Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (32 page)
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Clad only in bubblewrap and devoid of track information,
Analogue Bubblebath 3
also cleaved to the industrial end of the Aphex sound-spectrum. Most of the thirteen tracks are undanceably angular anti-grooves, adorned with blurts of noise and interlaced with the occasional ribbon of minimal melody. One track sounds like a gamelan symphony for glass and rubber percussion; another begins with the sound of a vacuum cleaner, before letting rip with an out-of-tune pianola-like oscillator-riff, conjuring the image of a rave in a cavern beneath the crater-pocked lunar surface of Ganymede. Like the hair-raisingly forbidding ‘Hedphelym’ on
Selected Ambient Works
, track eleven is like stumbling upon a pagan shrine on an alien world. But there’s two lapses back into the outright beauty of
Selected Ambient Works
. Track four has a forlorn, Satiesque melody floating at quarter-tempo over an incongruously strident, unrelenting beat. And track eight is kosmik
kinder-muzik
, a sublime confection of music-box melody and thunderous dub that always makes me think of an ice-cream van doing the rounds on The Clangers’ planet.
Analogue Bubblebath 3
also cleaved to the industrial end of the Aphex sound-spectrum. Most of the thirteen tracks are undanceably angular anti-grooves, adorned with blurts of noise and interlaced with the occasional ribbon of minimal melody. One track sounds like a gamelan symphony for glass and rubber percussion; another begins with the sound of a vacuum cleaner, before letting rip with an out-of-tune pianola-like oscillator-riff, conjuring the image of a rave in a cavern beneath the crater-pocked lunar surface of Ganymede. Like the hair-raisingly forbidding ‘Hedphelym’ on
Selected Ambient Works
, track eleven is like stumbling upon a pagan shrine on an alien world. But there’s two lapses back into the outright beauty of
Selected Ambient Works
. Track four has a forlorn, Satiesque melody floating at quarter-tempo over an incongruously strident, unrelenting beat. And track eight is kosmik
kinder-muzik
, a sublime confection of music-box melody and thunderous dub that always makes me think of an ice-cream van doing the rounds on The Clangers’ planet.
Fostering his crackpot genius image, Richard James claimed he could survive on a mere two or three hours of sleep a night. ‘When I was little I decided sleep was a waste of your life. If you lived to a hundred but you didn’t sleep, it’d be like living to two hundred. Originally, it wasn’t for more time to make music, I just thought sleep was a bit of a con. I’d always been able get away with four hours a night, but I tried to narrow it down to two. It gets very strange when I don’t sleep for a long while, ’cos it’s not that I’m actually that good at staying awake. I can only do it if I’m making music. But it’s fucking excellent, not sleeping, it’s sort of nice and not-nice at the same time. Your minds starts getting scatty, like you’re senile. You do unpredictable things, like making tea but pouring it in a cereal bowl instead of a cup.’
I reckon sleep-deprivation has a lot to do with the eerie, spaced-out aura of James’s music. Some neurologists believe humans have an innate need to dream. Which is why you feel ‘unreal’ when you’ve stayed up all night or are jetlagged: the brain is trying to dream while you’re still conscious. Aphex Twin music appears to be created in a mind-state that’s constantly flitting between ‘hypnagogic’ and ‘hypnopompic’. Hypnagogic is the half-awake phase just before you drop off in bed at night, when the mind’s eye fills with hyper-real imagery (but not the surreal visions you get in the classic R.E.M. dream-state). Hypnapompic is that early morning sensation of dis-reality gestured at in My Bloody Valentine’s lyric ‘when you’re awake you’re still in a dream’. James often makes tunes in a somnambulistic trance. ‘When I’m in the studio my eyes get tired from looking at monitors and sometimes I’ll finish a track with my eyes shut. I know where all the dials are, and so I can do a track by touch.’
Turn On, Tune In, Drop OffReleased at the end of 1992,
Selected Ambient Works
coincided not just with the electronic listening boom but with a resurgence of interest in ‘chill-out’ music as a supplement or sequel to the rave. The idea had been first mooted in 1989 in the form of a short-lived fad for ‘ambient house’. At Land of Oz, Paul Oakenfold’s acid house night at Heaven, there was a VIP area called The White Room. Here Dr. Alex Paterson – soon to be the mainman in The Orb – provided soul-soothing succour for the acieed-frazzled by spinning records by Brian Eno, Pink Floyd, The Eagles, War, 10cc and Mike Oldfield, all at very low volume and accompanied by multi-screen video projections. Hippy-rock guru Steve Hillage is said to have dropped by one night, only to hear Paterson playing
Rainbow Dome Musick
, an album Hillage had composed for the New Age-y Festival for Mind-Body-Spirit in 1979.
Selected Ambient Works
coincided not just with the electronic listening boom but with a resurgence of interest in ‘chill-out’ music as a supplement or sequel to the rave. The idea had been first mooted in 1989 in the form of a short-lived fad for ‘ambient house’. At Land of Oz, Paul Oakenfold’s acid house night at Heaven, there was a VIP area called The White Room. Here Dr. Alex Paterson – soon to be the mainman in The Orb – provided soul-soothing succour for the acieed-frazzled by spinning records by Brian Eno, Pink Floyd, The Eagles, War, 10cc and Mike Oldfield, all at very low volume and accompanied by multi-screen video projections. Hippy-rock guru Steve Hillage is said to have dropped by one night, only to hear Paterson playing
Rainbow Dome Musick
, an album Hillage had composed for the New Age-y Festival for Mind-Body-Spirit in 1979.
In 1989 – 90, the Spacetime parties were also taking place at Cable Street in the East End of London. Specifically designed to encourage people to talk rather than dance, the events were organized by Jonah Sharp and featured live music by Mixmaster Morris. Meanwhile, in his magazine
Evolution
(originally
Encyclopaedia Psychedelica
), counterculture vet Fraser Clark was evangelizing his vision of rave as the expression of a new Gaia-worshipping eco-consciousness. Clark coined the term ‘zippie’ to describe a new kind of hippy who rejected sixties’ Luddite pastoralism and embraced the cyberdelic, mind-expanding potential of technology.
Evolution
(originally
Encyclopaedia Psychedelica
), counterculture vet Fraser Clark was evangelizing his vision of rave as the expression of a new Gaia-worshipping eco-consciousness. Clark coined the term ‘zippie’ to describe a new kind of hippy who rejected sixties’ Luddite pastoralism and embraced the cyberdelic, mind-expanding potential of technology.
There was music too, dubbed New Age house or ambient house: Sueno Latino’s ‘Sueno Latino’ (a dance version of acid-rocker Manuel Gottsching’s proto-techno masterpiece
E2 – E4
), 808 State’s ‘Pacific State’, The Grid’s ‘Floatation’, Quadrophenia’s ‘Paradise’, Audio One’s ‘Journeys Into Rhythm’, Innocence’s ‘Natural Thing’ (featuring a sample from Pink Floyd’s ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’). Most of this stuff was pretty tepid: slow-mo house grooves overlaid with bird-song samples, serendipitous piano chords, mawkish woodwind solos, plangent acoustic guitars, and breathy female vocals whispering New Age positivity poesy. Two records stood out from the dross: The KLF’s
Chill Out
album and The Orb’s ‘A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From the Centre of the Ultraworld’.
E2 – E4
), 808 State’s ‘Pacific State’, The Grid’s ‘Floatation’, Quadrophenia’s ‘Paradise’, Audio One’s ‘Journeys Into Rhythm’, Innocence’s ‘Natural Thing’ (featuring a sample from Pink Floyd’s ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’). Most of this stuff was pretty tepid: slow-mo house grooves overlaid with bird-song samples, serendipitous piano chords, mawkish woodwind solos, plangent acoustic guitars, and breathy female vocals whispering New Age positivity poesy. Two records stood out from the dross: The KLF’s
Chill Out
album and The Orb’s ‘A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From the Centre of the Ultraworld’.
Although it initially seemed like it was going to be just another cheap joke from prankster duo Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, The KLF’s
Chill Out
turned out to be an atmospheric trans-American travelogue woven out of samples from sound effects records and MOR songs like Elvis Presley’s ‘In The Ghetto’, Acker Bilk’s ‘Stranger On The Shore’ and Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Albatross’. The sleeve spoofed Pink Floyd’s
Atom Heart Mother
(with grazing sheep replacing the Floyd’s ruminating cow), and a sticker on the front hinted ‘File Under Ambient’. The Orb’s ‘A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain’ came emblazoned with the slogan ‘Ambient House For The E Generation’. Twenty-four minutes long, the track is a shimmerscape of sound effects (crowing roosters, church bells, splashing pebbles), angelic close harmony singing, the helium-high croon of Minnie Ripperton’s ‘Loving You’, and a synth-pulse as radiant as a nimbus (the luminous vapour that surrounds God). The net effect is sheer nirvana or near-death experience, like your cerebral cortex is being flooded with pain-and-doubt killing endorphins.
Chill Out
turned out to be an atmospheric trans-American travelogue woven out of samples from sound effects records and MOR songs like Elvis Presley’s ‘In The Ghetto’, Acker Bilk’s ‘Stranger On The Shore’ and Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Albatross’. The sleeve spoofed Pink Floyd’s
Atom Heart Mother
(with grazing sheep replacing the Floyd’s ruminating cow), and a sticker on the front hinted ‘File Under Ambient’. The Orb’s ‘A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain’ came emblazoned with the slogan ‘Ambient House For The E Generation’. Twenty-four minutes long, the track is a shimmerscape of sound effects (crowing roosters, church bells, splashing pebbles), angelic close harmony singing, the helium-high croon of Minnie Ripperton’s ‘Loving You’, and a synth-pulse as radiant as a nimbus (the luminous vapour that surrounds God). The net effect is sheer nirvana or near-death experience, like your cerebral cortex is being flooded with pain-and-doubt killing endorphins.
Like The KLF, The Orb consisted of punk rock veterans: Alex Paterson had been a roadie and drum technician for Killing Joke, and sometimes sang Sex Pistols encores when the band toured. Through the Killing Joke connection, he got an A & R job at their label E. G., home to ambient pioneers Brian Eno and Harold Budd. After appearing uncredited on The KLF’s
Chill Out
and
Space
albums, Paterson collaborated with Jimmy Cauty on ‘A Huge Ever Growing Brain’. Teaming up with engineer Kris Weston, aka Thrash, Paterson then transformed The Orb into a real band.
Chill Out
and
Space
albums, Paterson collaborated with Jimmy Cauty on ‘A Huge Ever Growing Brain’. Teaming up with engineer Kris Weston, aka Thrash, Paterson then transformed The Orb into a real band.
‘A Huge Ever Growing Brain’ was released in December 1989. When The Orb’s debut album
Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld
finally materialized in the spring of 1991, it seemed monumentally tardy: the
magnum
(and I mean whopping – it was a 110 minute long dubble-elpee)
opus
of a clubland fad long past its sell-by date. In fact,
Adventures
was the harbinger of an imminent deluge of dub-flavoured ambient techno. Following
Chill Out
’s Pink Floyd homage, the sleeve depicted Battersea Power Station, previously seen on the cover of
Animals
; inside, there was a track entitled ‘Back Side Of The Moon’. These nudge-nudge wink-wink acknowledgements of the Floyd connection seemed designed to pre-empt the carping complaints of punk veterans: THIS is what Sid Vicious died for?
Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld
finally materialized in the spring of 1991, it seemed monumentally tardy: the
magnum
(and I mean whopping – it was a 110 minute long dubble-elpee)
opus
of a clubland fad long past its sell-by date. In fact,
Adventures
was the harbinger of an imminent deluge of dub-flavoured ambient techno. Following
Chill Out
’s Pink Floyd homage, the sleeve depicted Battersea Power Station, previously seen on the cover of
Animals
; inside, there was a track entitled ‘Back Side Of The Moon’. These nudge-nudge wink-wink acknowledgements of the Floyd connection seemed designed to pre-empt the carping complaints of punk veterans: THIS is what Sid Vicious died for?
But for all the protective irony and the contemporary house beats, there was no mistaking the fact that
Adventures
was the unabashed return of cosmic rock. Titles like ‘Earth (Gaia)’ and ‘Little Fluffy Clouds’ (with its samples of Rickie Lee Jones’s blissful reveries of the Arizona skyline of her childhood) harked back to the cosmic pastoralism and nostalgia for lost innocence that characterized late sixties outfits like The Incredible String Band. The quirked-out humour and daft sound effects recalled seventies space-rockers Hawkwind and Gong; Steve Hillage, a Gong veteran, actually shared production duties on ‘Supernova At The End Of The Universe’ and ‘Back Side Of The Moon’. On ‘Supernova’, braided wisps of evanescent sound – distant cloudbreak, radio murmurings, cascades of stardust, silvered shivers of harp – were draped incongruously over a kickin’ beat. ‘Back Side’ featured crackly samples of astronauts talking about Tranquility Base, the landing site on the Moon’s Sea of Tranquility. With its beatific, beat-free lassitude and zero-gravity suspension,
Adventures
was like a cut-price aural surrogate for the flotation tank, then in vogue with stressed out yuppies. The Orb’s music lowered your metabolic rate to the level of a particularly well-adjusted and ‘centred’ sea anemone.
Adventures
was the unabashed return of cosmic rock. Titles like ‘Earth (Gaia)’ and ‘Little Fluffy Clouds’ (with its samples of Rickie Lee Jones’s blissful reveries of the Arizona skyline of her childhood) harked back to the cosmic pastoralism and nostalgia for lost innocence that characterized late sixties outfits like The Incredible String Band. The quirked-out humour and daft sound effects recalled seventies space-rockers Hawkwind and Gong; Steve Hillage, a Gong veteran, actually shared production duties on ‘Supernova At The End Of The Universe’ and ‘Back Side Of The Moon’. On ‘Supernova’, braided wisps of evanescent sound – distant cloudbreak, radio murmurings, cascades of stardust, silvered shivers of harp – were draped incongruously over a kickin’ beat. ‘Back Side’ featured crackly samples of astronauts talking about Tranquility Base, the landing site on the Moon’s Sea of Tranquility. With its beatific, beat-free lassitude and zero-gravity suspension,
Adventures
was like a cut-price aural surrogate for the flotation tank, then in vogue with stressed out yuppies. The Orb’s music lowered your metabolic rate to the level of a particularly well-adjusted and ‘centred’ sea anemone.
‘I’ve been waiting for music like this all my life’, ran a sample in ‘Back Side’. Immodest, maybe, but it was no idle boast: thousands apparently
had
been waiting, and next summer, the band’s follow-up,
u. f. orb
, went straight into the British Album Charts at Number One. It was preceded by a single, ‘Blue Room’, which got to Number Eight in the hit parade, despite being just under forty minutes long and featuring only one real hook: ‘ah wah wah a wah wah’, the wordless siren-song of reggae vocalist Aisha, the protégé of UK dub wizard the Mad Professor. Paterson and Thrash appeared on
Top of the Pops
, but instead of miming with instruments, they played a
Star Trek-
style 3D chess-set in front of back-projected film of aquabatic dolphins. Named after the room at the Wright Patterson airforce base where the remains of crash-landed aliens are allegedly kept by the US government, ‘Blue Room’ alternates between ambience (synth-motes like spangly space debris) and aquafunk (an undulant, slow-mo groove that feels like skanking underwater). With Steve Hillage’s cirrus-streaks of heavily sustained guitar offset by Jah Wobble’s thunderquake bass, ‘Blue Room’ was an astonishing reconciliation of hippy and post-punk; imagine Public Image Limited if Johnny Rotten had never famously scrawled ‘I Hate’ in felt-pen over his Pink Floyd T-shirt.
had
been waiting, and next summer, the band’s follow-up,
u. f. orb
, went straight into the British Album Charts at Number One. It was preceded by a single, ‘Blue Room’, which got to Number Eight in the hit parade, despite being just under forty minutes long and featuring only one real hook: ‘ah wah wah a wah wah’, the wordless siren-song of reggae vocalist Aisha, the protégé of UK dub wizard the Mad Professor. Paterson and Thrash appeared on
Top of the Pops
, but instead of miming with instruments, they played a
Star Trek-
style 3D chess-set in front of back-projected film of aquabatic dolphins. Named after the room at the Wright Patterson airforce base where the remains of crash-landed aliens are allegedly kept by the US government, ‘Blue Room’ alternates between ambience (synth-motes like spangly space debris) and aquafunk (an undulant, slow-mo groove that feels like skanking underwater). With Steve Hillage’s cirrus-streaks of heavily sustained guitar offset by Jah Wobble’s thunderquake bass, ‘Blue Room’ was an astonishing reconciliation of hippy and post-punk; imagine Public Image Limited if Johnny Rotten had never famously scrawled ‘I Hate’ in felt-pen over his Pink Floyd T-shirt.
On
u. f. orb
itself, ‘Towers of Dub’ began with a Victor Lewis-Smith phone prank. The posh-voiced comedian calls London Weekend Television and, pretending to be Marcus Garvey, asks if Haile Selassie is waiting in reception: ‘He’s a, erm, black gentleman.’ After the hapless receptionist has shouted out for the long-dead Abyssinian monarch and Rastafarian Messiah, Lewis-Smith asks him to pass on the message that ‘I’ll meet him at Babylon an’ ting.’ Combining and conflating the studio-as-instrument effects of several forms of ‘head’ music – acid rock, dub reggae, ambient – The Orb offered a musiquarium of sound that seemed to have migrated from an alternative pop universe: one where Pink Floyd, Brian Eno and King Tubby got together to form a seventies supergroup bringing ‘cosmic ambient dub’ to the stadium circuit.
u. f. orb
itself, ‘Towers of Dub’ began with a Victor Lewis-Smith phone prank. The posh-voiced comedian calls London Weekend Television and, pretending to be Marcus Garvey, asks if Haile Selassie is waiting in reception: ‘He’s a, erm, black gentleman.’ After the hapless receptionist has shouted out for the long-dead Abyssinian monarch and Rastafarian Messiah, Lewis-Smith asks him to pass on the message that ‘I’ll meet him at Babylon an’ ting.’ Combining and conflating the studio-as-instrument effects of several forms of ‘head’ music – acid rock, dub reggae, ambient – The Orb offered a musiquarium of sound that seemed to have migrated from an alternative pop universe: one where Pink Floyd, Brian Eno and King Tubby got together to form a seventies supergroup bringing ‘cosmic ambient dub’ to the stadium circuit.
By this point, The Orb
had
built up a formidable reputation as a live band. After ‘Blue Room’, they scored another big hit with ‘Assassin’, an uncharacteristically uptempo onslaught of tribal house rhythms and quicksilver, scimitar-flashing riffs. The best of the five mixes was recorded live at the 1992 Glastonbury Festival. The following year saw
Live 93
, a double-CD/quadruple-LP that recalled The Grateful Dead in the way that The Orb improvised wildly around a core of pre-recorded sequences. Catching the Orb tour when it reached New York’s Roseland Theater in the autumn of 1993, I did spot straggly-bearded Deadhead types headnodding in the audience alongside the sixteen-year-old ravers. And I was struck by how everything about The Orb – from the cloud-castle immensity of the sound to the ama-a-a-a-zing visuals – was spectacular but impersonal. The band themselves figured as ‘specks on their own landscape’ (as David Stubbs said of the German neo-psychedelic group Faust). Throughout the show, Paterson and Thrash remained shrouded, bobble-hatted figures lurking behind their banks of gear, technicians in the stereo-laboratory as opposed to stars. Like a planetarium or a piece of majestic architecture, The Orb’s music seemed to invite awe rather than involvement. And yet the grandiosity was veined with Monty Pythonesque daftness and post-punk irony, prompting me to wonder: can you really kiss the sky with your tongue-in-cheek?
Lie Down and Be Countedhad
built up a formidable reputation as a live band. After ‘Blue Room’, they scored another big hit with ‘Assassin’, an uncharacteristically uptempo onslaught of tribal house rhythms and quicksilver, scimitar-flashing riffs. The best of the five mixes was recorded live at the 1992 Glastonbury Festival. The following year saw
Live 93
, a double-CD/quadruple-LP that recalled The Grateful Dead in the way that The Orb improvised wildly around a core of pre-recorded sequences. Catching the Orb tour when it reached New York’s Roseland Theater in the autumn of 1993, I did spot straggly-bearded Deadhead types headnodding in the audience alongside the sixteen-year-old ravers. And I was struck by how everything about The Orb – from the cloud-castle immensity of the sound to the ama-a-a-a-zing visuals – was spectacular but impersonal. The band themselves figured as ‘specks on their own landscape’ (as David Stubbs said of the German neo-psychedelic group Faust). Throughout the show, Paterson and Thrash remained shrouded, bobble-hatted figures lurking behind their banks of gear, technicians in the stereo-laboratory as opposed to stars. Like a planetarium or a piece of majestic architecture, The Orb’s music seemed to invite awe rather than involvement. And yet the grandiosity was veined with Monty Pythonesque daftness and post-punk irony, prompting me to wonder: can you really kiss the sky with your tongue-in-cheek?
The immediate effect of The Orb’s success was to spawn a plague of ambient dub, aka digi-dub. While the fad generated a handful of genuinely sublime moments – Higher Intelligence Agency’s ‘Ketamine Entity’, Original Rockers ‘The Underwater World of Jah Cousteau’ – the trouble with the genre was that it was one of those hybrids, like jazz-funk and funk-metal, that only
seem
like a good idea. Too often, instead of Harold Budd meets Prince Far I, the results were more like Vangelis teaming up with Adrian Sherwood on an off-night: celestial synth-vapour (ambient) + meaninglessly overdone echo FX and stereophonic tomfoolery (dub).
seem
like a good idea. Too often, instead of Harold Budd meets Prince Far I, the results were more like Vangelis teaming up with Adrian Sherwood on an off-night: celestial synth-vapour (ambient) + meaninglessly overdone echo FX and stereophonic tomfoolery (dub).
The original roots music of seventies Jamaica had a spiritual halo, a halcyon haze, that the British digi-dub outfits tried and failed to recover; smoking vast quantities of weed wasn’t enough. Partly this was because producers like Tubby, Lee Perry and Keith Hudson used lo-fi technology: self-cobbled effects, four-track recording (which meant that several instrumental parts had to be compressed on to one track, thereby creating classic dub’s blissful blurriness). And partly it was because the Jamaican dubmeisters combined flesh-and-blood musicians with studio wizardry to achieve an uncanny fusion of presence and absence, funky feel and disembodied drift. The high-definition gloss and inelastic, sequenced rhythms of digital dub can’t compare with the earthy-but-otherwordly vibe the Jamaicans got by taking a supple, interactive rhythm section and feeding it through the hall-of-mirrors vortex of the mixing desk. The analogue echo and reverb units cobbled together by the original Jamaican dub producers created a smudgy reverberance that feels closer to real-world acoustics. So instead of roots reggae’s sacrosanct expanse, most ambient dub evoked only the virtual, geometrically plotted space of MIDI hardware: the music smelled sterile, not ambrosial.
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