Techno is Black music. So is house. And footwork. And dubstep. Pretty much all dance music as we know it is rooted in funk, soul, and disco, which is to say that it is rooted in fundamentally Black American musical forms. But as club culture has become a global concern, those foundations have frequently been forgotten.
Dweller is determined to push back. Founded in 2019, the New York festival—which returns to the city this weekend, February 24-26—features an all-Black lineup and follows a powerful aim: to amplify Black talent, provide context for their work, and fight back against tokenism by centering Black creativity in Black spaces.
Dweller is the brainchild of Frankie Decaiza Hutchinson, who co-founded Discwoman, a booking agency and creative collective that exclusively represents women and non-binary artists. If part of Dweller’s mandate is educational—this year’s festival features an evening of discussions, readings, and screenings about building Black futures, and its website features an extensive library of source materials—some of that has to do with the fact that the British-born Hutchinson didn’t learn about dance music’s Black roots until she had been clubbing for years.
Her eureka moment came in the early 2010s, when she heard UMFANG—aka Emma Burgess-Olson, her future partner in the Discwoman agency—play a track by Detroit’s Kelli Hand, a Black woman whose pioneering contributions to house and techno have yet to be recognized. It was a powerful moment of awakening. “Growing up, I understood house music as white music,” Hutchinson says. “I could have easily gone my whole life without knowing it wasn’t.” (The festival’s name is a nod to the Detroit electro duo Drexciya, whose elaborate sci-fi mythologies established a model for Afro-futurist world-building.)
