Josh Dahlberg, 26, in many ways encapsulates the post-rumble Detroit of a new artistic dawn.

He has some of the key features of the non-native, mid-20s, male Detroit dweller: bold-framed glasses, hair slicked to one side and a beard that is in itself a commanding presence. What keeps him from being a mere member of a herd is his dry wit and his ingenuity, both of which have helped him live the dream of running a record label and making electronic dance music with friends.

He is the founder and one of the directors of Blank Artists, which celebrate its sixth year anniversary on Feb. 19.
Dahlberg’s musical genesis occurred in high school, when he started D.J.’ing gigs .with standard equipment bought with money earned through mowing lawns.

“The events I was doing were on the west side of the state,” he said of his high school days. “That would have been ’01-’02; that would have been when raves and all that negative media-driven stuff—that would have been the embers after all that.”
The rave days of old have become mythologized, he said.
“A lot of people now just coming into electronic music really missed out on those days, because even though everyone has their notions about what a rave was, I think it brought a different level of reform to people who were into the music and who were really heads.”

Dahlberg seeks “refinement” in music and takes pride in garnering “educated listeners.” When asked whether rave drug use levels have anything to do with this refinement, he, with grin intact, sets the record straight: “I don’t think any one generation cares less about drugs than the previous, let’s get that right.”

A desire for diversity and art yanked Dahlberg from the rural Michigan town in which he grew up (Owosso) and threw him into the Detroit fray. He graduated from Wayne State with a bachelor’s in anthropology.

“I’m not looking to do sh—with [the degree] now,” he dryly notes.
So why the degree? Anthropology is a subject that could prove useful to any navigator of cities, but there was something more for Dahlberg.

“I had to legitimatize my move to Detroit to my family, almost. I applied to U of M, who of course shot me down, so I was, like, ‘Well, I guess I gotta move to Detroit,’” he said.
The proud snicker that comes attached to the comment is characteristic of Dahlberg’s conversational style.
In addition to managing Blank Artists, Dahlberg is himself one of the Blank Artists. He has managed a couple personal musical projects, including Green Meadows, the moniker under which Dahlberg will be performing at Blank Artist’s upcoming six-year anniversary party at the Park Bar.

Green Meadows has provided Dahlberg with the opportunity to rummage around the possibilities of free-form experimentation; it is softer and calmer than typical House or techno music.
Anyone interested in Green Meadows can download free stuff from him at blankartists.com.

Formation of Blank Artists

Blank Artists, which began in 2005, has been largely a communal effort, and one of the most crucial players has been Drew Pompa, 28, co-director and one of the artists on the label. His group, made up of his brother Phil and him, is called Siege; their first record is on its way.

The reasons for the long-standing friendship between Dahlberg and Pompa are easily identifiable. Pompa speaks in a relaxed drone, and is, for lack of a better phrase, a genuine music freak whose conversation tends to swoop through a litany of reference points, from the legendary Detroit Jazz Club the Blue Bird Inn to postwar French composers.

“[Josh and I] met virtually before we met physically,” Pompa said. The two of them frequented the same music-themed message board. In the wake of their disillusionment with everybody else on the board’s poor taste in music, they decided to link up with each other with a focus on making music of their own.

Pompa’s past is similar to Dahlberg’s. He too started D.J.’ing high school out of a broad musical interest. Later on, Pompa discovered what he is actually interested in: music specifically, but sound generally, the kind of stuff that jerks the spirit while massaging the ear drums.

Older brother Phil played a pivotal role in young Drew’s formative musical education. “He knows no boundaries when it comes to music,” Drew Pompa said. “The more you diminish these boundaries, the more knowledge you can absorb. The more knowledge you absorb, the more music — the more great music — you are able to create.”

Pompa also shares with Dahlberg a preference for the tangible vinyl to the shapeless internet music.

“Nothing is better than a physical product,” Dahlberg said. “This is the stuff that matters. This is the stuff that travels and translates. …So I encourage everyone to hold a Blank Artists record in their hands — frequently.”

Pompa analogizes the vinyl-to-MP3:

“It’s like a French classical building in Baltimore standing next to a suburban townhome.”

The echoes and rhyme effects in the messages of Dahlberg and Pompa continue. Dahlberg refers to Detroit as “creatively fertile” while Pompa calls Detroit a “fertile playground.”
Pompa’s personal philosophy seems to have overlaps with that of early 20th century Futurist musicologist Balilla Pratella in that he has a natural predilection for the esoteric underground, coupled with a suspicion of commercialism.

“Household names have no control over their creative destiny,” he said.

Erik Cronin is a Blank Artist who uses the name Codine. He connected with Dahlberg and Pompa around early 2007 in East Lansing.

Erik hopes Dahlberg and Pompa gravitated towards his music because it was an “original take on Detroit techno, not falling into current trends.”

He said creative destiny is something over which Blank Artists very much allows him to have control.
“I’ve worked with other labels less willing to let artists go off on their own tangent,” he said. “[Dahlberg and Pompa] are very open to new ideas.”

Blank and the Futurists

Futurist texts, which mostly came out of early 20th century Italy, point to eerie and, in some cases, accidental parallels between the Italian Futurist and Detroit techno movements.
These texts, in relation to Blank Artists, seemt o provide a basis for their musical formula, but Dahlberg therefore distrustful of manifesto language.

When it is brought up to him that the Blank Artists’ insistence on teaching the self through mistakes was lauded by the Futurists, he sets another record straight:

“Well, I think that’s natural in the evolution of man. I think the first time you see someone get eaten in the grasslands by a lion, you learn from that; you say, ‘How can we apply this going forward?’”

Detroit’s self-appointed cultural guardians can, and will, continue to argue about what the city’s narrative is, or should be. But it seems indisputable that there is something to the landscape that made the city a logical bastion of techno and House. It makes sense that the city of machinery would become one of the preeminent locales for the art of noises made by machines.

“Detroit was the imperial capitalistic capital of the world,” Pompa said when discussing the reasons for Detroit’s musical significance. “It succeeded, and then failed.”

Blank Artists taps into a realm of Detroit rarely given justice by written and verbal representations of it: that is, the monster-movie Detroit, the sci-fi Detroit, the Detroit packed with geniuses, both sober-minded and drug-addled.

The Blank Artists roster is fairly sizable. It consists of—in addition to Dahlberg, Pompa, and Codine — Hot Pink Karma (“funky white boy sh—,” in the words of Pompa), Memphis natives Agents of Woe, Jared Wilson, E. Spleece, Josh Cummings, Madis One, Pipé Scuttleworth, RS-232, Theatre of the Absurd, and Secrets (whose biography at blankartists.com begins with an interesting spin on a certain Obama-ism: “Let’s be clear—Secrets is a dirtbag.”).

The Blank line-up displays, through their sounds, a respect for the Detroit electronica tradition — Plastikman, Aux 88, Inner City, and so on — while working towards something distinguished and new.

The Blank Artists sixth anniversary party will feature performances by Jared Wilson, Green Meadows, Codine, About Flying, the Siege, and Madis One. It takes place at 10 p.m. Feb. 19 at the Park Bar, 2040 Park Ave. in downtown Detroit.