Colin Ward · CRFW

dance / rave / groove — the floor as a song-engine

Where water — submerged ecosystems, pools, rain, the fluid register is the wet substance Colin reaches for and
body — Bliss Body, body-coinages, the body as ecosystem is the workshop, the dance/rave/groove register is the
motor: the social rhythm that makes a track feel like a track and not a
study. It is not one word but a small vocabulary — dance, rave,
groove, bounce, hop, shake, bump, pump, floor, mchn — that
recurs across roughly 35 named files in the catalog and sits behind the
naming of three full albums (CAVE RAVE 2013, DDR 2011 / DDR2 2012 / DDR3
2016) plus a recurring live-event series (Fantazia
2010 → 2016).

The motif’s most distinctive feature is that Colin almost never spells
the dance words straight. “Dance hall” becomes brain waves dance hall;
“rave” becomes CAVE RAVE (caves rarely host raves); “dance machine”
becomes danceMCHN; “dance floor people drop” becomes DanceFloorPPLdropz.
The dance vocabulary is a host for the same coinage operation he runs on
animals (see animal coinages — absurdist creature collisions) — the floor-word stays, but the
qualifier collides it with somewhere absurd. Colin treats the dance as
serious craft and the dance-words as toys.

Releases anchored in the motif

The motif is load-bearing for at least four naming-level releases:

  • CAVE RAVE (alphabets, 2013-11-07) — a 9-track album whose title is
    the motif itself. Track 8 (“CAVE RAVE”) is the title cut. The Bandcamp
    copy describes the genre as “Dance, electronic, glam, experimen[tal]”.
    This is the moment the motif becomes a release-name. See
    CAVE RAVE.
  • DDR series (2011 → 2016) — the most cross-era piece of evidence in
    the catalog. DDR (alphabets 2011), DDR2/HAUNTED (alphabets 2012), and
    DDR3:Loaner phone (Killd By 2016) each riff on the Dance Dance
    Revolution     arcade-game shorthand without ever quite naming it. The DDR3
    tracklist contains DanceFloorPPLdropz and danceMCHN — the most
    literal dance-floor titles in the entire catalog. See DDR.
  • DANCEPOWER (alphabets, 2010-07-08) — single-track release named for
    the motif × the [___]POWER family. Single track toby dance.
    See DANCEPOWER.
  • SWEAT BEE: DANCE MIX (alphabets, 2012) — the explicit dance-floor
    framing of the SWEATBEE series; five tracks numbered i–v. The “DANCE
    MIX” tag is rare in Colin’s catalog — most variants are unmarked alts.
    See SWEAT BEE: DANCE MIX and sweat / sweatbee.

Tracks (selection across years)

Direct dance/rave/groove vocabulary in track titles, in archive order:

  • nov09/run it run it fantasia mixx.mp3 — the first surface of Colin’s
    Fantazia coinage, November 2009, six months before the first
    documented Fantazia 2010 event.
  • BIEBER JERBOA / 02 brain waves dance hall — alphabets-era, dance-hall
    routed through brain-waves (overlap with body — Bliss Body, body-coinages, the body as ecosystem / interior
    ecosystem).
  • alphabets/MARCH09hopdanceshakebump/ — folder name itself is body-action
    coinage stacked four-deep: hop · dance · shake · bump. (Surfaced first
    on body — Bliss Body, body-coinages, the body as ecosystem page; reads cleaner here.)
  • alphabets/PUMPBOUNZE/ family — entire archive folder built on the
    pump/bounce coinage; same operation as hopdanceshakebump.
  • shakeshakeshakeshakeshake — repetition-as-emphasis title; see
    body — Bliss Body, body-coinages, the body as ecosystem for the body-as-percussive-engine framing.
  • DANCEPOWER / 01 toby dance — DANCEPOWER’s only track.
  • SWEATBEE: DANCE MIX i–v — SWEATBEE recast as floor-music.
  • CAVE RAVE / 08 cave rave — title cut.
  • Court Clothes / 11 G-E-N-I-E-club — Killd By era; “club” appears as a
    spelled-out floor-space register.
  • DDR3:Loaner phone / 03 DanceFloorPPLdropz — most literal dance-floor
    title in the catalog.
  • DDR3:Loaner phone / 04 danceMCHN — dance-machine compressed into a
    Killd-By-typography shape.

Three operations on the dance-word

  1. Floor-word + qualifier collision. brain waves dance hall, cave
    rave    , DanceFloorPPLdropz, danceMCHN, G-E-N-I-E club. Same engine
    as Colin’s body-coinages and animal-coinages: a stable noun (dance,
    rave, club, floor, machine) is collided with something that doesn’t
    normally sit beside it.
  2. Body-action stacking as title. MARCH09hopdanceshakebump,
    PUMPBOUNZE, shakeshakeshakeshakeshake. The dance is rendered as a
    sequence of physical verbs rather than a noun — closer to a
    choreography than a genre. This is also where the motif overlaps most
    strongly with body — Bliss Body, body-coinages, the body as ecosystem (the body-in-motion-as-percussive-engine
    operation).
  3. Game / arcade reference as a stand-in for floor practice. The DDR
    series is the cleanest example. A 1998 Konami arcade game becomes a
    nine-year-recurring naming convention for Colin’s floor-music releases.
    The reference is unspoken — the title is just DDR — but the
    floor-practice meaning is consistent across all three iterations.

Cross-motif overlaps

  • dance × body: MARCH09hopdanceshakebump, PUMPBOUNZE,
    shakeshakeshakeshakeshake, DanceFloorPPLdropz (the body that drops).
    See body — Bliss Body, body-coinages, the body as ecosystem op #5 (body-in-motion as percussive engine).
  • dance × sweat: SWEAT BEE: DANCE MIX is the bridge release.
    Colin’s dance is not airy — it’s heat-producing. See sweat / sweatbee.
  • dance × cave: CAVE RAVE 2013 is the strongest single overlap with a
    spatial motif (cave/underground). The album cover and the genre tag
    explicitly invoke the rave register inside an enclosed-space register.
  • dance × hall / club / floor / machine: the architectural register —
    dance hall, club, floor, machine — names the physical site the
    music is for. Colin’s floor-spaces are usually wrong-sized: a cave, a
    brain, a generic MCHN.
  • dance × game: DDR series. Probably the most distinctive thing about
    Colin’s dance-naming — most experimental musicians don’t name three
    releases after an arcade game.

The Fantazia connection

The motif’s social-event surface is the [[events/fantasia-2010|Fantazia
series]] (Fantazia 2010 → Fantazia 2016), which Colin co-curated as a
recurring large-scale interdisciplinary event in Denver. The earliest
textual reference to “fantasia” in the archive is the November 2009 track
run it run it fantasia mixx on alphabets’ NOV09, suggesting Fantazia
began as a song coinage roughly six months before the first staged
event. The motif’s release-shape and event-shape are the same shape.
This is consistent with Colin’s broader pattern of letting a track-title
become a project-title become a real-world event title (compare bliss
body on body — Bliss Body, body-coinages, the body as ecosystem — track → film → memorial).

Notes for future passes

  • A MARCH09hopdanceshakebump deep-pass would surface the per-track
    contents of that folder — currently only the folder name is documented.
    Could split into its own release stub if the archive has enough.
  • The PUMPBOUNZE folder family probably warrants a release stub; right now
    it sits in body — Bliss Body, body-coinages, the body as ecosystem and here as evidence only.
  • The DDR series page (DDR) is light on cross-track analysis;
    it could pull in the dance/rave/groove framing developed here on a
    cleanup pass.
  • “Floor-word + qualifier” pattern (op #1 above) might generate its own
    list-page if/when the website wants a “Colin’s coinage operations”
    navigation surface.
  • Possible adjacent motif: machine / robot — overlaps with this motif
    on danceMCHN and with animal coinages — absurdist creature collisions on robo goats,
    robodogs. Carry-forward from Session 14.

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