There was no mistaking the family-reunion feel in the 7th St Entry last February 3. Too Much Love, the widely beloved DJ party that lasted from 2006 to 2014, was holding its first session in a decade, and presiding on the small stage was Peter Lansky, who now works under the name TML. It's an alias that signals a more head-down approach while still nodding to the name of his old party, which returns to the Entry this Saturday.
Near the bar, I caught up with a friend whose excitement was contagious. Too Much Love, he explained, was his entrée into local nightlife—the place where kids found themselves, where they found their lifelong friends. For many, it wasn’t a party—it was the party that defined their lives.
Lansky had moved to Minneapolis from the Chicago suburbs in 2003, to begin freshman year at the University of Minnesota, and immediately hit a brick wall. “I wasn’t 21, so I couldn’t go to anything,” he says. “Basically, everything at the time that was DJ-oriented would have been 21-plus or, probably more importantly, not intersecting with my musical interests at the time.”
Having missed the ’90s rave scene entirely, Lansky got inspired during high school by going to “loft parties in Wicker Park in Chicago, which was not gentrified at the time.” The DJs would play with laptops. “I was like, ‘Oh, fuck, I could maybe do that,’” he says.
Lansky also started a LiveJournal Community for DFA Records, the label that hit the ground running in 2002 with 12-inches by the Rapture and LCD Soundsystem. “They got me and my friends into LCD’s first Chicago show, and they snuck us into the after party at Smart Bar,” Lansky says. “All this kind of stuff was very foundational for me. I was coming at dance music from that angle, from DFA and Daft Punk. I was excited about Justice, things like Vitalic. When that Alan Braxe compilation came out [The Upper Cuts, 2005], I that’s when I started to dig deeper into actual dance music, saying, ‘Oh, I think I like this.’”
After a year in school, Lansky became an assistant marketing director for Radio K, working the door for their In the Garage events at the Dinkytowner. Soon he was DJing these nights—his first gigs, spinning Liars and Yeah Yeah Yeahs tracks between featured bands—under the sobriquet Sovietpanda, the name he’d take into his next venture.
The Radio K gig gave Lansky a contact at First Avenue, and he emailed the office asking to play a night they had advertised that promised M.I.A. and Gorillaz, among others. It didn’t happen. "They were like, ‘You can help, but we can only give you college credit,’” he says—only Lansky had just dropped out. But a few months later, he reached out again and landed a spot in the club’s Record Room (formerly the VIP Room) to try his idea out.
Named for a track on LCD Soundsystem’s self-titled 2005 album, Too Much Love kicked off in September 2006, a month after Lansky’s 21st birthday. He wanted to showcase “this unrepresented intersection—some current electro, but also remixes and recontextualizing new wave, and French house. I talked about all these things that were really exciting and propagating online. And I was seeing pictures of all these parties in other places, and I was like, ‘I want to be doing that.’”
The timing couldn’t have been better. This was the year of Daft Punk’s breakout Coachella performance, with powerful visuals that inspired every other electronic act with any commercial hopes to quickly adapt. Across the U.S., the surging, blaring, DIY sound that would widely be referred to in its time as “electrohouse,” or simply electro, and in later years as “bloghouse,” was incubating a new and very different kind of DJ music than the IMAX-like whoosh of arena trance or the gritted-teeth edge of purist techno.
Lansky, on the other hand, was inspired by the broad-eared eclecticism of early-2000s DJs like Erol Alkin (whose Trash party was a key inspiration), Optimo, 2 Many DJ’s, and James Murphy of DFA Records and LCD Soundsystem. Lansky’s instincts proved correct: Minneapolis welcomed Too Much Love instantly. The first night was mobbed, as were most nights.
“I was hitting up people on MySpace to promote the party,” Lansky says. “When it was a good crowd, I was surprised. I didn’t know where people would come from. After the first one, we would sell out every month.” Lansky also found his DJs through early social media. “I didn’t know any other DJs. I booked DJ Bach and Jonathan Ackerman and Scott Butters to play the first one, but I had never met them before. It was all on MySpace—I wasn’t interacting with those people in real life.”
That would soon change. Too Much Love had started as a monthly in the Record Room. “We did four or five months before [then-First Avenue manager] Sam Peterson wanted to move it to the Mainroom on Saturdays every week,” Lansky says. “I thought it was really a bad idea. But he was very reassuring that they were going to promote it and it would work.”
For several years, it did. Lansky credits the club’s commitment during the party’s early years to doubling as a live venue and a DJ club. “It was part of their business plan—to have shows early, then fill the room up later with dance nights. Less money to spend on production, just get people in the door, get them drinking. What happened with the internet at first was all these niche things came to the surface and were ripe for discovery. It felt like a dismantling of the monoculture of Top 40 and MTV. Suddenly there were all these splinters to explore.”
The crowds were as eclectic as the music.
“The first few years, we would get a real mix of people, of students, of hipsters, of people looking to go out,” Lansky says. “A lot of people would come to First Ave. before they would go to the Saloon, so we were voted Best Gay Club one year by City Pages. It was a real mix of people who knew they wanted to go out but didn’t necessarily know what that was going to be about.”
One highlight came in the fall of 2007, when Arcade Fire and LCD Soundystem’s twin-headlining tour hit Minneapolis. “They happened to be in town on a Saturday, so I asked them if they wanted to come DJ,” Lansky says. “First Avenue sent a limo for all of them. James Murphy would tell his friends that there was a very strange, large party in Minneapolis that was very fun.”
That thumbs-up enabled Lanksy to cut deals. “A lot of the time, I was booking [DJs] either because the artist had asked their agent, or [doing it] without the agent. I’d get people for fees that I could afford, because they were interested in something different.”
By the early 2010s, another shift was underway, the most baldly populist one yet. “The rise of dubstep was very noticeable,” Lansky says. “People who might have come to First Avenue before would go to the Skyway and get involved in dubstep culture. And then that became EDM, which really changed things. When EDM became Top 40, and all the imagery that came and the songs about going out, people had a much firmer expectation of what they wanted their night out to be like.”
In its final months, Too Much Love was demoted back to the Record Room before fizzling out altogether. Lansky did other things for the club, but he largely left that era behind for nearly a decade. Renaming himself TML, Lansky re-established himself as an internationally respected producer and touring DJ, the music very different from the anthemic tracks that put his party on the map. He had no plans, he would say, to return to the old stuff.
That changed when Lansky accepted First Avenue’s invitation to play Danceteria Through the Decades, an April 2023 Mainroom event with five other DJs, all playing in the style of each of the club’s decades in operation. Lansky’s selections captured his era precisely: Hercules and Love Affair’s “Blind,” Justice vs. Simian’s “We Are Your Friends,” and Kylie Minogue/New Order’s “Can’t Get Blue Monday Out of My Head.”
Then came last January’s Entry edition of Too Much Love. That night sounded like something else altogether. Playing under a deep blue light, with a big disco ball lit from all sides for maximum color and drama, the 2024 party featured grooves that seemed to stretch for miles, the obverse of TML’s Decades set.
Lansky demurs at this. In both cases, he says, “I was really trying to straddle both. I really had crowd-pleasing in mind. I was really worried about what people’s expectations were going to be, and I realized after doing it: every single person probably had different expectations, so it was kind of a moot point. For this one, I’m worrying a lot less about that. I’m just gonna try and enjoy it a bit more. That’s my plan.”
Too Much Love: The Dance Party Returns
With: TML
Where: 7th St Entry, 701 First Ave., Minneapolis
When: 9 p.m. Saturday, January 25
Tickets: $20.59; find more info here
