Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (23 page)

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Authors: Simon Reynolds

BOOK: Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture
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The ‘Mentasm’ noise has a similar manic-yet-dirge-like quality to the down-tuned guitar sound used by Black Sabbath and their doom-metal ilk. That’s no coincidence: Beltram was consciously aiming to recreate the vibe of Sabbath and Led Zeppelin. ‘I like evil, dark-sounding music and I guess it’s because I grew up listening to heavy metal,’ he told
Melody Maker
. ‘I like the mood it creates. It’s very psychedelic, but not in the bell-bottom, flower power way.’ On the Beltram/Program 2 collaboration ‘The Omen (Psycho Mix)’, he actually sampled Robert Plant’s languishing screams and orgasmic whimpers from the weird ‘ambient’ mid-section of ‘Whole Lotta Love’.
Beltram has said that ‘Energy Flash’ and ‘Mentasm’ were deliberate attempts to ‘make the music go faster, ’cos as a DJ I like to play records faster’. Techno responded to his challenge, much to the consternation of Detroit purists. Initially, Beltram found his greatest reception in Belgium. Speaking to
iD
in 1991, he enthused: ‘The Belgians were the first people who could relate to me. Belgium was very, very advanced.’ Indeed, the first real Euro-hardcore track, Rhythm Device’s ‘Acid Rock’, saw producer Frank De Wulf independently hit upon the same techno-as-heavy-metal idea as Beltram: the track imitated Deep Purple’s monster-riffing dirge ‘Smoke On the Water’.
Belgium’s pop music inferiority-complex had ended at the end of the eighties with the New Beat craze, which stormed the country’s pop charts and briefly looked like it was gonna be Britain’s Next Big Thing after acid house. ‘Before New Beat, there was no chance for Belgians to break records into our own chart, it was totally dominated by Anglo-American music,’ said Renaat Van DePapeliere of R & S, the label that released ‘Mentasm’ and ‘Energy Flash’. New Beat began when DJs started to spin gay Hi-NRG records at 33 r.p.m. rather than the correct 45 r.p.m., creating an eerie, viscous, trance-dance groove. At the height of the craze, Renaat recalled, the Ghent club Boccaccio ‘was like a temple. Everyone was dressed in black and white, dancing this weird, robotic dance.’ Groups like Lords of Acid and A Split Second started to make records with the same uncanny, slow-mo feel.
As the nineties progressed, the b.p.m. returned to normal, then accelerated, as DJs started playing techno with their turntables set to +8. A native hardcore was born, with labels like Hithouse, Big Time International, Who’s That Beat, Beat Box and Music Man, and groups like Set Up System, Cubic 22, T99, 80 Aum, Incubus, Holy Noise and Meng Syndicate. All peddled a distinctively Belgian brand of industrial-tinged techno where melody was displaced by noise. Set Up System’s ‘Fairy Dust’ (the title probably refers to amphetamine) featured a fingernails-on-a-blackboard scree-riff that sounded like a brain-eraser wiping the slate of consciousness clean. On T99’s ‘Anasthasia’, the ‘Mentasm’ stab mutated into what some called the ‘Belgian hoover’ effect: bombastic blasts of ungodly dissonance that sounded like
Carmina Burana
sung by a choir of satan-worshipping cyborgs.
As Belgian hardcore swamped Europe, dominating the underground rave circuit and penetrating the pop charts, the techno cognoscenti blanched in horror at the new style’s brutalism. With its corrugated, rock-like riffs and stomping beats, tracks like Cubic 22’s ‘Night In Motion’ seemed to sever house’s familial ties to disco and black R & B. Belgian and German hardcore was heavily influenced by the late eighties school of Euro Body Music (EBM), with its stiff, regimented rhythms and aerobic triumphalism. EBM bands like Front 242 flirted with Constructivist and fascist imagery in songs like ‘Masterhit’, and something of that musclebound, man-of-steel aura carried through to Euro-hardcore. LA Style’s massive hit ‘James Brown Is Dead’ seemed like a gloating celebration of hardcore’s Teutonic funklessness; the track’s
Sturm und Drang
fanfares and cavernous production (geared for massive raves in industrial hangars) imparted an unnervingly Nuremberg-like vibe.
Many anti-hardcore hipsters attributed the new style’s megalomaniacal aggression and high tempo to a decline in the quality of Ecstasy, which they believed was heavily cut with amphetamine. House’s trippy vibe had degenerated into a manic
power
-trippiness. Hence Ravesignal’s ‘Mindwar’ and ‘Horsepower’, the awesome creations of R & S producer CJ Bolland. With its Doppler-effect speed-rush and revving-engine pulse-rhythms, ‘Horsepower’ is Giorgio Moroder’s Eurodisco souped up on steroids and testosterone. Imagine ‘I Feel Love’ if Giorgio had made it with Arnold Schwarzenegger in mind, not Donna Summer. In the film
Pumping Iron
, Arnie talked about how the feeling of flexing his muscles was akin to orgasm, ‘so I’m coming all the time’; the parallels between this and the ‘arrested orgasm’ sensation created by Ecstasy and amphetamine are striking.
That’s very much the vibe exuded by Human Resource’s Euro-hardcore classic ‘Dominator’, on which the rapper’s boasts of ruffer-than-ruff invincibility climax with the Lacanian epiphany: ‘In other words, sucker, there is no Other / I wanna kiss myself.’ Taking the mentasmic drone to its nether limit, ‘Dominator’ is simultaneously sluggish and palsied; you feel like your nerve-endings have gone dead, but beneath the armature of numbed flesh, your heart’s beating furiously. And this was a pretty accurate reflection of the insensate, punch-drunk state many hardcore ravers were in by the end of the night, after necking several pills of dubious composition, topped off by a gram of sulphate and a couple of acid blotters.
Midway through ‘Dominator’, a startlingly realistic alarm-bell lets rip, cueing the Pavlovian response to flee. Hardcore was full of similar sound-effects – sirens, church bells – that created a sense of emergency and insurgency. This was the
panic-rush
, as celebrated in tracks like Praga Khan’s ‘Rave Alarm’, HHFD’s ‘Start The Panic’, John +Julie’s ‘Red Alert’ and Force Mass Motion’s ‘Feel The Panic’; an edgy, jittery exhilaration caused by the metabolic acceleration and paranoiac side-effects of doing too much Ecstasy and amphetamine. The original Greek panic, the ‘panic fear’ of the horned god Pan, was a transport of ecstasy-beyond-terror. Activating the brain’s ‘flight-or-fight’ response speed floods the body with the adrenalin-like neurotransmitter norephinephrine. In a panic state, perceptions are heightened, sense-impressions are more vivid, because you’re on red alert. As with a soldier in a combat situation, such a drastic intensification of the immediate present can be a Dionysian thrill. But the side effects of too much speed (hypertension, paranoia, heart arrythmia) are unpleasant, while the attrition wreaked by long-term abuse leads to a kind of physical and spiritual battle-fatigue. By late 1991, you could see the walking wounded on the dancefloor.
For veteran ravers who remembered happier days, the experience now offered by British hardcore clubs like Wasp, Factory, Crazy Club, Eclipse, In-Ter-Dance and Storm seemed closer to an assault course than a fun night out. European raving was, if anything, even more of an endurance test. Renaat Van DePapeliere raved about a club in Cologne where temperatures would reach tropical levels and DJs wore oxygen masks. Berlin had The Bunker (a warren of pitch-black and strobe-strafed catacombs), E-Werk (a disused electrical power-plant), and, most famously Tresor – once the vaulted subterranean safe of a 1920s department store, now a sweat-bath, sardine-crammed with ravers garbed in paramilitary camouflage gear (a fashion started by hardcore warrior DJ Tanith). East Berlin, with its deserted Communist Party premises and derelict warehouses, was infested with illegal parties. Frankfurt, meanwhile, had the Omen and Dorian Gray clubs, and had spawned a distinctive German hardcore sound via labels like PCP (Planet Core Productions) and Force Inc.
I never made it to any of these heavenly hell-holes of Euro-hardcore, but I caught something of the vibe at a regular Saturday night event in Central London called the Breakfast Club. Run by an organization with the vividly evocative name Slime Time (and whose slogan was: ‘fuck off nutty tunes for fuck off nutty ravers’), the Breakfast Club began at 5 a.m. and went on until 11 a.m. Sunday. The atmosphere on the floor was somewhere between a National Front rally and a soccer match. The music was an ambush of sound and fury, cyber-Wagner fanfares, subsonic bass-quake and blaring samples. Juddering, staccato rhythms enforced a new kind of dancing, all twitches and jerks, like disciplined epilepsy. Close-cropped boys danced like they were shadow boxing; some moulded their hands into the shape of cocked pistols and let rip. No wonder the other big hardcore club in the centre of London was called
Rage
.
The buzzwords of the era were revealing. Pleasure was expressed in a masochist slang of catatonia and brain-damage: on a good night, you’d get ‘faced’ (off your face), ‘sledgied’ (into a coma), ‘cabbaged’ or ‘monged’ (turned into a vegetable). Good tracks were ‘mental’, ‘kickin”, ‘bangin”, ‘nosebleed’ or ‘bone’ (as in boneheaded). Every European hardcore scene had its own variations: the Belgians called the music ‘skizzo’ (schizophrenic), the Germans used the term ‘bretter’ (as a noun, it means means ‘hard board’, as a verb ‘to beat’). The weekender side of rave had always fitted neatly into the traditional working class ‘culture of consolation’; with hardcore, it had now evolved into a culture of concussion, a regime of punishing bliss ‘strictly for the headstrong’.
Hipsters grumbled about ‘cheesy quavers’ and ‘E-monsters’ losing it to 140 b.p.m. ‘nuttercore’. And the nutter stereotype really did exist: teenage boys with sunken cheeks, pursed lips and massively dilated pupils, T-shirts tied round their waist to reveal gaunt adolescent physiques emaciated further by excessive Ecstasy intake. In a 1991 research paper, ‘Raving and Dance Drugs: House Music Clubs and Parties in North-West England’, Dr Russell Newcombe noted the emergence of the ‘nutter’ as a minority within the rave scene. Dedicated to getting severely ‘cabbaged’, these headstrong youth resorted to ‘stacking’: taking from three to six tablets per session, and sometimes between ten and twenty E’s over the course of a three day weekend. These kids quickly became locked into a cycle of overdoing it, then paying for it with a grievous mid-week comedown; this savage depression could only be overcome by the thought that Friday would soon roll around, presenting the opportunity to do it all again. Unwilling to face the Saturday morning crash, these kids would pop more pills in order to stay awake right through till Sunday. Lacking the patience to wait the hour it takes to ‘come up’ on E, they’d eagerly assume that they’d bought a dud pill, and take another: an unbeatable recipe for disaster. Some would grind up two or three E’s and snort them because nasal ingestion was a faster-acting method of administration.
As manufacturers responded to the massive escalation in the demand for Ecstasy caused by this Second Wave of Rave, police seizures of MDMA and other synthetic drugs rose dramatically. In 1990, the London Metroplitan seized 5500 kilos; in 1991, the figure was more than 66,000 kilos. Reflecting both increased numbers of people using Ecstasy and the rise of a reckless, nihilistic attitude to drug intake, the number of MDMA-related deaths began to escalate. From 1989 – 90, there were only two or three deaths linked to MDMA; in the second half of 1991, there were five. During the 1988 – 90 period, Guy’s Hospital in London reported an average of fifteen cases per month of adverse reactions due to Ecstasy; by 1991, they were receiving between thirty or forty distressed ravers per month, suffering effects like paranoia, racing heartbeat and the sometimes fatal condition of heatstroke.
Metal Machine Music
 
Hardcore crusaders like Renaat of R & S celebrated the way that techno had resurrected the generation gap, supplanting punk as the noise that parents, older brothers, and squares in general, just couldn’t accept as music. But hardcore also created a generation gap
within
rave culture, as acid house veterans and hipster élitists decried the new brutalism as a barbaric travesty of the original vision of Detroit and Chicago.
British house producer Joey Negro lambasted hardcore not as punk rock but as equivalent to the Johnny-come-lately, lumpen-prole version of punk called Oi! Speaking to
DJ
, he described the Belgian style of techno as ‘young people’s fuck-off music. Latterday Sham 69, Angelic Upstarts or the UK Subs.’ A more common analogy was with heavy metal. In the same magazine, Claire Morgan Jones argued that rave, ‘the late twentieth-century reworking of sixties style peace, love and understanding’ had degenerated into ‘a knee-jerk club ritual many have started to call “the new heavy metal”.’ Noting the submerged homo-eroticism of working-class lads stripped to the waist and sniffing amyl nitrate like gay clubbers, she complained that, in the evolution of house into hardcore, ‘all the curve and swing [has] been squeezed out . . . all it seems to be about is boys, bass and bother’.
When they started out, Warp Records and its artists all used the word ‘hardcore’ to situate themselves within rave culture; Steve Beckett declared in late 1989 that ‘we’re totally committed to [releasing] uncompromising, hardcore tracks’. But by 1991, Warp and its roster were at some pains to distance themselves from what they felt was a commercialized and conformist rave scene. Although Nightmares On Wax had been enthusiastic in 1990 about the ‘big bass sound’ of Belgium and Italy, the following year the duo were complaining about ‘heavy metal house’ and ‘soppy and poppy’ bubblegum rave played at ‘tacky Sharon and Tracey clubs’. NOW’s debut album
A Word Of Science
largely abandoned bleeps and clonks in favour of mellow ‘smoker’s delight’ grooves influenced by seventies funk.
Former punks with a highly developed political consciousness, Orbital were as offended by the social implications of hardcore’s ‘nutter’ mentality, as by its lumpen sound. ‘It’s like a science fiction film,’ Paul Hartnoll told me in 1992. ‘You’ve got everybody going out on a Friday or a Saturday, or both, taking their so-called E’s’ – an allusion to the common belief that most Ecstasy pills really consisted of amphetamine and valium – ‘and they carry on through Sunday having a mad time, and by Monday they’re deadbeat zombies. For the rest of the week, they’re “yes sir, no sir,” and then by Thursday they’re waiting for the weekend again. It just subdues them. The drugs wear you down so you’re ready to accept the drudgery of working life.’

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