Danny Grooves

From Chubby Checker to Fatboy Slim, there’s always been a hearty appetite for dance music, and electronic dance music, or EDM, is just the latest musical menu item to satisfy that craving for beefy bass and a savory beat.

Going back to the ‘90s when production companies such as Exstasis produced raves in dusty dance halls, there has been a vibrant dance music scene in the Quad-Cities, and the latest group to bring high-quality shows to the masses, Civil Entertainment’s EDM Nation, is keeping that legacy alive, as evidenced by its gig next week at the Rock Island Brewing Company featuring up-and-coming DJ Danny Grooves.

“We’re just trying to put on quality shows and highlight the scene around our area,” said CJ "the DJ" Crawford, the founder of Civil Entertainment. “Danny Grooves is the big draw of this show. He’s a producer with some great things coming out on a national scale."

Grooves has a single with Mac Lethal titled "The Regiment" coming out Jan. 24.

Also on the RIBCO bill is Megarad, a two-man DJ project featuring CJ and Matt Egert mixing tracks at the same time to create a cool sonic dance mix.

“It should be a great night, and we hope people will come out and give it a chance, or if they’re fans of EDM that they’ll come out and enjoy it,” CJ said. “We put a lot of work into our shows to find the right lineup, the right venue, the right lights, to come up with some pretty creative things. We’re just trying to make people aware of these events and help the scene grow.”

Civil Entertainment has been putting on shows for 2½ years, CJ said, noting that he’s respecting a long legacy of dance shows in the Quad-Cities as well as contributing to a blossoming current scene.

“There are a lot of people doing events,” he said. “We’re all friends, and we encourage people who go to our events to go to others’. If you hear about events, whether they’re ours or other people’s, we encourage you to check them out. We all put on quality events. That just helps the scene grow. Everything we were able to achieve this year has been due to joining forces with Adam Miller and Miller Entertainment. You really do have to band together to have enough strengths to outweigh your weaknesses to pull off bigger things, and we did just that.”

CJ also encourages people unfamiliar with the genre to give it a try. After all, he wasn’t always hardcore into EDM either. A former metal musician and member of the group Civilized Anarchy, he was drawn to some of EDM’s heavier bass and aggro Dubstep sound, but he found himself hooked by its more melodic and musically complex components, as well as the sense of community created by its shows.

That sense of community is something he always attempts to build with his own productions, he added.

“When we do a show, we don’t know what to expect,” CJ said. “The point is to create an engaging experience. We want people to give it a try, come out and hopefully enjoy it and come back again.”

He's also offering patrons an inexpensive lure to come in the door as well. The group’s Facebook page on the day of the event will release a “secret password,” good for half off the admission price at the door. - Quad City Times