🐋 We Hunted Three Years for this Tune!

Success in a years-long hunt for a brilliant edit of Marvin Gaye's What's Going On

🐋 Picture this -- the moment a song takes a big bite out of your soul

This is the story of a “white whale” of a song and how a group of people dancing together in a magic room in a Southern California desert heard it, were deeply touched by it, and tracked it down over the course of a three-year-long hunt that crossed oceans and continents.

The story starts three years ago when several hundred folks were dancing in a room where three DJs (brothers Stephen and David Dewaele and James Murphy) were about halfway through a six-hour vinyl set. They had just played Wally Badarou’s “Mambo”. They followed it with a whale of a tune.

You have to understand that any given Despacio party is a room full of heads -- people who chase rare grooves and quickly look at each other across the floor to check that we’re clocking a tune. A little nod from one of these folks tells me all I need to know: “yup, I’ve got this one.”

But there were no nods from any of the human Shazams in the room, just looks of confusion and surprise and joy on the faces of the people that I had come to rely on for song identification. I hadn’t been worried, but now I was.

Maybe you’re a human Shazam. Want to try your hand at it?

Give it a listen (sorry about the terrible-quality MP3):

As I looked around the room, I saw ID hounds attempting to Shazam the tune, but Shazam failed them. The tune had not yet been sucked into the giant commercial machine that populates Shazam’s database. Uh oh, this one was going to be a challenge. There would be no instant gratification here. My worry grew.

So I listened extra hard, trying to burn the song into memory. I worried this would be the last time I might ever hear it. I let the song wash over me, a mellow piano note plinking at the end of every measure of a heavily textured beat tapestry. When Gaye’s voice arrives, it lands softly, on cat feet.

Speaking to his biographer about making the record, Gaye said, “I felt like I’d finally learned to sing. ... I’d been studying the microphone for a dozen years, and I suddenly saw what I’d been doing wrong. I’d been singing too loud.”

It’s easy to not hear mega-hits like “What’s Going On.” Through overplay, they become so ubiquitous that we stop hearing them. But remixes and edits have the power of making the familiar new again, of bringing songs back to life.

A room of people were essentially hearing -- really hearing -- Gaye’s song for the first time. The DJs had somehow found this rare edit and were gifting us the opportunity to hear one of the greatest songs of the 20th century for the first time.

We were overcome with the beauty and sadness of the song. And yet we were simultaneously feeling these pleasures while registering the agony of knowing we might never hear the song again.

🐋The hunt begins

When you’re in this situation of hearing a song you must have, what’s your next move? Sometimes you can peek at the record as it spins, but at Despacio we couldn’t do that because the DJ booth is hidden, tucked away where nobody can see the records except the DJs.

Maybe you begin to rehearse in your head how you’re going to beg the DJ for the ID after they play the last song. “Amazing set. What was that edit of Marvin Gaye’s ‘What’s Going On’ that you played at about 6pm?”

But at Despacio, the DJs sneak out through the back door after the night ends.

Maybe you message the DJs on Instagram the day after, begging for any shred of intel they can share about the song that haunted you as you put your head down on your pillow that evening. We tried that, no response.

Maybe you message one of the crew members that put on the event. Tried that. The crew didn’t know the track. Maybe you go to LinkedIn to find the management team representing the talent and send them a message there. But still no luck. You offer a bounty online, and attach the audio snippet. No luck.

Months and years go by. But you’re not going to give up.

This is how it goes. Some songs show up just once, leaving a lasting mark on our bodies and psyches. We hunt these white whales to the ends of the earth because we can’t forget or forgive the injury, nor can we rest until the song has been captured. We must capture the song and play it over and over until we’ve healed the hole it left in our hearts.

A few days after Despacio, as attendees reminisced online, chatter returned to the Marvin Gaye track. One person wrote, “My first hour in Despacio in my life, and I was brought to tears almost immediately. Unreal Remix of the GOAT.”

Someone shared a brief video of the moment:

Another attendee wrote, “I was hoping to find a full version of the edit. This was my favorite thing I heard in Despacio that weekend and one of my favorites of the festival.” Me too, amigo, me too.

🐋 Where the whale surfaced - Despacio

It’s no accident that the tune was played at Despacio. It’s one of those rooms built from the ground up that puts the dancefloor first, with an emphasis on music that’s rare in today’s hypercommercial world of VIP tables and made-for-Instagram DJ personalities. Despacio has no stage. It’s just a big dancefloor that fits about 2,000 people encircled by seven towering speaker stacks powered by McIntosh amps. A disco ball hangs over the center of the room. The room is kept dark, but occasionally the ball explodes, like so:

caption: photo from Despacio by @imustdraw (Instagram)

The people who dance together inside Despacio tend to form bonds due to the quantum entanglement of soul particles that occurs on proper dancefloors. And after the event’s over, part of the weekend never dies as attendees hang out on Reddit and on Discord to reminisce, chat, and hunt down song IDs during the months-long waits until the next Despacio.

Despacio’s DJs draw from a massive collection of tens of thousands of records, many of which don’t exist in any form online. Many of the songs they play in this room have never been released or have seen extremely limited release. White labels, pressed under murky legal circumstances, abound. The DJs delight in bringing their rarest vinyl to Despacio, sometimes bringing test pressings and fragile acetates for play in that hallowed room. The Dewaele brothers told Tim Sweeney of Beats in Space that they’ve played about 120 dubplates of their own unreleased music.

That’s why Shazam fails to identify many of the songs played at Despacio. Shazam claims to have 100 billion songs in their database, but the songs that make it into Shazam’s database have been ingested by the commercial publishing machine. Despacio’s tracks are often several levels below the sweep of commercial radar.

Naturally, given the power of these songs, the Despacio community dedicates significant human energy to hunting down the music that’s played there. They organize their finds into a crowdsourced spreadsheet they call The Spreadsheet of Truth. This group effort helps identify roughly 90% of the music that’s played on any given night at Despacio, but the Gaye tune eluded capture.

Long after April 2023, that remix of Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On haunted the community, of which I’m a member. We searched and searched. Our desperation was so great that we’d pull out our phones in record shops and play snippets of the song for the employees who worked there. We did this in Ghent, London, Berlin, Miami, New York City, and Los Angeles. We circled back and played the track for Shazam again and again. We asked DJ friends. We even posted a cash bounty for anyone that could help ID the song. Still no luck.

🐋 Denlekke, Tune Sleuth, reaches out to Douglas Sherman

Then there was a break in the case. One sleuth, known as “Denlekke” in the Despacio Discord, went through every search result for “Marvin Gaye What’s Going On Edit” and found this online recording of a set played by Douglas Sherman (one of David Mancuso’s hand-picked back-up musical hosts for The Loft parties) at A-One record shop in New York in July, 2015.

Douglas Sherman at A-1 Records, 2015

Denlekke messaged Sherman and was able to get a picture of the label of the record. The strange image Denlekke received was some kind of glyph, hand-drawn with black and red Sharpie pens. There was no other identifying text.

The label — a hand-drawn glyph of a whale

Of course Denlekke immediately ran a reverse image search, but no results came back. He also extracted a low-quality MP3 out of the online recording, and he shared this terrible-quality MP3 rip of the track to assist others with their search.

Months went by, then years. The community started calling the track a “white whale” because it had been long hunted but never caught. Nearing the three-year anniversary of the track’s debut at Despacio, I posted a note to the Discord, “this is your annual reminder that we still don’t have an ID on this track.”

I posted the message as a joke of sorts, because by this point I was convinced that we’d never find the record.

But Denlekke saw that message and decided to try another reverse image search.

This time, the search returned one result, pointing to a discogs listing.

Denlekke couldn’t believe it. He shared the link to the Discord.

The first response arrived two minutes later: “What the fuck no way.”

Denlekke cautioned folks not to immediately jump to buy it, because he hadn’t yet had a chance to listen to the record. The marketing copy didn’t mention Marvin Gaye or “What’s Going On,” but it seemed to hint at the possibility:

“On the A side, “Profascination,” AJ From Philly explores a progressive, ethereal re-interpretation of a classic 20th century R&B anthem.”

Had Denlekke found the record?

The listing’s copy mentioned a Bandcamp page, and included a few unique keywords including a song title and a producer’s alias. Using these new terms, we were able to quickly locate the Bandcamp page:

screenshot of the Bandcamp page for the record

I’d purchased one copy of the record from the Bandcamp listing, and one copy from Discogs. The Discogs purchase arrived first. I was waiting for the UPS driver when he knocked. I took the package, ripped it open, pulled the record out of its sleeve, dropped it onto my turntable, and set the needle down.

My ears confirmed it. Denlekke had found the record. He’d found the record!

Word circulated amongst the community. More than 40 copies of the record sold quickly over the next several days, catching the producer, “AJ From Philly” (whose real name is Josh Madoff), by surprise. He messaged buyers letting us know that it’d be a few extra days before he could retrieve the records from storage and ship them out. He shared this photo with the Despacio Discord prior to shipping:

AJ From Philly shared this photo of the stack of records before shipping them out

Circling back to Denlekke, I asked him about this hunt and what drives him to put in effort to find song IDs.

He wrote, “I like to collect records that are under-appreciated in the modern era. There’s a real joy to hunting and “discovering” records without an online presence. Part of that is then being able to share it with others so that the music will hopefully be preserved for longer and the artists can hopefully get the praise they deserve.”

Through email, and then through Discord, I asked Madoff about the record and his creative process.

🐋 How AJ From Philly aka Josh Madoff made Profascination

Madoff and his artistic partner APA (who produced the B-side on the record) had self-funded the release of just 200 copies of the record in 2014, but Madoff had long since moved away from dance music production and built a deep career as a composer and sound designer for film and TV projects that have shown up on Netflix, Showtime and Hulu.

Magical Dancefloors was able to get in touch with Madoff to ask him a few questions about how the track came to be and how it made its way onto dancefloors.

caption: AJ From Philly (Josh Madoff) in his studio

Madoff and APA produced one song each for the record. They hadn’t priced it to break even, and initial distribution was limited. Describing the distribution, Madoff wrote, “We were just selling direct to mostly DJs and a handful of record stores before that, wanted to keep it this special secret thing. We mostly sold it to DJs. We were very lucky to get a ton of interest from a nice roster of DJs and producers that I really admire. I know Optimo used to play it as their closer a lot. Justin Carter and Eamon Harkin (Mister Saturday Night) def bought the most copies and gave them out to a lot of DJs. I was also told it was in rotation at the Loft NYC.”

Justin Carter and Eamon Harkin, who you might know from their wonderful NYC club Nowadays (I’ve written about that club extensively) were gifting copies of the record to their DJ friends, one of them being Douglas Sherman, which is how it came to be played in the set that Denlekke had found via his online searches.

This track is a great example of the sort of unidentifiable re-edit that dancers will probably only ever hear once in their lives and then spend the rest of their days searching for. The spacey satellite bleeps, jungle djembe, and staccato clacks add an electronic underlayer to Gaye’s silky vocals, like a cashmere-wrapped robotic panther. The track’s in no hurry. It arrives step by step with a stealthy sure-footedness.

Describing his creative process, Madoff shared with me, “I was always in love with this song. It sounds so sweet, but the lyrics are about how fucked up the world is. I wanted to take people on a journey from the sweetness of the original, to the dark hell-on-earth that it describes, and back to a place of redemption. That’s how the three main sections of the song are laid out. Everything but the vocals are 100% original and mostly live recordings I made at my home studio. There are around 100 tracks total that make up the song.”

As an example of his recording technique, Madoff shared that the drum sounds came from a djembe he layered with gaffer tape, played and recorded himself, then pitched and EQ’d until the sound took just the right shape.

Madoff’s got his hands full now with his work for film, but he writes that “I have thought about getting back into it.... have a bunch of music I’d like to finish and release. It’s just very difficult to find the time these days. I’m always chasing a score deadline or rushing to finish a soundtrack.”

Maybe the Internet beating a path to his door will convince him to give it another shot. We’d love to hear more from the brain that produced Profascination.

🐋 How Justin Carter (of Nowadays) shared the record

We now know how the track came to be played at Loft parties, how it came to close out Optimo sets, and how it came to be played at Nowadays, NYC. But still one mystery remained -- how did the track get into the hands of the DJs who put on Despacio?

In an attempt to find the final piece of the puzzle, I contacted an archivist at Deewee records was able to confirm that the track isn’t in the Ghent collection. I was now fairly certain that the record had been a James Murphy selection for Despacio.

So I contacted Justin Carter who had been an early superspreader of the record. I asked Carter how he discovered the record and whether he might have been the one to pass it on to James Murphy. Carter responded:

“Many years ago, a person on the Mister Saturday Night label gave me this record with a hand drawn whale on one side and a hand drawn bobcat on the other side. Red Sharpie used to draw both, every copy hand done and a little different from the others.

I was into both sides, but the “What’s Going On” remix is particularly special, one of those records that doesn’t get played often, but when it does, the impact is serious. It makes no sense on paper, but somehow it recontextualizes one of the most well-known and important songs by one of the 20th century’s most important musicians. Like who thinks, “I’m gonna flip this ‘What’s Going On’ song,” and actually succeeds in doing it justice? I have heard people gasp and laugh when the vocals initially come in, cover their faces in grief when a storm seems to arrive and the track rumbles in the break, and shed tears of joy when the bassline comes in and the clouds part toward the end. Every time I hear it, I think, “It may get hard, but it’s going to be okay.”

Not long after they gave it to me, I asked for more copies that I could share. I passed it to a few people and established a policy for myself: anytime I put it in my bag, I’d add extra copies. If I played it and someone asked about it, I’d hand them a copy of the record. I’ve never met James, so I’m not sure where he got it...

In early February, I pulled it back out and played it for the first time in a long time at a private gathering that I’m a part of, and thirteen(!) people asked me about it. I didn’t have thirteen copies to give out, so I got in touch with the guys who made it and got most of what they had left so I could carry on my tradition. In the meantime, Edowa Shimizu—a friend who is also one of The Loft gatherings’ current stewards and a musical host, who happened to be at the gathering where I played it that night—borrowed my last copy and played it at February’s Loft anniversary party. There was apparently another run on the booth with people asking about it. So the story continues.

Douglas Sherman, one of The Loft’s other current stewards and musical hosts, often reminds me of something David Mancuso used to say to him: “The music plays us.” Every time this record comes up, I think of that.”

🐋 The whale meets the dolphin -- how James Murphy discovered the tune

Carter suggested that perhaps Madoff had given the record to James Murphy, so I asked Madoff again if he remembered giving it to Murphy. The second time was the charm. He remembered:

“Dave P booked James Murphy to DJ at The Dolphin on Broad Street in Philly on a random Thursday in 2015. I used to live like three blocks from The Dolphin, so Alex and I walked over to hear his set. At some point in the night, I reached up to the DJ booth and handed James Murphy the record with no context, no email, and I didn’t even give him my name.”

Caption: Flyer from the James Murphy and Gregory Droggitis set in Philadelphia, March 26, 2015

Continues Madoff, “I had totally blocked that from my memory, haha. In retrospect, I think I was already trying to be a Film Composer, even though I didn’t know it yet. If you listen to the whole song, it’s really a short film in 3 acts. And the function of the music is to take you on an emotional ride that carries you through the story.”

So that’s how that specific piece of vinyl was passed from one pair of hands to another and played for Despacio eight years later at 6pm on a Friday in April.

If not for Madoff handing his record to James at the Dolphin in 2015, dancers in 2023 would never have heard that record at Despacio’s Coachella 2023 outing. And with the final piece of the puzzle in place, we’re near the end of our emotional ride.

🐋 What’s going on?

So far in this story I’ve resisted the most obvious temptation, but I can resist no longer. History repeats itself, and Gaye’s timeless words seem more relevant today than they have been in decades. I’ll quote the first two stanzas:

Mother, mother
There’s too many of you crying
Brother, brother, brother
There’s far too many of you dying
You know we’ve got to find a way
To bring some lovin’ here today, yeah

Father, father
We don’t need to escalate
You see, war is not the answer
For only love can conquer hate
You know we’ve got to find a way
To bring some lovin’ here today

To listen to this record today is to realize how little has changed. I’m a long-time misanthrope who believes humanity will never pull its head out of its ass, but songs like this briefly open my heart to the possibility that we might one day care enough about police brutality, war, the environment, and prejudice to do something real about them. These issues haven’t gotten any better in 55 years. In many ways they’ve gotten worse. But for a few brief minutes, we might allow ourselves to dream.

🐋 Post-script

At the time I initially published this post at noon today, there were 34 copies of the record remaining. Seven hours later, all 34 records had been sold. It’s now officially sold out. There will be no repressing, and the team have no plans for a digital release. Enjoy your records, folks! After you’ve given it a spin, would love if you came back and shared in the comments how it made you (or the dancefloor) feel.

… and finally, a quick request. Please consider leaving a like or comment on this post. It helps with visibility in the dumb algo game that we all have to play these days. Smashing that like button takes you a second, and gives my work visibility. Thank you!