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Poreotics Crew Members: Can Nguyen, Matt Nguyen, Chad Mayate, Justin Valles, Lawrence Devera, and Charles Nguyen.

Randy Jackson Presents: America's Best Dance Crew is in the midst of its fifth season,  with just seven crews left battling for the top spot for the $100,000 grand prize. The show started off with its regional battle, where five crews from each region vied to be in the top three. Only nine crews remained to make it to nationals--and television. Judging the crews are teen idol from 'N Sync JC Chasez and hip-hop artist Lil Mama. New on the panel is  R&B singer Omarion, known for his popping-influenced dance style in music videos; he also starred in You Got Served. And, of course, hosting the show is Saved By The Bell's AC Slater (Mario Lopez).

Last night's show, Lopez announced that the show ran into technical difficulties that may have altered the votes. Because of this, the show decided not to eliminate any crews and everyone made it to the next round. However, two crews will be voted off next week's show, making it a high-stakes performance.


Yusuf Shariff (OC Weekly): So what's with the sunglasses?

Poreotics Crew: The sunglasses are for having a character on stage, it's pretty much hiding our eyes, so that you think we are serious, but our dancing shows that we are not. We're actually goofy. When we have glasses on, it pulls the audience in thinking that we're serious, but when we dance we're the opposite of that. More >>

It's a little strange to sense all the buzz surrounding Europe's new dark wave of dance floor sounds, which combine tribal drums with deep, chugging bass and a simmering sense of bacchanalia. The likes of Loco Dice, Sven Vath, Dubfire and Radio Slave have been churning out this latest club-land flavor, which lies somewhere between minimal techno and dubby house music. But it's been done before.

Fabric London

The doctor is in the house.

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Rewind to the mid-1990s and behold one Southern California native Doc Martin, who was rinsing out evil, "druggy" house for the after-after-hours underground. Dry, loopy tracks would declare "New York-London-Amsterdam" ad nauseum; or a song would state, "It's dark in here ... it's wet in here ... it's deep in here ... I like it here." Even before DJ's DJ Danny Tenaglia was declared the king of the "twisted" sound, Mr. Martin was tweaking bodies and minds.

A DJ hero who has been at it since the late 1980s, Doc has never been a flavor of the moment. He's always been his own man, anchoring his strictly underground Sublevel events while jetting off ocassionally to headline the world's greatest superclubs. (London's Fabric is a frequent destination). Check out Doc's timeless, bottom-heavy grooves Tuesday at Focus.

Focus presents Doc Martin Tuesday at Tapas, 4253 Martingale Way, Newport Beach. 18+. Tickets $8 in advance. Doors at 9:30. Info: focus-oc.com.

Some would credit Europe with this thing we call electronic dance music by pointing back to the pioneering work of Kraftwerk, Giorgio Moroder and Can. They would be half right: Contemporary electronic dance music, like blues, rock and jazz, is a progeny of the interplay between black and white music. (See Juan Atkins, Frankie Knuckles and Moby). And so, for many years New York was the club capital of DJ culture, and Southern California was its backyard playground.

DJ T

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But Europe has, in recent times, exacted a swift revenge on the world's dance floors. Berlin, Barcelona and Ibiza, Spain have surpassed New York, Miami and Chicago as clubbing's premier map points. And early techno and electronic dance artists such as Germany's Sven Vath, Booka Shade and DJ T - some of them beyond their 40s -- have come back with a vengeance, adding that lost ingredient of early European electronic - soul - to their teutonic groove boxes.

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​As the '00s dawned a fresh crop of DJs and artists descended on club-land. Where the last generation had mastered the long mixes and hip-hop-style tricks of turntables, the new kids were getting under the hood of technology to produce multimedia experiences on the dance floor. James Zabiela is chief among the new wave of spinners.

The Brit burst on the scene in 2000 by winning a mixtape contest put on by a UK dance music magazine (Muzik). He was soon embraced by the progressive house elite (Sasha, John Digweed) and ended up showing them how it's done. Zabiela's groovy, forward-moving tech-house style is almost overshadowed by his skills: He often spins and mixes DVDs instead of CDs, and lately he's taken on the live performance software suite known as Ableton Live, which allows DJ to break songs into parks and reconstruct them on the fly.

It's a far cry from 1999, when it seemed that everything that could be done using two turntables and a mixer had been done. Things were getting stale. Little did we know that 10 years later jocks like Zabiela would take DVD decks, laptops and video screens to breath new life into pop's most technologically advanced wing, electronic dance music. Check him out tonight [Thursday] at Giant in Newport Beach.

Giant presents James Zabiela tonight at Code, 4221 Dolphin Striker Way, Newport Beach. 21+. Doors at 9. Free with RSVP; $10 for "express" entry. Info: giantclub.com.

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Ben Watt is one half of Everything But The Girl, the pop group he co-founded with his wife, Tracey Thorn, in the 1990s. As the act turned to electronic influence, he came to DJing and he hasn't really looked back--even when DJing is not half as lucrative as being a pop star.

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Long Beach's Basement Lounge is on a roll. Lots of times, promoters come into Iowa by the Sea and claim big things are going to happen. Then they never do. But so far, the new people running the Basement Lounge have got a pretty good thing going on.

This Thursday's weekly Big Audio event includes hometown hero Greyboy spinning a set of soul music all from 45s. Watching him change records every three minutes should be pretty entertaining. I wonder when he'll find the time to take a piss break.

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Since the dawn of the 1990s, American dance music culture has seen waves of club-goers, artists and DJs come and go. The survivors are rare: It's hard to stick with a dancing-till-dawn culture as your 40s approach, but that's what one DJ has done. Thee-O continues to be a pillar of Southern California club culture, and his banging, bouncy house style hasn't let up, either.

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Krijin van Noordwijk

​Once every few years a game-changing album will accelerate the evolution of electronic dance music. The Prodigy added punk rock aggression to the scene in 1992 (Experience), the Chemical Brothers became the Beatles of club-land in 1995 (Exit Planet Dust) and Moby introduced the world to the tuneful, down-tempo side of e-music in 1999 (Play). In the '00s, much of the progression happened behind the scenes and in studios where technology forged new ways of layering, mixing and matching sounds. The music became more polished than ever, but rarely was there a sense that dance music had leapt forward like it had in the 1990s.

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​In the often futuristic realm of electronic dance music it's easy to forget there is also a strong strain of reverence for the highest forms of pop musicianship. DJ Louie Vega often recalls his salsa heritage, Dennis Ferrer elevates his grooves with gospel, and jazz accentuates the palette of one Mark Farina.

The latter, who will DJ Tuesday in Newport Beach, is the West Coast's DJ laureate. A Bay Area spinner with deep appreciation for soulful chops and improvisation, Farina led a conga line of second-wave house music DJs from Chicago to the Golden State in the 1990s. His Mushroom Jazz mix-CD series single-handedly inspired a genre -- composed of jazzy, psychedelic down-tempo grooves -- that carved out a niche in clubland. But he's also known for his loopy, brassy, big-room house music.

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For too long DJ culture has been reclusive and wary of the mainstream. It's an understandable stance: After disco sucked, core dance music went underground, burned by its flirtation with the charts and subsequent bashing. Generations beyond disco, many spinners still take the underground stance, eschewing pop flavors and marketing. But that ethos is changing rapidly as the millennial generation of kids takes over clubland. Mash-ups, samples, and '80s tunes are all fair game.

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