With inthemix celebrating its 10th year as the excitable watchdog of the dance music community in 2010, we’ve spent plenty of time reflecting on the past decade and the events and trends that have defined it. As well as the forever shifting tides of clubs, festivals and movements, another notable occurrence from the last 10 years has been the consistently booming rise of live dance music, to the point that now in 2010 live acts are as dominant on festival line-ups as DJs have regularly been. The trend can be immediately seen on the bill for Sydney’s 2011 Field Day which is specifically broken down between DJs and live bands, with the likes of Trentemoller, The Rapture and Art Vs Science outweighing the DJs including Erol Alkan, Tensnake and Justice.

Of course, the live side of dance music is nothing new, indeed, bands have been making people dance long before the invention of the CDJ, but it’s in the last few years that we’ve really seen an explosion in the live scene, with DJs and producers stepping out from behind the decks with their own twists, tweaks and takes on a ‘live’ show.

Already in 2010 dance fans have witnessed a range of new live ventures from established DJs and production acts including Sasha, Groove Armada and Deadmau5 with his expansive rubix set-up, not to mention The Bloody Beetroots who’ve morphed into a live synth-punk act with Death Crew 77 seemingly never to return to the decks again.

So what’s brought about this sharp rise in live transformations amongst the club crowd, and if this live takeover of the dance is to continue as indicated, is it a good thing for the artists making the moves and the fans watching? To get some answers inthemix quizzed artists at home and abroad about why they’ve made the transition into the live field and how they see the scene moving from here.

For David Dewaele of Belgian double act Soulwax and 2manydjs the reason behind the spike in dance acts making live crossovers has stemmed from one thing and one thing only. “You want to know why this has happened? Daft Punk. That was it,” he stated in an interview with inthemix recently. “I can tell you – for a fact – that everyone was just shitting themselves when Daft Punk came out with a live dance act that had this gigantic visual show. All of a sudden, everyone was like ‘oh, hold on, we can’t just show up with a few CDs anymore?’.”

That sentiment is echoed by Canadian dance star Tiga, who told inthemix that the original idea to transform his DJ sets into the Planet Turbo live show came from feeling dwarfed on big stages with just a stack of records to distinguish himself with.

“I distinctly remember the feeling of ‘fuck, I have to up my game’, because I was coming on after De La Soul I think it was, and they were dominating the stage with like fifteen guys, and I was just a skinny little DJ with a record box on a massive stage,” Tiga recalled. “It was absurd. How do you even compete with that?”

As well as feeling under-dressed on festival bills as “just a DJ”, Tiga explained that there’s been a kind of “domino effect” that has lead to the current state of dance music and its shift towards the live arena, saying that the downturn in record sales is keeping artists on the road and making them scramble to standout amongst each other.

“Nobody is really confident about making money on records any more – that part of the industry is either dead or dying – so that leaves people with a lot more urgency to tour, and that means there are more people touring and it’s a more competitive market place, so everyone has to offer a little bit more.”

As well as increased competition between artists, operating in this over-crowded marketplace has given us some unfortunate cases of “me-too” live acts which never seem to hit the right spot, something which Soulwax’s David Dewaele pointed out as one of the biggest problems of the live boom.

“In my opinion it’s brought with it a lot of really crap shows and visuals,” he said of the overload in live offerings. “It now feels like there’s just a lot of this keeping up with the Jones’ effect happening where people are trying to do spectacular stuff by hiring people to do it for them. And it just doesn’t work well. When Daft Punk did it, I thought it was incredible and it blew everyone’s minds.

“And even now, with someone like Deadmau5, even though I don’t really like his music, if I see his show I can tell that he is behind it, he’s the one running it. I respect that. Daft Punk spent a year making that show, they didn’t just hire someone and leave it to them to do,” Dewaele said emphatically. “Anyone can set up like a hundred LED screens and put some stupid visuals on a loop. I just think that’s embarrassing.”

This seems to be one of the most common points of contention for both dance fans and artists alike when approaching live turf; how live is ‘live’? Already in this era of live crossovers performers have taken some rather creative liberties with their interpretation on the word, something which Bob Rifo of The Bloody Beetroots raged over in an interview with inthemix earlier this year, saying he was sick of seeing “the word ‘live’ [used] to describe opening a laptop, pressing play-stop-cutoff”, branding those culprits as nothing more than ‘pseudo-DJs’.

Avoiding such an issue will likely be on the minds of Canberra’s favourite DJs, The Aston Shuffle, as the duo simultaneously put the finishing touches on their debut artist album and accompanying rebirth as a live band due to be unveiled this summer.

“It’s something we really, really want to do,” Aston’s main-man Mikah Freeman told ITM. “But we want to make sure we do it the right way so we don’t look a bunch of fools. We don’t want to do something that isn’t us [or] that feels like we’re cashing in. We have to do it with sincerity.”

Similarly, Swiss DJ Deetron has been testing the waters of a live show only to scale back any immediate plans until he can perfect a show that’s worthwhile to audiences as well as himself.

“I’ve only done two live sets so far, one was at Cocoon for Sven Vath’s birthday,” he explained. “A lot of the DJing has come closer to a live set, or what is considered a ‘techno live set’. A lot of people play with Traktor or Ableton, doing DJ sets that are more of a live set…for me though, it’d be ‘real’ live – I’d only play my own tracks, and ideally I’d like to do it with real musicians or a vocalist,” he said before pointing to the shows of Redshape, Caribou and “more band-style live acts” as examples of the transition done right.

While it pays to be cautious with the ever-ballooning trend of studio dance acts transforming for the live stage, there can be no denying that there’s merit to the trend, especially when the artists themselves are able to flex their creativity and deliver something outstanding, as summer festival revelers saw this year when 2manydjs performed with their live set-up. With more and more acts set to make the jump to a live setting in the future – we can count trance heroes Above & Beyond as next on the list – it’s quite clear that this new wave of live experiments won’t dissipate any time soon, but more than anything it’s important to have some balance and, as active participants in the scene, to know where to draw the line when the time comes.