The Night I Fell in Love With Dance Music: Andy Hermann

As the music editor at LA Weekly, Andy Hermann helps curate the musical tastes of the city and places considerable editorial focus on Los Angeles’ diverse and trendsetting electronic music scene.

But the East-Coast bred, self-proclaimed former theater geek didn’t discover the scene until one fateful morning at Burning Man, when he heard the weird call of psy-trance and subsequently found his life forever changed.

Here, Hermann tells the story of the night he fell in love with dance music.

You’ve covered a lot of electronic music in your role as music editor and in your writing before that, as well. What specific night sparked your interest in the music and the scene?
The way I got introduced to the music was by going to Burning Man in 1998. As you must do at Burning Man, especially the first time you go, I had kind of a crazy out-all-night adventure.

Tell me everything.
Honestly, I’m sure we must have heard other electronic music over the course of the evening and the event as a whole, but the “aha moment” was when we had been up all night—me and this girl who I had just met, that ended up becoming my girlfriend for the next three years. She took me out; we took our bikes out to a party that was happening in the middle of the Playa as the sun was coming up. There was a psy-trance DJ named Olli Wisdom, who was doing a set with psy-trance and Goa trance, and I had never heard anything like that before.

What electronic artists were you familiar with before that?
My knowledge of electronic music at the time consisted of, like, the cheesiest, mainstream, early house music you can think of. I heard this crazy psy-trance on this giant sound system, and next to us there was an art structure that apparently was a UFO that someone had set on fire. There was just this burning UFO, and a packed dancefloor, and everyone there was just so happy and having a great time, and it just blew my mind. I had never experienced anything like it before—the scene, the music. That was my entry point.

How did you seek out the music post-Burning Man?
I lived in Boston at the time, and from there I started seeking out raves and more underground clubs in Boston, which there weren’t many of at the time, and coming out to L.A. to visit the girl. We had formed a long-distance relationship, and she’d take me out in L.A., and I slowly became introduced to the scene from there, discovering a bit more each time.

What were those early experiences in L.A. like?
One of the first ones was a desert party called Dune. The one that I went to actually got canceled and rescheduled to the Fox Theater in Pomona, which at the time was a shithole, not the beautiful palace that it is now. The performers were Paul van Dyk and Christopher Lawrence. That was another “wow” moment. But the first experience at Burning Man—that was when the light bulb went on, where I was really like, “Wow, I understand why people like this boot-in-a-dryer music now.”

What are your other recollections of that night at Burning Man?
It was the Burning Man crowd—the sort of desert hippie, Mad Max, post-apocalypse look that everyone has going on there. Other than that, what grabbed me about the music was something that I still love about psy-trance—my favorites are actually now house and techno and genres that are maybe a little lower BPM—but I loved the psychedelic qualities of it. I loved the way it was made of densely interwoven patterns.

At that time, my own experience of clubbing was similar to most people’s: Clubs were really seedy, and people were extremely self-conscious and trying hard to look cool. You have to dance and look and act and even lean up against the bar a certain way. I think people go to a club just to go to a club. You still largely get that experience when you go clubbing nowadays, and it’s too bad. The experience that I had was luckily the opposite—a total feeling of joy. Some people were dancing their asses off, and some people were great dancers, and some were terrible dancers, but no one cared. No one was checking each other out, and everyone was just enjoying the moment.

That was the amazing thing about it: the positivity of the experience and the lack of judgment. I was a first-time Burner, and I was probably wearing… I don’t know, nothing cool. Probably cargo shorts and a T-shirt. But it didn’t matter, there was no attitude or judgment, and it felt like a club that anyone could be a member of.

Hermann (front left) at Burning Man

How did that experience affect your life going forward?
Burning Man as a whole changed my life. That sounds like a cliché, but I wouldn’t be living in L.A. if it weren’t for her and for Burning Man. I’m incredibly grateful to her and Burning Man for putting me on the path that I’m on now. Specifically, hearing that DJ set that morning I think changed my life as well. I was already at that time working for a music website back in Boston—it was more of a commercial site—writing product copy for CDs. I had done some freelance writing and had only really dipped my toe into writing about music professionally at that point, and not into electronic music at all. Getting introduced to dance music and having that experience definitely set me on a path that led me to the job I’m in now.

Whose idea was it to go?
It was one of those things where it was sort of the universe pushing it in that direction. It was a series of coincidences where I just kept hearing about Burning Man everywhere I turned. I had been visiting an old high school friend in the Bay Area who was super into the whole Burning Man scene, and they had taken me to a Burning Man-themed warehouse party, where I felt very uncomfortable and out of my element, and that was sort of my first introduction to it.

A girl I was dating in Boston wanted to go, and I couldn’t go with, and she came back raving about how amazing it was. I wasn’t sure if I was going to be entirely into it, but it kept coming up, and I was interested in a wary kind of way. Like I said, I was a drama geek and was part of a political street theater group, and we’d do guerrilla performances in front of random audiences in various places. One of my friends from the group announced that he really wanted to go, and I decided that I wanted to go along. I just went with two friends from Boston; the three of us flew to San Francisco and rented a car, and it just happened.

And nothing was ever the same again.
And nothing was ever the same again.