flyover 12: TML
On a Tuesday night in November 2023, four Minneapolis DJs played at Brooklyn’s Bossa Nova Civic Club. We’re excited to present TML’s closing set from that evening. The mix is a dark and heavy beatdown that eludes classification. It’s full of sharp turns, hard techno, banging electro, and leftfield heaters old and new.
TML, or Peter Lansky for long, visits NYC regularly. “I try to go once a year to see friends and hear as much music as I can,” he said after his most recent trip last November, “and eat food.” That trip also presented Peter with the opportunity to close down Midnight Creatures, a recurring night thrown by Minneapolis’ Acme Collective at Bossa Nova Civic Club. Peter shared a bill with Minneapolis mainstays Byzarra, Llyynnxx, Ori The Ghost, and Acme boss Gerardo, who DJs as El Niño Indigo. Kanyon provided local support and played “one of the better live techno sets” Peter’s heard in years. His set as TML was recorded between 2 and 4 a.m.
About half of the tracks Peter played that night were brand new; many of them were released just days or weeks before the set. How does he stay up on new releases and seamlessly weave those new tracks in with the old?
“It's like a disease,” Peter said of his music discovery process. “Obsessive” is another word he used. A lifelong music lover, Peter first noticed symptoms in high school, symptoms that became overbearing when he started throwing parties and playing DJ sets. “There was a long time where that is all I was doing,” he said. “I got in the habit of going through large amounts of music every single week.”
On a Friday night in July 2015, Peter was double-booked at First Ave. Not long before LCD Soundsystem’s late-2015 reunion, frontman James Murphy rolled through Minneapolis to DJ in the Mainroom, and Peter opened. Upstairs in the Record Room, a Minneapolis techno crew called System flew in British Murder Boy and Downwards Records co-founder Regis for a heavy, heady club night. Peter was on that bill as well.
“That was a crazy night,” he reminisced with a laugh. “I played my first [ever] live set before Regis, and James Murphy was up there watching me. I was like, this is fucked…it was surreal because I was so nervous about this live set, but I had known James Murphy for a while, so he came up and watched, and I was like, I'm sure he's so disappointed in me [for] playing live techno.”
Peter recalls the night foggily. His partner Sarah was also there. “Sarah was drinking a Red Bull, and James Murphy yoinked the Red Bull out of her hand and was like, hold on, I'm gonna make you coffee…part of his [rider] was a coffee setup in the green room. He also had a champagne rider that he did not expect to be filled, but it was filled, and I was the only opener, so I drank so much super expensive champagne…I had to open Glam Doll Donuts the next morning…so my alarm was going off at 6:30. I fell asleep on the couch, and [Sarah] was shaking me awake…yeah, it was a crazy night.”
How did Peter end up drinking James Murphy’s top-shelf champagne in the First Ave green room after playing two gigs in the storied venue in the same night? To find out, we have to go back nearly ten more years, back to the founding of a party named for an LCD Soundsystem track.
On a Saturday night in September 2006, First Ave took a chance on Peter. They gave him the keys to the VIP Room (later renamed the Record Room) for a monthly dance party with a rock lean.
“Too Much Love” would be the name, a nod to the second track on LCD Soundsystem's first LP. Peter would DJ as Sovietpanda, the name of his music blog, in part to help establish an identity that emerged from the internet into the physical world.
It’s worth noting that LCD Soundsystem and DFA Records aren’t just a passing interest for Peter–by the time Too Much Love began, he was already enmeshed in a DFA community that he helped foster. Peter started the DFA Records Livejournal community in the early 2000s, and was on first-name terms with James Murphy and Jon Galkin, DFA’s founders, long before the first drink was spilled on the Too Much Love dancefloor.
At the height of the buzzy music blog era, Too Much Love supplied college-aged Twin Cities revelers and music junkies with a direct injection of floor-ready hits and remixes of old and new dance and rock tracks. Too Much Love quickly built an audience and took over First Ave’s Mainroom on Saturday nights, where it held a weekly residency for six years, before returning to the Record Room and wrapping up in 2014.
After establishing credibility and gathering momentum, Peter was able to book everyone from local DJs to international touring acts. “I booked a bunch of DFA folks and Tim Sweeney, and whenever, like, LCD or Holy Ghost! would come into town, we would have them [play],” he recalled. “But I [also] had Dustin [Zahn], Zak [DVS1], Steve [Centrific], and Silent Servant…Silent Servant played the best Too Much Love set ever, because he played the blog stuff and the DFA stuff, probably stuff you'd never hear him play, because he got the history of the party. He understood it.”
With a $3 cover that was liquidated to $1 with a student ID, Peter didn’t pay full rates for these acts. He often booked acts who were already coming to the Twin Cities for another show after making “humble offers” that artists accepted.
“I just wanted people in the room,” Peter said of the bargain bin door price. “I booked all these other DJs through word of mouth. We lucked out to have LCD and Arcade Fire in town on a Saturday…First Ave did get them limousines to all come down and play [the party]. That was during the first year [that] we were in the Mainroom. We also had Diplo that month, which was an accident, but those [bookings] helped with word of mouth around town.”
Word of the unique and intensely enthusiastic vibe of the parties traveled quickly. “[The] LCD and Hot Chip guys, when their friends were coming [from] overseas, they'd be like, if you want to go to this party, it's weird. They're a bunch of kids losing their minds to whatever.”
On Saturday, February 3, 2024, Too Much Love will return to First Ave. For the first time, the party will be held in the 7th Street Entry.
As for the new venue, Peter wants a more vibey atmosphere than a Mainroom slosher can provide, and the Record Room is long gone; Theory of a Dead Man rocked too hard in 2015 and brought First Ave’s intimate club crashing through the Mainroom’s ceiling. After repairs, First Ave did not reopen the room, leaving a massive hole in the Twin Cities’ underground nightlife that, nearly a decade later, has not been filled.
Peter hopes attendees don’t expect a rose-tinted cash grab for this round of TML in the Entry. “I'm missing clubs a little bit, so I was like, I'll do it in a smaller room. I'll play all night. It's not going to be a nostalgia thing. It's not going to be a throwback thing,” he said. “I'll play music from the time, but not just bloghouse…I want to make sure that people know not to expect, I don't know, Crookers remixes or something.”
Anyone who shows up to Too Much Love in 2024 expecting to relive their indie sleaze glory days might be missing the point. “Too Much Love, for me, even though we played old music at the time, was very much an anti-nostalgia thing. The best times are now, the best music is coming out now. I want to showcase new music, so I wouldn't want to do a throwback party.”
The Bossa set reveals avenues of sonic exploration Peter may take during Too Much Love 2024. “The Bossa party is what I'd been missing,” he said. “It's such a great place. It's small, it has a fog machine, it has great cocktails…I don't know why we don't have that here, but I love that place, and I was so happy when Gerardo asked me to play…it was a total blast.”
“We were talking about the disease…I don't know what compels me to keep doing this. [But] after that night, I was like, oh yeah, this is kind of what it is.”
Tracklist:
Florian Kupfer - Dereliction [Ediciones Capablanca, 2023]
Stenny - Onda [Ilian Tape, 2023]
Simo Cell - Whispers [TemeT, 2021]
Ron Morelli - Put Your Head On The Floor And Have Somebody Step On It [Bite, 2020]
Geeneus - Ja Know [Dump Valve Recordings, 2001/Bingo Beats, 2004]
L/F/D/M - Bang!
[Urban Kickz Recordings, 2022]
Mala - B [Self-reissued, 2021]
Surgeon - Box [Tresor, 1998]
Atrice - Backrooms [Ilian Tape, 2022]
DJ Slip - Track 4 [Missile Records, 1996/2016]
Privacy - Python [Klakson, 2020]
Regis / Female - Backlash (Mix 1) [Belief Systems, 1997/Downwards, 2020]
Vladimir Dubyshkin - I Decided To Fly [трип, 2018]
Rhyw - Sharknado [Voam, 2022]
Mosca - Laminar Flow [Rent, 2023]
Luca Duran - Ojos Cerrados (Laksa’s 3rd eye rolla’ Remix) [2023]
Major Lazer, J.Balvin, El Alfa - Que Calor (Cardozo edit) [2023]
Blawan - Justsa [Ternesc, 2021]
Deathplate - Untitled (Stable Mix) [2021]
Reptant - The Clique’s Clack [TRUST, 2022]
Stenny - Quadra [Ilian Tape, 2023]
Rhyw - Engine Track [Fever AM, 2023]
Ctrls - Sleepkillers [Micron Audio, 2022]
ABSL & Anetha - Boa Dormant [Mama Told Ya, 2023]
Guber - Wrong Ibiza (Ploy Remix) [宀 Music, 2022]
Talismann - Xilverback [Talismann, 2021]
Pariah - Squishy Windows [Fever AM, 2022]
hkkptr - organik [Silencer, 2023]
Privacy - Go [Klakson, 2019]
Pearson Sound - Cobwebs [Hessle Audio, 2020]
DJ Gonz - Further Trip [SELN Recordings, 2022]
Skanna - Heaven [Skanna, 1993]
No Spiritual Surrender - Spinning Circles [L.I.E.S. Records, 2019]
Dillinja - Deadly Deep Subs (Remix) [Deadly Vinyl, 1994/Razors Edge, 1996/Metalheadz, 2015]
Fischerspooner - Emerge [International DeeJay Gigolo, 2001]
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