Grammys to feature first dance music segment

Grammy show producer Ken Ehrlich had considered putting dancing/electronica music into the ceremony in the past, but could never quite figure out how to incorporate the high-energy club feel in front of a sometimes staid audience.

He thinks he's figured it out this year. For the first time, the Grammy show will put the spotlight on the genre with a segment featuring Grammy nominees Deadmau5, the Foo Fighters, Chris Brown, David Guetta and Lil Wayne, all performing in a tent space amid 1,000 fans.

"We decided to go all out this year," Ehrlich said of the performance taking place outside the Staples Center in Los Angeles, where Sunday's ceremony will be held. "All we're going to try and do next week is to try and put the home audience in the middle of it. ... It is more than just sitting there and watching it."

Dance music did not receive its own category until 2003 with the best dance recording/dance field, and the music had not been featured with its own segment in the show.

"I don't know that I figured out a way to do it that felt right until now," Ehrlich said in an interview Monday. "My feeling about dance is it's such an immersive experience for the participant, that to put it on stage ... where the audience is not a part of it ... I don't know, honestly, until we came up with the idea of doing it this way, I don't know if it ever would have worked."

Ehrlich calls the performance the "most ambitious number that we've ever done outside the Staples Center." It will feature at least four cameras from audience level as Deadmau5 (pronounced dead mouse) and the Foo Fighters perform his remixed version of the band's song "Rope," which netted him one of his Grammy nominations, and as Brown and Lil Wayne perform with Guetta.

Ehrlich said the performance reflects the popularity of dance music over the past few years.

"As much as a recorded medium that it is, and the fact that it's selling a lot of CDs and downloads, it's really a live experience," he said. "It is more than just sitting there and watching it."

Other performers on the show include Adele, Bruce Springsteen, Chris Brown, Paul McCartney and Taylor Swift for what Ehrlich boasted would be a "pretty amazing show."

"What I try and do when we're building this show is to think about the audience first. ... What can I do that's going to keep an audience for 3 1/2 hours watching the Grammy Awards?" he said. "I do try and look for how broad I can make it and still assume that people are going to tune in and stay with it."

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Nekesa Mumbi Moody, the AP's music writer, reported from New York. Follow her at http://www.twitter.com/nekesamumbi.

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Ken Ishii, out of dance clubs and into daydreams

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan's trail-blazing techno king Ken Ishii has rocked massive crowds the world over with his dance floor beats, but for his latest album he drew inspiration from what some may think an odd choice much closer to home -- a luxury Tokyo shopping mall.

Ishii, 41, is nothing if not unconventional and even as his popularity has grown -- he has risen from playing clubs to the MTV Video Music Awards, made the cover of Newsweek magazine and composed the theme song for the 1998 Winter Olympics -- the master music mixer has tried to remain true to his roots even as his songs make their way into spaces as common as elevators.

"I didn't want to become commercial but music always does," Ishii told Reuters. "I'm an old-school techno kind of guy."

His new project "Music for Daydreams" has the formal title "Ken Ishii presents Metropolitan Harmonic Formulas" and is released in February, almost 20 years after Ishii cut his first track.

The 11-song album marks a small departure for the soft-spoken producer and DJ with a delicate shift in pace from his staple, techno voodoo. He collaborated with jazz musicians, and took two years to complete the record that grew from his work mixing music for the Tokyo Midtown Galleria, a trendy shopping, restaurant and hotel complex in Roppongi, Tokyo.

"I wanted to do something for daytime," Ishii told Reuters. "I always DJ at night so I wanted to do something different. Something for day people."

He said the songs cross many genres and have a timeless feel, but are "still my kind of electronic music."

Ishii burst onto the music scene in the early 1990's, tearing up dance floors in Europe before Japan knew what techno music was.

"Techno changed my life. In the late 80's I was into electronic music like Kraftwerk," said Ishii, who was heavily influenced by Detroit's underground techno scene. "'Space Invaders' got me into electronic noises as a kid."

His big break came from Belgium's R&S Records, a major techno label, when he was still at university.

"I just wanted to be on their label so I sent a tape. It started as a way of killing time as a bored student," he said.

STUDENT TO MASTER MIXER

A No. 1 hit on the techno chart of British music magazine NME in 1993 was followed in 1996 by an MTV video award for the single "Extra" -- both firsts for a Japanese artist.

"It all exploded in Europe very quickly. I thought it was very strange," said Ishii. "I was just a student and all these faxes kept pouring in from European record companies."

He played his first ever live set to 20,000 people in the Netherlands that year. His seminal album, "Jelly Tones," came out in 1995 and featured "Extra," boosting his fame further.

Then came the call from the Japanese Olympic committee.

"Producing the theme track for the Nagano Olympics was a huge thing for me," said Ishii. "But some people don't want to be recognized on the street."

Struggling to stick to his roots as an underground sensation and avoid becoming mainstream eventually led to a key career decision for the artist who so shuns glitz that he is still driven to gigs in his manager's old Toyota even today.

"At the end of the '90s my record labels in Japan and Belgium wanted me to play more commercial," he said.

"I said 'Okay, sorry, this is finished. This is not what I want to do.' I became independent."

And success kept coming. Ishii formed his own label in 2002, and in 2004 he was voted best techno DJ at the "Dance Music Awards" on Ibiza, Spain's clubbing island.

His 2010 dancefloor smash hit "Right Hook" proved Ishii could still strip paint from the walls before he turned his hand to the multi-textured "Music for Daydreams."

"What I do keeps me energized," said Ishii. "When I play my old tracks of 20 years ago on the dancefloor and the crowd are cheering and mad for it still, it's so special.

"That's when I feel I created something timeless."

(Editing by Elaine Lies and Bob Tourtellotte)

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