Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (21 page)
Read Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture Online
Authors: Simon Reynolds
BOOK: Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture
2.55Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
Detroit had never been a rave scene, never been about drugs; techno had begun as a Europhile fantasy of elegance and refinement. So you can imagine the originators’ horror when real Europeans transformed techno into a vulgar uproar for E’d up mobs: anthemic, cheesily sentimental, unabashedly drug-crazed. The British and their allies on the Continent shed the pall of cool that restrained Detroit, and raised the music’s temperature to a swelter. No wonder anti-hardcore hipsters and Detroit-nostalgics always complained about ‘sweaty ravers’.
During those three years, 1990 – 92, the British hardcore scene wasn’t so much a melting pot as a
mental pot
; an alembic, heated by the flames of drug abuse, that generated new sonic amalgams with every season. All hail the ‘
al
chemical generation’, to twist Irvine Welsh’s famous phrase: half a million British kids who boldly sacrificed their brain-cells to spawn some of the maddest music this planet has ever heard.
Low Frequency Oscillationsmental pot
; an alembic, heated by the flames of drug abuse, that generated new sonic amalgams with every season. All hail the ‘
al
chemical generation’, to twist Irvine Welsh’s famous phrase: half a million British kids who boldly sacrificed their brain-cells to spawn some of the maddest music this planet has ever heard.
For all the music’s futurism, hardcore was organized around two almost touchingly quaint models: the cottage industry and the local community. Artists – usually DJs with first-hand experience of how to work a crowd’s bass-biology reflexes – made their tracks on home-studio set-ups or at cheap local studios, then pressed up anywhere from five hundred to a few thousand white label 12-inch singles and sold them direct to specialist dance shops.
Steve Beckett, co-founder of Sheffield’s Warp label, remembers a golden age when the word ‘white label’ was like a magic password. ‘I’d be driving to shops like Selectadisc in Nottingham and Derby, and you’d say “white label” and they’d be like “right! come in!” They’d take fifty off you for five quid each, no problem. It was a real special thing then, because hardly anybody was doing it. Dance music was all imports, then people in Britain starting doing it for themselves, and then their tracks started to get better than the tunes from America.’
Warp was a classic example of an enduring hardcore archetype: it was both a label and a specialist record store, and had close ties to the crucial Sheffield clubs like Jive Turkey, Cuba and Occasions. Other examples include Bradford’s Unique 3, who DJ-ed at the The Soundyard and started their own label Chill, and Romford’s Suburban Base, which grew out of owner Dan Donelly’s Boogie Times shop. In the typically incestuous scenario, the DJs work in the shop, spin at the club and make tracks for the label. The shop enables the music-makers to keep in touch with the punters and to service DJs; the club provides opportunities to test out new tracks on the dancefloor, then return to the studio to make adjustments. Hardcore rave was fuelled by the same vital blend of commerce and aesthetics as the Jamaican record business, with its cowboy labels, self-cobbled studios, and sound-system parties.
If one record can be said to have trailblazed the floorquaking sub-bass style of Northern house, it’s Unique 3’s 1989 track ‘The Theme’. Cold and cavernous, ‘Theme’ has only one hook: an ultra-minimal percussive/melodic motif which sounds like it’s played on a glockenspiel built from icicles and stalactites. Beneath this shockingly empty soundspace throbs the subliminal pressure of the solar-plexus-pummelling bass. The Bradford boys’ next release, the Top Thirty cracking ‘Weight For the Bass’, was even more spartan than ‘Theme’. The ‘Original Soundyard Dubplate Mix’ recalls Nitro Deluxe’s brutal house or Mantronix’s neo-electro, but with a Jamaican twist. Over the heart-palpitating B-line, which jabs and judders in sync with the cardiac-arrythmia inducing pattern of the programmed drums, there’s a plangent, ultra-trebley piano vamp in the Italo-house style. ‘Weight’ conjures the unlikely vision of dreadlocked roots rockers on E and rude-boys swapping their guns for fluorescent light-sticks.
According to Steve Beckett, this new Yorkshire house sound actually did come out of Jamaica, via North England reggae sound-systems: ‘people like Ital Rockers in Leeds who didn’t get as much recognition, but who were doing the
mental
-est records ever. They’d cut just twenty or thirty tracks on acetate, and have sound-systems parties underneath this hotel. No lights, 200 people, and they’d play reggae, then hip hop, then these bleep-and-bass tunes. And they’d be toasting on top of it.’
mental
-est records ever. They’d cut just twenty or thirty tracks on acetate, and have sound-systems parties underneath this hotel. No lights, 200 people, and they’d play reggae, then hip hop, then these bleep-and-bass tunes. And they’d be toasting on top of it.’
For Beckett and partner Rob Mitchell, ‘The Theme’ was the impetus to start their own label from the upstairs room of a shared house, using £2,000 and money from the Enterprise Allowance scheme. Having tried and failed to sign Unique 3, Warp debuted with a track by Sheffield boys Robert Gordon, Shaun Maher and Winston Hazell, aka Forgemasters. The tune’s title, ‘Track With No Name’, stridently affirmed the house scene’s radical anonymity (another crucial element of the hardcore ethos). And the band’s name, borrowed from the big local steelworks Forgemasters, chimed in with a lineage of constructivist dance music that ran back through Die Krupps’ metal-bashing disco tracks ‘Steelworks Symphony’ and ‘Wahre Arbeit, Wahre Lohn’, through Heaven 17’s ‘Crushed By The Wheels of Industry’, all the way to Kraftwerk, whose name is German for power plant.
Sheffield is famous for its stainless steel and its hardline socialist, Red Flag waving Labour council. In pop terms, Sheffield also evokes the word ‘industrial’: the bleak avant-funk of Cabaret Voltaire, Clock DVA and Chakk, the shiny, spotless synth-pop of The Human League. Not only did these early eighties bands inaugurate a Sheffield tradition of experimenting with synthesizers, drum machines and tape-loops, they also established a local infrastructure of cheap and cheerful recording studios, like Cabaret Voltaire’s Western Works, and Chakk’s Fon. Built using the massive advance from Chakk’s ill-starred major label deal, Fon spawned Krush’s early Brit-house smash ‘House Arrest’, a Number Three hit at the end of 1987; Forgemasters’ Rob Gordon was a member of the Fon Force production squad.
Another resource from Sheffield’s industrial past that lent itself to the Northern house explosion was a plethora of ideal venues for illegal parties – warehouses in the city’s non-residential, industrial zones. (Later, when the police started to crack down, promoters used quarries outside the city limits.) ‘You’d have, like, a thousand people in a warehouse,’ remembers Beckett. ‘There’d be metal gangways around the side of the walls with people hanging off them. Complete mayhem! It was more like a festival than a party. Always just a few lights, or complete darkness, so you were just dancing in the dark.’
‘It had a real blues feel to it,’ he continues, referring not to rhythm-and-blues but to illegal reggae parties. ‘There was quite a criminal element involved: just a couple of people on the door, no proper security. The reason they were doing it was to make a quick profit. That was what the early rave scene was all about, but somehow it didn’t have the commercial feel of the big raves later on. That’s what gave the scene an edge – it felt like everybody was doing something dodgy and illegal. Which they were!’
The post-punk industrial outfits had a penchant for using ‘non-musical’ noises,
à la
fifties
musique concrète
. The Warp artists’ version of this was to use a non-musical function inside samplers and synthesizers: the sine-wave test-tones provided so that the frequencies can be set on the recording heads, prior to laying a track down on a master-tape. ‘In a sampler, you’ll just have a tone-generator,’ explains Beckett. ‘It’s not supposed to be for making music, just for testing the equipment. You’ve got a treble-tone, a mid-tone and a bass-tone, which people used to get the biggest bass possible. Then they’d overlay different bass-sounds, so there might be three or four basslines in one track.’
à la
fifties
musique concrète
. The Warp artists’ version of this was to use a non-musical function inside samplers and synthesizers: the sine-wave test-tones provided so that the frequencies can be set on the recording heads, prior to laying a track down on a master-tape. ‘In a sampler, you’ll just have a tone-generator,’ explains Beckett. ‘It’s not supposed to be for making music, just for testing the equipment. You’ve got a treble-tone, a mid-tone and a bass-tone, which people used to get the biggest bass possible. Then they’d overlay different bass-sounds, so there might be three or four basslines in one track.’
This sine-wave sub-bass can be heard on the third Warp release, ‘Testone’ by Sweet Exorcist (Cabaret Voltaire’s Richard Kirk and DJ Parrot). Closer to electro than house music, the dehydrated drum machine beats and pocket-calculator blip-melody recall Kraftwerk’s ‘Tour De France’ and Man Parrish’s ‘Hip Hop Be Bop (Don’t Stop)’. What drove the Ecstasy-sensitized crowds wild, though, was the bowel-tremor undertow of low-end frequencies, impacting you like an iceberg (90 per cent of the devastation takes place below the threshold of perception).
Test-tones were just one strand in what rapidly evolved into a science of bass. Another Warp act LFO – it stood for Low Frequency Oscillation – would create a bass sound, record it on to cassette with the recording levels right up in the red zone, sample that deliberately distorted sound, and repeat the process: all in search of the heaviest, hurtful-est bass sound. ‘A lot of it was in the cut,’ says Beckett, referring to cutting the lacquer, which is the first stage in the process of pressing vinyl. ‘You’ve got filters on your cutting heads. Basically, it was about taking off all the filters and all the compression, and just pushing the levels up as far as you could. The engineer, this guy Kevin, would be sitting there watching the temperature gauge go right up, ’cos your cutting heads get really hot if you haven’t got the filters on. He’d be sweating, saying “you’re gonna fuckin’ destroy, me, ya bastards”, ’cos if the heads blew he’d get sacked. But he loved it really. He used to know what we wanted ’cos he’d worked with the On U Sound dub reggae people.’
People called the Northern style of house ‘bleep-and-bass’ or just ‘bleep’ (the latter referring to the Kraftwerk/electro-style one-finger synth-motifs). But it was the bass pressure that really counted. ‘I don’t remember us ever talking about bleeps,’ says Beckett, ‘But there was definitely loads of detailed conversations about how you could get the bass heavier, how Kevin cut it. It became a competition. There was this Wednesday nightclub at Kiki’s, where there was a separate bar made of glass, and the track “LFO” was actually shaking the bar. That was when we knew we’d got it right.’ With Warp’s second release, Nightmares On Wax’s ‘Dextrous’, Beckett says ‘we had to put out the Quiet Bass Mix, ’cos we couldn’t physically cut the Loud Bass Mix’.
Nightmares On Wax, the Leeds-based black/white duo of Kevin Harper and George Evelyn, also recorded the all-time Warp classic ‘Aftermath’. Over a baleful B-line, a distraught diva intones ‘there’s something going round inside my head / I think it’s something I feel / It’s something unreal.’ Echo effects send the last word reeling, like a ghostly/ghastly apparition inside the sensorium of a tripped-out raver; the diva’s voice is phased and reversed in a jagged-timelapse effect; a noise-loop of eerie metallic scraping sounds like the onset of migraine. With its ecstasy-is-agony disorientation, ‘Aftermath’ is a premonition of the ‘darkside’ gloom that would descend upon hardcore three years later, as ravers succumbed to the paranoiac effects of long-term, excessive drug abuse. Of all the bleep-and-bass tracks, ‘Aftermath’ has had the most enduring influence, both directly (it’s been sampled many times by jungle artists, most notably on the 1994 Renegade track ‘Something I Feel’) and indirectly. Coco Steel and Lovebomb’s 1992 Warp release ‘Feel It’ – bleep-and-bass’s twilight anthem – is an unofficial sequel to ‘Aftermath’: there’s the same hair-raising, stalking vibe and twitchy, staccato feel, but the diva’s distress is replaced by curt dominatrix injunctions to ‘fee-eee-eee-eel it’.
‘Aftermath’ peaked at Number Thirty-eight in the UK Chart in the autumn of 1990; a few months earlier, Warp had scored two simultaneous Top Twenty hits with LFO’s ultra-minimal, robot-voiced ‘LFO’ and Tricky Disco’s chirpy, cartoon-tekno outing ‘Tricky Disco’. LFO were Mark Bell and Gez Varley, two teenagers from Leeds. In just a few weeks, the duo went from giving local DJs tracks on cassette to selling 130,000 singles and refusing invitations to appear on
Top of the Pops
. Having scored three national hits and a bunch of club smashes with tracks by Sweet Exorcist, Tuff Little Unit, The Step and Tomas, Warp found itself at the end of the year in the unlikely position of commanding nearly 2 per cent of Britain’s record sales for 1990. But they were also facing bankruptcy, having signed a bad distribution deal with the dance indie label Rhythm King.
Top of the Pops
. Having scored three national hits and a bunch of club smashes with tracks by Sweet Exorcist, Tuff Little Unit, The Step and Tomas, Warp found itself at the end of the year in the unlikely position of commanding nearly 2 per cent of Britain’s record sales for 1990. But they were also facing bankruptcy, having signed a bad distribution deal with the dance indie label Rhythm King.
LFO saved the label by recording the highly successful long-player
Frequencies
– not just the definitive bleep-and-bass record, but one of the dozen or so truly great
albums
the electronic dance genre has yet produced. The LFO sound consisted of creaky sonorities like fatigued metal buckling or stressed machinery having a nervous breakdown, and wonderfully sticky, Velcro-like synth-textures that tug at your skin-surface and get your goosepimples rippling in formation. Above, or
beneath
all, they used a myriad shades of bass: SUB-sub-bass, trowel-in-your-ear-hole-bass, enema-bass, internal-injuries-bass. Samples of house-diva Liz Torres bring an abstract urgency to the dislocated groove and glistening, globular bass-tones of ‘You Have To Understand’. On ‘El Ef Oh’, the title’s phonemes are drastically filtered to sound like death-rattle gasps or purple gas seeping from a zombie’s mouth, while the percussion crackles like jabs from an electric cattle prod. ‘Mentok 1’ is a weird surge of oozy, spongy texture-goo. ‘Think A Moment’ is a Cubist catacomb of wheezing synths, gluey bass, corrugated noises, and glum refrains reminiscent of David Bowie and Brian Eno’s lugubrious
Low
instrumentals. ‘Groovy Distortion’ chugs and puffs like a steam engine on a gradient, with textured percussion that sounds like a cat coughing up a hairball.
Frequencies
– not just the definitive bleep-and-bass record, but one of the dozen or so truly great
albums
the electronic dance genre has yet produced. The LFO sound consisted of creaky sonorities like fatigued metal buckling or stressed machinery having a nervous breakdown, and wonderfully sticky, Velcro-like synth-textures that tug at your skin-surface and get your goosepimples rippling in formation. Above, or
beneath
all, they used a myriad shades of bass: SUB-sub-bass, trowel-in-your-ear-hole-bass, enema-bass, internal-injuries-bass. Samples of house-diva Liz Torres bring an abstract urgency to the dislocated groove and glistening, globular bass-tones of ‘You Have To Understand’. On ‘El Ef Oh’, the title’s phonemes are drastically filtered to sound like death-rattle gasps or purple gas seeping from a zombie’s mouth, while the percussion crackles like jabs from an electric cattle prod. ‘Mentok 1’ is a weird surge of oozy, spongy texture-goo. ‘Think A Moment’ is a Cubist catacomb of wheezing synths, gluey bass, corrugated noises, and glum refrains reminiscent of David Bowie and Brian Eno’s lugubrious
Low
instrumentals. ‘Groovy Distortion’ chugs and puffs like a steam engine on a gradient, with textured percussion that sounds like a cat coughing up a hairball.
A precise and rigorous grid of pulses and tics, LFO’s sound owed far more to electro than to house or techno. Indeed, Varley and Bell had originally met as members of rival crews at a 1984 breakdancing contest. Strangely, no figures from old skool hip hop feature in the roll-call of illustrious forefathers on ‘What Is House’, the title track of LFO’s brilliant late 1991 EP – instead, it’s acid house gods Phuture, Mr Fingers and Adonis, and Euro-synth pioneers Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk who get props from a slurred, distorted voice oddly reminiscent of Mark E. Smith. And then LFO promptly disappeared, emitting not a bleep or a clonk until late 1994’s ‘Tied Up’ and the patchy 1996 album
Advance
.
Advance
.
Other books
Bachelor at Her Bidding (Bachelor Auction Book 2) by Kate Hardy
The Moon Rises by Angela Horn
A Million Dirty Secrets by C. L. Parker
Crash Into You by Ellison, Cara
The Blind Dragon by Peter Fane
Ossendar: Book Two of the Resoration Series by Williams, Christopher
Love Locked by Highcroft, Tess
Goddess of Legend by P. C. Cast
Arrive by Nina Lane
The March North by Graydon Saunders