South Carolina. I was focused on law school and was working at a consulting firm. After I got done with school, my buddy and I did a road trip from South Carolina cross-country to Seattle in six weeks. In Seattle, we saw that Daft Punk was playing during their famous Pyramid tour. I went and saw the show, and it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen.

My friend had to start graduate school, so he left right after the show, but I planned to stick around in Seattle for a couple of days. I kept thinking about the Daft Punk show and how blown away I was at the experience, so I decided I was going to get into my car and drive to see them again at Lollapalooza. I literally drove by myself for two days straight from Seattle to Chicago. The first day, I drove 1,600 miles straight. I left Seattle at 10am and got to Bismarck, North Dakota, at 4am the next day.

Holy shit.
The next day, I drove another 1,000 miles by myself, and had to drive an extra 300 miles around Minneapolis because of the bridge collapsing. When I got to Chicago, all of my friends were like, “What are you doing here?!” I told them, “We’re going to see Daft Punk!” So we all went and saw the show, and it was a ton of fun. It made me think about getting back into music. After that, I quit my job, sold my car, went traveling for a bit, and moved to New York to pursue the music industry.

And obviously, that’s worked out quite well for you. Now that you’ve been doing this for a while, do you still have those moments of transcendence, like, “Wow, I’m doing the thing that I was meant to do?”
They do still come. At the end of the sold-out Above & Beyond Madison Square Garden show, that was a big moment. Before I was doing management, I was a publicist, and they were my first big clients. So I’ve been working with them for three years now. They’re definitely one of the reasons why I’m here right now.

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