The Freight Yard, circa 1993-1997 in Allentown, PA, promoted by dj's Geoffe and Rick Miko, ran every Friday night from ten to two, with the occasional all night event. These events attracted upwards of 500-1000people and hosted musicians such as Joey Beltram, Laurent Garnier, Keoki, Josh Wink and many more. At this time a busy rave scene in the Northeast also offered an excess of massive events to choose from every weekend. In the years surrounding the turn of the millennium the rave scene went sour. Infected by the American dream of bigger is better, the rave scene courted big money and imploded upon itself. Since its demise, the reputation of dance music here has been tainted.

Putting a sophisticated twist on event production, The Detroit Electronic Music Festival and Paxahau events in Detroit, Mutek in Montreal, and Tronic Treatment, Bunker, Infrastructure and Wolf+Lamb events in NYC each took up a local mission of redefining people's perceptions by creating a new underground dance community in North America. Europe and most other parts of the world were never faced with this challenge, because their arts and music communities have been widely supported and sponsored.

In early 2002, Thomas Schreiber (Tom++), Rick Miller (Rick Miko) and I decided to work together and create events under the promotional name of funkshun, aka f(x). The idea was simply to create events in Philadelphia starring our favorite electronic musicians. Since it has always been important that we take control of the aesthetic details of the event, we take pride in producing an evolving environment that seeks to better itself with each and every event. What can we do next and how can we do it better? This is the question that inspires us to come up with new ideas.

Operations moved to Philadelphia in the summer of 2003, and we immediately connected with others who shared similar ambitions: the local record labels foundsound, internal error, tbtmo, conversation and new f(x) members diss0nance, ryan vanderbeck and darwin lewis. We started off small, hosting a Tuesday night weekly, called the 12 Step Program, at a South Philly Dive, 12 steps down. We often wanted to give up, but we learned from our mistakes and continued to test new variables in the equation. We quickly understood that the only way we could do this, without compromising our vision, was to plan for the long term sustainability of much more than a series of events. We had to develop and organize a community of radical individuals.

November 2004 saw the first event under the name rizumu, for which we had refined our flyer design, website and event atmosphere into a cohesive, stripped down package, designed to impress even the most jaded anti-electronicist. At the rizumu premier, we brought Neil Landstrumm from Edinburgh, Scotland, solely for this event, to share his intense live performance with Philadelphia. Because Neil was highly sought after for other shows, and because it had been many years since his last appearance, securing Neil's only North American tour date put rizumu on the map and gave everyone a tantalizing taste of what was to come.

Finally, in March of 2005 rizumu moved out of the bar setting and its restrictions into a venue where we could make larger decisions about the design of the atmosphere and, most importantly, extend our hours to the early mornings. We held nine rizumu events at the Halcyon Gallery, a factory space in Port Richmond, and in December 2006 rizumu found a home in West Philadelphia at LAVA. Here we were able to focus on the smaller details, fine tuning the events even further. It is around his time that Nikolai Grabowski got involved with the technical aspects of the sound and lighting. Nik brought renewed energy and fresh ideas to f(x), contributing to the excellence of the events, and raising the quality to a place that we had previously only dreamed of.

In celebration of five years of the f(x) project, in March of 2007 we founded a new dance zone on the outskirts of Fishtown, The Vacuum; the kind of place that sucks you into a world of pure imagination. The Vacuum is a spacious multi-room venue, with a conceptually constructed interior that provides two rooms of (newly upgraded) sound. The possibilities there are endless, as this is the ideal forum for exposing our unique take on underground dance culture to Philadelphians. It is in this space, throughout 2007, that the realization of the project will hopefully occur, but already from this point forward we are well beyond our original goalpost.

The current itinerary is to keep bringing the sounds of international, national and local artists to the city. The four current rizumu party zones are LAVAzone, IncitingHQ, Siam Lotus and The Vacuum. We should be back in the park every Thursday night starting in June and we will continue to speckle the landscape with our sounds at various other venues and continuing collaborative efforts with Flying V and Inciting.

In a world where the categorization of electronic dance music into infinite micro-strands continues to be the standard, we aim to defy specific classification. We deliver a selection of musicians, often from far-off places, who are inspired by experiences unique to their environment. We are also looking forward to launching a revised website and sharing the great music that has been brewing here and abroad through the forthcoming rizumu record label.