Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (31 page)
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Authors: Simon Reynolds
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Listening to
Artificial Intelligence
now, it’s hard to imagine why the album had such an impact. Speedy J’s ‘De-Orbit’ and the two tracks by Musicology (alter-ego of Detroit-pietists B12) constituted little more than test-card muzak.
Electro-Soma
, B12’s debut long-player that followed as part of Warp’s Artificial Intelligence series of single-artist albums, took its name from soma: the Prozac-like tranquillizer in Aldous Huxley’s
Brave New World
, which was derived from an Ancient Indian intoxicating plant juice venerated as a drink of immortality by Vedic worshippers.
Electro-Soma
’s effect is more akin to a queasy docility, like being forcibly anaesthetized with Glade air-freshener.
Artificial Intelligence
did however showcase material from three outfits destined to become major players in the realm of electronica: Autechre, The Black Dog and The Aphex Twin.
Artificial Intelligence
now, it’s hard to imagine why the album had such an impact. Speedy J’s ‘De-Orbit’ and the two tracks by Musicology (alter-ego of Detroit-pietists B12) constituted little more than test-card muzak.
Electro-Soma
, B12’s debut long-player that followed as part of Warp’s Artificial Intelligence series of single-artist albums, took its name from soma: the Prozac-like tranquillizer in Aldous Huxley’s
Brave New World
, which was derived from an Ancient Indian intoxicating plant juice venerated as a drink of immortality by Vedic worshippers.
Electro-Soma
’s effect is more akin to a queasy docility, like being forcibly anaesthetized with Glade air-freshener.
Artificial Intelligence
did however showcase material from three outfits destined to become major players in the realm of electronica: Autechre, The Black Dog and The Aphex Twin.
Autechre – the Manchester based duo of Sean Booth and Rob Brown – followed a typical trajectory for English techno boffins. Having grown up on electro, graffiti, and Mantronix, they were dislodged from their B-boy path by the phuture shock of acid house. Profiling the duo for
The Lizard
, writer Peter McIntyre identified a sort of constructivist/Cubist aesthetic running through Autechre’s output, which he connected with Brown’s studies in architectural design. ‘We’re big fans of geometry in both design and sound,’ the duo confirmed. ‘There’s nothing better than tight geometry.’ On albums like
Incunabula
,
Amber
and
Tri Repetae
, and EPs like
Garbage
and
Anvil Vapre
, they constructed unlovely but queerly compelling sound-sculptures: abstruse and angular concatenations of sonic glyphs, blocs of distortion and mutilated sample-tones, with occasional light relief in the form of pretty pulse-scapes of chime-colour like ‘Yulquen’.
The Lizard
, writer Peter McIntyre identified a sort of constructivist/Cubist aesthetic running through Autechre’s output, which he connected with Brown’s studies in architectural design. ‘We’re big fans of geometry in both design and sound,’ the duo confirmed. ‘There’s nothing better than tight geometry.’ On albums like
Incunabula
,
Amber
and
Tri Repetae
, and EPs like
Garbage
and
Anvil Vapre
, they constructed unlovely but queerly compelling sound-sculptures: abstruse and angular concatenations of sonic glyphs, blocs of distortion and mutilated sample-tones, with occasional light relief in the form of pretty pulse-scapes of chime-colour like ‘Yulquen’.
Comparisons with Leger and Mondrian aside, Autechre’s music is most redolent of wildstyle graffiti, where typography is convoluted and abstracted to the point of illegibility. The graf parallel fits because their music is basically avant-garde electro: Man Parrish meets Pierre Henry, or The Art of Noise meets Luigi Russolo’s ‘The Art Of Noises’. The cryptographic opacity carried through to the song-titles: ‘c/pach’, ‘gnit’, ‘rsdio’, ‘second scepe’, ‘vletrmx21’. Although
Artificial Intelligence
’s sleevenotes had insisted that the new electronica ‘cannot be described as soulless or machine made’, what’s most interesting about Autechre’s work is the absence of heart and humanity, the way that the listener’s impulse to forge an emotional connection simply ricochets off the impenetrable, gnomic surfaces of their sound. At times you can’t help wonder if the ‘aut’ in their name stands for autism: listening, the mind’s eye conjures up a vision of two small boys surrounded by tekno toys, lost in their own little pre-verbal world of chromatics and texture and contour.
Artificial Intelligence
’s sleevenotes had insisted that the new electronica ‘cannot be described as soulless or machine made’, what’s most interesting about Autechre’s work is the absence of heart and humanity, the way that the listener’s impulse to forge an emotional connection simply ricochets off the impenetrable, gnomic surfaces of their sound. At times you can’t help wonder if the ‘aut’ in their name stands for autism: listening, the mind’s eye conjures up a vision of two small boys surrounded by tekno toys, lost in their own little pre-verbal world of chromatics and texture and contour.
The Black Dog – the trio of Ed Handley, Andy Turner and Ken Downie – were almost as hermetic as Autechre, but more committed to traditional art notions of ‘expression’. They once defined their project as the quest for ‘a computer soul’, while Ken Downie told
Eternity
that The Black Dog started in order to fill ‘a hole in music. Acid house had been “squashed” by the police and rinky-dinky Italian house music was getting played everywhere. Emotion had left via the window.’
Eternity
that The Black Dog started in order to fill ‘a hole in music. Acid house had been “squashed” by the police and rinky-dinky Italian house music was getting played everywhere. Emotion had left via the window.’
The musical emotions in The Black Dog (and alter-egos Plaid and Balil) aren’t the straightforward, run-of-the-mill, everyday sort, but rather more elusive: subtle, indefinable shades of mood, ambiguous and evanescent feelings for which even an oxymoron like ‘bittersweet’ seems rather crude. Eschewing live appearance and seldom doing interviews, The Black Dog nonetheless created a cult aura around their often hard-to-find discography. One of their chosen mediums was cyberspace: long before the current craze for techno web-sites, The Black Dog established a computer bulletin board called Black Dog Towers. Visitors could gawp at artwork and learn more about the Dog’s interest in arcane knowledges, such as paganism, out-of-body experiences, UFOs, Kabbalah, and ‘aeonics’ (mass shifts in consciousness). Ken Downie – the principal eso-terrorist in the band – has described himself as a magician. One of The Black Dog’s earliest tracks, ‘Virtual (Gods in Space)’, features a sample – ‘make the events occur that you want to occur’ – which gives a magickal spin to the punk DIY ethos.
Although far from the euphoric fervour of rave, The Black Dog’s early 1990 – 92 material is remarkably similar to the breakbeat hardcore of the day. Like Hyper-On Experience, DJ Trax et al, the mode of construction is basically the Mantronix collage aesthetic updated for the rave era: incongruous samples + looped breakbeats + oscillator riffs. But the mood of ‘Seers + Sale’, ‘Apt’, ‘Chiba’ and ‘Age Of Slack’ is quirky Dada absurdism rather than Loony Toons zany. The crisp, echoed breakbeat and keyboard vamp on ‘Seers + Sale’ recalls 2 Bad Mice classics like ‘Waremouse’, except that the riff sounds like it’s played on a church organ, so the effect is eldritch rather than E-lated. On 1991’s ‘Chiba’, the Morse Code riff has a glancing lightness of inflection that anticipates the Detroit-breakbeat of Innerzone Orchestra’s ‘Bug In The Bassbin’.
Carl Craig, the producer behind Innerzone Orchestra, clearly recognized The Black Dog as kindred spirits in sonic watercolours; in 1992 his Planet E label released their classic Balil track ‘Nort Route’. Strangely redolent of the early eighties – the Sinophile phunk of Sylvian and Sakomoto’s ‘Bamboo Music’, the phuturistic panache of Thomas Leer – ‘Nort Route’ daubs synth-goo into an exquisite calligraphic melody-shape over an off-kilter breakbeat. The track trembles and brims with a peculiar emotion, a euphoric melancholy that David Toop came closest to capturing with his phrase ‘nostalgia for the future’. What The Black Dog/Balil/Plaid tracks most resembled was a sort of digital update of fifties exotica. But instead of imitating remote alien cultures, as the original exotica did, it was like The Black Dog were somehow giving us advance glimpses of the hybrid musics of the next millennium: the Hispanic-Polynesian dance crazes of the Pacific Rim, or music for discotheques and wine bars in Chiba City and The Sprawl (the megalopolises in William Gibson’s
Neuromancer
and
Count Zero
). While some of the Dog’s later work – on albums like
Bytes
,
Parallel
,
The Temple of Transparent Balls
and
Spanners
– crosses the thin line between mood-music and muzak, it’s still marked by a rhythmic inventiveness that’s unusual in the electronic listening field. With its percussive density and discombobulated time signatures, The Black Dog’s music often feels like it’s designed for the asymmetrical dancing of creatures with an
odd
number of limbs – not bipeds, but quintupeds or nonopeds.
Surfing on SinewavesNeuromancer
and
Count Zero
). While some of the Dog’s later work – on albums like
Bytes
,
Parallel
,
The Temple of Transparent Balls
and
Spanners
– crosses the thin line between mood-music and muzak, it’s still marked by a rhythmic inventiveness that’s unusual in the electronic listening field. With its percussive density and discombobulated time signatures, The Black Dog’s music often feels like it’s designed for the asymmetrical dancing of creatures with an
odd
number of limbs – not bipeds, but quintupeds or nonopeds.
If anyone substantiated Warp’s concept of electronic listening music, it was Richard James, aka Aphex Twin. On
Artificial Intelligence
, he appeared as The Dice Man, just one of a bewildering plethora of pseudonyms – AFX, Caustic Window, Soit P. P., Bluecalx, Polygon Window and Powerpill. Despite this penchant for alter-egos and a professed indifference to publicity, Richard James has been by far the most successful of the new breed of ‘armchair techno’ auteurs at cultivating a cult of personality. He’s fostered this by painting a picture of an extremely abnormal childhood in the remote coastal county of Cornwall.
Artificial Intelligence
, he appeared as The Dice Man, just one of a bewildering plethora of pseudonyms – AFX, Caustic Window, Soit P. P., Bluecalx, Polygon Window and Powerpill. Despite this penchant for alter-egos and a professed indifference to publicity, Richard James has been by far the most successful of the new breed of ‘armchair techno’ auteurs at cultivating a cult of personality. He’s fostered this by painting a picture of an extremely abnormal childhood in the remote coastal county of Cornwall.
James’s avant-garde impulses emerged almost as soon as he was potty-trained. As a small child he messed about on the family piano, exploring different tuning scales and hitting the strings inside instead of the keys. ‘I used to play
with
the piano, rather than play tunes on the keyboard,’ he told me. These infantile experiments uncannily parallel the ‘prepared piano’ techniques devised by John Cage and other twentieth-century composers. Many years later his infamous DJ performances – he’d place the stylus on sandpapers instead of vinyl and modulate the hellaciously abrasive din using a graphics equalizer – echoed Cage’s ‘Cartridge Music’ piece, in which the turntable’s stylus cartridge was rubbed against inappropriate objects and surfaces.
with
the piano, rather than play tunes on the keyboard,’ he told me. These infantile experiments uncannily parallel the ‘prepared piano’ techniques devised by John Cage and other twentieth-century composers. Many years later his infamous DJ performances – he’d place the stylus on sandpapers instead of vinyl and modulate the hellaciously abrasive din using a graphics equalizer – echoed Cage’s ‘Cartridge Music’ piece, in which the turntable’s stylus cartridge was rubbed against inappropriate objects and surfaces.
Like Cage and other avant-classical composers, James’s interest has always been sound-in-itself, or as he puts it with characteristic down-to-earthiness: ‘I’ve always been into banging things and making weird noises.’
Musique concrète
style tape manipulation was swiftly followed by teenage forays into Stockhausen-esque electro-acoustic experiments. ‘I bought a synth when I was twelve, thought it was a load of shit, took it apart and started pissing about with it. I learned about electronics in school until I was quite competent and could build my own circuits from scratch. I started modifying analogue synths and junk that I’d bought, and got addicted to making noises.’ This obsession with generating a repertoire of unique timbres eventually led James to study electronics at Kingston University.
Musique concrète
style tape manipulation was swiftly followed by teenage forays into Stockhausen-esque electro-acoustic experiments. ‘I bought a synth when I was twelve, thought it was a load of shit, took it apart and started pissing about with it. I learned about electronics in school until I was quite competent and could build my own circuits from scratch. I started modifying analogue synths and junk that I’d bought, and got addicted to making noises.’ This obsession with generating a repertoire of unique timbres eventually led James to study electronics at Kingston University.
The geographical/cultural remoteness of Cornwall is another crucial element in the mythos of Aphex as isolated child prodigy. James claims that when he first heard acid and techno, he was astounded because he’d quite independently been making similar sounds for years. James immediately threw himself into purchasing every techno record he could lay his hands on, and he started DJ-ing at clubs and beach-raves. Finally his mates persuaded him to put out his own tracks, which he’d been giving them on cassette for years.
James immediately won acclaim with the cosmic-jacuzzi swirl of ‘Analogue Bubblebath’, the title track of his 1991 debut EP. With its fluttery, diaphanous riff-pattern and hazy-yet-crystalline production, ‘Bubblebath’ announced a new softcore direction in techno – meditational, melodically-intricate and ambient-tinged. But the EP also revealed that James was no slouch when it came to industrial-strength hardcore. The chemical-formula title and astringent sound of ‘Isopro-phlex’ suggests a nasty corrosive fluid, the kind whose container carries warnings like ‘avoid inhalation’ and ‘irrigate the eye area immediately, then seek medical help’. James’s next track, ‘Didgeridoo’, impacted the hardcore dancefloor in a big way. Inspired by hearing traveller-minstrels playing the didgeridoo at festival-raves in Cornwall, the track is by far the best of a 1992 techno mini-genre based around the strange similarity between the Australian aboriginal pipe and the acieed bass-squelch of the Roland 303. But it doesn’t actually feature a didgeridoo; eschewing samples, James laboured for three days to concoct an electronic simulacrum of the primordial drone.
‘Analogue Bubblebath’ and ‘Didgeridoo’ mark out the poles of the Aphex sound-spectrum: synth-siphoned balm for the soul versus clangorously percussive noise. James’s debut album,
Selected Ambient Works, 85 – 92
is tilted towards softcore. The opening track ‘Xtal’ is a shimmer of tremulously translucent synths, hissy hi-hat and muffled bass; a girl softly intones a daydreamy, ‘la-la-la’ melody, her slightly off-key voice seemingly diffracted by the gossamer haze of sound. The nine minutes long mood-piece ‘Tha’ is twilight-after-rain melancholia worthy of the Eno-produced instrumentals on Bowie’s
Low
. Over a pensive bassline and water-drip percussion, a mist of susurrating sound drifts like the chinese-whispery hubbub of a railway station concourse or an abbey’s cloisters. The voices are so reverb-atomized you catch only the outline of words before they crumble like chalk-dust and disperse.
Selected Ambient Works, 85 – 92
is tilted towards softcore. The opening track ‘Xtal’ is a shimmer of tremulously translucent synths, hissy hi-hat and muffled bass; a girl softly intones a daydreamy, ‘la-la-la’ melody, her slightly off-key voice seemingly diffracted by the gossamer haze of sound. The nine minutes long mood-piece ‘Tha’ is twilight-after-rain melancholia worthy of the Eno-produced instrumentals on Bowie’s
Low
. Over a pensive bassline and water-drip percussion, a mist of susurrating sound drifts like the chinese-whispery hubbub of a railway station concourse or an abbey’s cloisters. The voices are so reverb-atomized you catch only the outline of words before they crumble like chalk-dust and disperse.
Fusing narcosis and speed-rush, ‘Pulsewidth’ is ambient techno, literally; everything’s soft-focus, the aural equivalent of vaseline-on-the-lens, yet the fluorescent bass-pulse is irresistibly dynamic, propelling you towards a breathtaking breakdown before surging off again. The sensation is like ‘swimming through cotton wool’ (Graham Greene’s description of a botched suicide attempt when he took deadly nightshade and tried to drown himself in the school pool). ‘Heliosphan’ is impossibly stirring and stately, its cupola-high synth-cadence and wistful melody offset by impish twirls of nonchantly jazzy keyboards. Imagine the theme music for a fifties government film about Britain’s new garden cities: serene, symmetrical, euphonious, evoking the socially engineered perfection of a post-war New Order.
Selected Ambient Works
climaxes with ‘We Are the Music Makers’. The track makes you wait and wait through long stretches of just beats and bass-fuzz, teasing you with intermittent flickers of twinkly synth in the cornermost crevice of the soundscape. Then there’s a one-note dapple of reverb-hazy piano, like green-tinted sunlight peeking through a woodland canopy and caressing your half-closed eyelids, before the melody finally blossoms in full spangly-tingly glory.
climaxes with ‘We Are the Music Makers’. The track makes you wait and wait through long stretches of just beats and bass-fuzz, teasing you with intermittent flickers of twinkly synth in the cornermost crevice of the soundscape. Then there’s a one-note dapple of reverb-hazy piano, like green-tinted sunlight peeking through a woodland canopy and caressing your half-closed eyelids, before the melody finally blossoms in full spangly-tingly glory.
Almost as striking as the music on
Selected
was the second half of the title:
85 – 92
. This was Richard James highlighting the fact that most of the record was culled from the backlogged output of his teenage years. In interviews, he talked about how he’d amassed a personal archive of around a thousand tracks, enough for a hundred albums. In truth, James had no real notion of how much music he’d made in the previous eight years; he had lost track of his tracks. ‘Every time I go back to Cornwall,’ he told me, ‘my friends play me tapes of tunes I gave ’em, stuff I haven’t heard for years. In their cars I’ll find cassettes of material that I haven’t even got copies of. Lots of them sound like the tape is just about to wear out, like it’ll break if you play it one more time . . . See, once it’s recorded, I lose all interest in it.’
Selected
was the second half of the title:
85 – 92
. This was Richard James highlighting the fact that most of the record was culled from the backlogged output of his teenage years. In interviews, he talked about how he’d amassed a personal archive of around a thousand tracks, enough for a hundred albums. In truth, James had no real notion of how much music he’d made in the previous eight years; he had lost track of his tracks. ‘Every time I go back to Cornwall,’ he told me, ‘my friends play me tapes of tunes I gave ’em, stuff I haven’t heard for years. In their cars I’ll find cassettes of material that I haven’t even got copies of. Lots of them sound like the tape is just about to wear out, like it’ll break if you play it one more time . . . See, once it’s recorded, I lose all interest in it.’
More tantalizing glimpses into James’s trove of unreleased material came with the two albums that followed swiftly on the heels of
Selected
: Polygon Window’s
Surfing On Sine Waves
and AFX’s
Analogue Bubblebath 3
. If tracks like ‘If It Really Is Me’ verged on a sort of astral muzak, most of
Surfing
was harder and darker than its ambient predecessor. The stand-out track, ‘Quoth’ features no melody, no synths, no bass even, just frenzied metallic percussion. It makes me think of Alfred Bester’s science fiction classic
Tiger, Tiger
, where the anti-hero Gulliver Foyle encounters a
Lord of the Flies
community of asteroid-belt castaways, who’ve built themselves a planetoid out of space junk; ‘Quoth’ could be the savage pounding of tribal rhythms against the hulls of shipwrecked spacecraft.
Selected
: Polygon Window’s
Surfing On Sine Waves
and AFX’s
Analogue Bubblebath 3
. If tracks like ‘If It Really Is Me’ verged on a sort of astral muzak, most of
Surfing
was harder and darker than its ambient predecessor. The stand-out track, ‘Quoth’ features no melody, no synths, no bass even, just frenzied metallic percussion. It makes me think of Alfred Bester’s science fiction classic
Tiger, Tiger
, where the anti-hero Gulliver Foyle encounters a
Lord of the Flies
community of asteroid-belt castaways, who’ve built themselves a planetoid out of space junk; ‘Quoth’ could be the savage pounding of tribal rhythms against the hulls of shipwrecked spacecraft.
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