Electronic music label putting Memphis on map

Voodoo Village label founders Brandon Thornburg and Matthew Ladner are staging a showcase Friday night.

Unusual for a city its size, Memphis can lay claim to being a player in a variety of musical genres -- the familiar trio of blues, rock and soul, of course, but also gospel, heavy metal and even jazz. But one that might not immediately come to mind is the burgeoning field of electronic dance music.

"The dance music scene has existed for a really long time here, but I feel kind of like it's the bastard child of Memphis music," says Matthew Ladner, who performs around town as electronic artist MarceauxMarceaux.

Ladner and fellow performer Brandon Thornburg are hoping to change that perception with their new Memphis-based electronic music record label, Voodoo Village. Started by the pair last spring, the label will hold its first showcase, which will also double as a release party for Voodoo Village's release of MarceauxMarceaux's new EP, Spurrr, Friday night at Mollie Fontaine Lounge.

While its rise has been predicted for decades, electronic dance music does at last seem to have found its niche in the popular music landscape. It's still not a powerful presence on the record charts, but a milestone of sort was reached recently when dubstep maestro -- dubstep being a subgenre of electronic dance music, or EDM, that is most prevalent these days -- Skrillex received five nominations for next month's Grammy Awards. Another of the genre's stars, DJ deadmau5, received three nominations.

Meanwhile, EDM festivals are one of the fastest growing segments of the live music industry. The 2011 Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas drew an astounding 250,000 people.

Locally, Ladner and Thornburg have been a part of the EDM explosion as part of the loose collection of artists that play the regular Electrocity dance parties started almost three years ago by Taylor Dawson. The monthly events attract 500 to 900 young people a night, simultaneously satisfying a local thirst for electronic music and building a new audience.

With a base of local EDM fans established, for Thornburg the next step seemed obvious: Start a label.

"For me it seemed a natural extension of Electrocity," says Thornburg, a Memphis native who, at 36, was beginning to feel too old for the live scene. "It had always been kind of a dream of mine to have a label. We were making enough money throwing parties to fund all the legal documents we needed to get started. And then everything just started to fall into place. An old friend helped us with studio stuff. And now the more we do promotion for it, the more things fall into our laps."

Thornburg and Ladner, a Mississippi Gulf Coast transplant, started Voodoo Village, named for a notorious religious temple in Southwest Memphis, last March and have put out three digital-only releases, including EPs by Thornburg's own project Witches, New Orleans duo Force Feed Radio and the new MarceauxMarceaux record.

Not all of Voodoo Village's artists come from the Electrocity family or even the Mid-South, and stylistically, within the confines of electronic music, they are all different from each other, Ladner says. Still, listeners can detect a shared aesthetic that ties the label to its hometown.

"It has more influence of things that are around us in Memphis. It's got a little bit darker feel to it. It's edgier. It's not your typical pop dance music that you would hear on the radio."

Voodoo Village is already making an impact, though mostly outside of Memphis. Through the informal network of deejays worldwide, some Voodoo Village tracks have already been picked up and remixed by other artists. Appropriately, Voodoo artists played last October's Voodoo Music Festival in New Orleans before a crowd of several thousand people.

"As far as sales and things like that, we're not seeing a ton, but that's not unusual," says Thornburg, adding that the music's bread and butter is shows like tonight's, which is tentatively planned to become a monthly event. "We mainly gauge things by fan reaction, which is very positive."

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Voodoo Village Recordings label showcase

11 p.m. Friday at Mollie Fontaine Lounge, 679 Adams Ave. No cover. For more information, call (901) 524-1886.

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