Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (35 page)

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Authors: Simon Reynolds

BOOK: Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture
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With it vague conceptual nature and over-ornamented monumentalism,
Lifeforms
is digital progressive rock. Robert Fripp contributed ‘guitar textures’ for ‘Flak’; in an alarming echo of ELP and Deep Purple recording with symphony orchestras, Dougans and Cobain even attempted to do a classically scored version of ‘Eggshell’. FSOL had merely translated the prog ethos of ostentatious virtuosity into sampladelic terms: their great bugbear was recognizability in sampling. When
The Wire
played the duo ‘mystery tracks’ as a spur to aesthetic debate, FSOL poured scorn on a 1992 ’ardkore anthem by Sonz of A Loop Da Loop Era. ‘Deplorable era and a blind time,’ declared Cobain. ‘Anyone who managed to keep their head in that era and not do that sort of thing has benefited. I’m coming round to the [idea] that being obvious can be really beautiful if you do it well. But that’s a kind of obviousness I hate.’ Strangely, while Sonz tracks are fondly regarded as rave classics and producer Danny Breaks is a highly respected drum and bass
auteur
, nobody – not even the reviewers who hailed FSOL as sound-sculptors
non-pareil
– has much to say about
Lifeforms
these days. It’s ELP and King Crimson all over again.
Metronomic Underground
 
One evening in mid-1992, I checked out Knowledge, a ‘proper techno’ night run by DJs Colin Faver and Colin Dale at London’s SW1 club. I was immediately struck by the ascetic decor and the curiously sober frenzy of the mostly white-male audience (many sporting the shaven-haired ‘Slaphead’ look of the classic techno purist). Of course, nary a breakbeat was heard all night. (Lycra? Forget it.) Speaking to
iD
, Colin Dale explained the anti-hardcore agenda: ‘That’s why we started Knowledge – to show there was better music than the breakbeat stuff around.’
At Knowledge and similar clubs like Eurobeat 2000, Lost, Final Frontier, The Orbit, Pure and Deep Space the sounds you heard – purist techno,
nouveau
acid and hard trance from labels like Canada’s +8, Holland’s Djax-Up, Germany’s Tresor and Labworks – were dancefloor-oriented, body-coercive cousins of armchair techno. Despite its fierce physicality, these styles shared the same cerebral cast: the boy’s own aura of anal-retentive expertise, the vague, ill-defined conviction that something radical was at stake in this music. This was rave music purged of cheesy ravey-ness (the breakbeat, the sample, the riff-stab, the anthemic chorus, the E’d up sentimentality) and retooled for a student sensibility, that perennial class base for the ‘progressive’ since the late sixties.
Although the new purists paid lipservice to techno’s Black American origins, their sound was starkly European, stripped of Detroit’s jazzy inflections and Chicago’s gay disco sensuality. Instead the whitest, most Kraftwerk-derived aspects of Detroit techno were layered on top of the least funky element in Chicago house, the four-to-the-floor kick-drum. By the end of 1992, this whiter-than-white sound had evolved into Teutonic trance, a hybrid of Tangerine Dream’s cosmic rock and Giorgio Moroder’s Eurodisco, as purveyed by labels like MFS and Harthouse, artists like The Source, Hardfloor, Oliver Lieb, Age of Love, Cosmic Baby and Speedy J.
Where ambient techno is soundscape painting for immobile contemplation, trance is cinematic and kinetic; producers often describe their music in terms of ‘taking the listener on a journey’. Trance is
trip
py, in both the LSD and
motorik
senses of the word, evoking the frictionless trajectories of video-games, virtual reality or the ‘console cowboys’ hurtling through cyberspace in
Neuromancer
. Along with its cyberdelic futurism, trance also has a mystical streak, expressed in hippy-dippy titles like Paul Van Dyk’s ‘Visions Of Shiva’ and Trance Induction’s ‘New Age Heartcore’. ‘Trance’ evokes whirling dervishes, voodoo dancers, and other ritualized techniques for reaching altered states via hyperventilation, dizziness and exhaustion.
Harking back to the ‘purity’ of the pre-rave era, trance revived the acid house sound of 1987 – 8. Presaged by late 1991 tracks like Mundo Muzique’s ‘Acid Pandemonium’, the Roland 303 resurgence really exploded a year later with Hardfloor’s ‘Hardtrance Acperience’, which sold 30,000 in Britain alone. Where the original Chicago acid was ultra-minimalist, the new acieeed was maximalist: ‘Hardtrance’ assembles itself according to an additive logic, gradually layering up at least three 303 bass-pulses (writhing like sex-crazed pythons), Moroder-style Doppler effects, sequencer-riffs, and tier upon tier of percussion. A terrific tension is built up, but there’s no release, no climax.
At its coldly compulsive best – Arpeggiators’ ‘Freedom of Expression’, Trope’s ‘Amphetamine’, Commander Tom’s ‘Are Am Eye’ and ‘Dark Eyes’ – trance exhilarates. But for me, it’s the form of techno that’s most thoroughly in thrall to the sequencer’s precision-locked logic; tracks are grids rather than grooves. With its programmed drum machine beats and punctual pulses, trance resembles an orchestra of metronomes, all subordinate to the timekeeping of that tyrannical conductor, the kick-drum. This predictability is what allows the mind to disengage and ‘trance out’.
Inside every trance producer is a prog-rocker struggling to get out and express himself, worse luck. Take Jam and Spoon. Their brilliant early track ‘Stella’ was part of the R & S label’s flight from Dionysian rave towards Appollonian soft-core. There’s literally no hard core to this track, just a muffled kick-drum, cirrus-swirls of angel’s breath, and a feathery, one-chord pulse-riff that ascends from higher plane to higher plane. ‘Stella’ appeared on a 1992 EP titled ‘Tales From a Danceographic Ocean’ EP – a tongue-in-cheek nod to Yes’s
Tales From Topographic Ocean
s, prog rock’s noodly nadir. Or perhaps it was simple homage, since Jam and Spoon’s debut album was in effect a
quadruple
: two simultaneously released CDs,
Triptomatic Fairy Tales 2001
and
2002
, both crammed with kitschadelic sounds and song titles like ‘Zen Flash Zen Bones’ and ‘Who Opened The Door To Nowhere’.
And then there’s Sven Vath – co-founder of Harthouse and its sister label Eye Q, legendary DJ at the Omen in Frankfurt. In the sleevenotes to 1993’s
Accident In Paradise
, Vath cites his ancestral spirits as Eno, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Harold Budd and Holger Czukay, but also, more tellingly, Peter Gabriel, Vangelis, Andreas Vollenweider and Mozart. With its didgeridoos, mystic-Orient melodies and DAT-recorded aural snapshots from Nepal and Goa,
Accident In Paradise
is a deodorized ethno-techno travelogue. But in true prog-rock fashion, the album is really steeped in nineteenth-century Euro-classical music; all arpeggiated synth-wank and piano trills as frou-frou as Enya, while ‘Coda’ features a harpsichord, for fuck’s sake! The critics loved it (at last! a techno album that ‘works as a whole’ and sounds good on your domestic hi-fi), but even they had no stomach for Vath’s next concept album atrocity
The Harlequin, The Dancer and The Robot
.
Food For Thought
 
‘More participatory musics are more rhythmically complex (and harmonically simple); more contemplative musics are rhythmically simple (and more harmonically complex).’
– Simon Frith on the difference between African based and
European based musics,
Performing Rites
 
 
The struggle between intelligent techno and hardcore was a bitter contest, waged across class and generational lines, to decide who ‘owned’ electronic dance music and what direction it should pursue. This was a schism between non-stop ecstatic dancing and sedate(d) contemplation, between the 12-inch and the album, between the demands of the audience and the prerogatives of the auteur. Neither side of this perennial divide had a monopoly on creativity; the electronic listening music initiative produced some beautiful and innovative sounds. But it’s always struck me as odd that so many people involved in dance music seem to regard the physical response as somehow ‘lesser’. The result was a glut of melodious, middlebrow ‘mindfood’ – music hedged on one side by its disdain for the functionalism of ‘rave fodder’, and on the other by its reluctance to really explore the extremities of mindfuck texturology. By 1995, these soi-disant experimentalists could only rescue themselves from the disembodied anaemia of ‘intelligence’ by rediscovering the breakbeat. Irony of ironies, they had to relearn the score from the hardcore.
SEVEN
 
SLIPPING INTO DARKNESS
 
THE UK RAVE DREAM
TURNS TO NIGHTMARE,
1992 – 93
 
There seems to be a moment, intrinsic to any drug culture, when the scene crosses over into ‘the dark side’. It happened in San Francisco in the late sixties, when heroin, methamphetamine and the terrifyingly intense hallucinogen STP killed Haight Ashbury’s love and peace vibe. In Ecstasy subcultures too, there tends to be a point where the MDMA honeymoon phase comes to an abrupt end; again and again, from Manchester in 1990 to Los Angeles in 1993, the descent into darkness occurs.
What makes British hardcore unique is the way the same shift from utopian to dystopian was reflected in the
music
. By late 1992, the happy rave tunes of 1990 – 91 were being eclipsed by a style called ‘dark side’ or ‘dark-core’; hardcore became haunted by a collective apprehension that ‘we’ve gone too far’. Thematically and sonically, darkside tracks mirrored the long-terms costs of sustained Ecstasy, marijuana and amphetamine use: side-effects such as depression, paranoia, dissociation, audio-hallucinations and creepy sensations of the uncanny.
The titles and sampled soundbites of this era immediately indicate that something is awry in the house of hardcore. There was imagery of brain damage (Bizzy B’s ‘Total Amnesia’, 4 Hero’s ‘Mind Loss (A State of Amnesia)’) and disorientation (2 Bad Mice’s ‘Mass Confusion’, Satin Storm’s ‘Think I’m Going Out Of My Head’). There were tracks about death, like Ed Rush’s ‘Bludclot Artattack’, with its ‘you’ve got a ticket to hell’ sample, and Origin Unknown’s ‘Valley Of the Shadows’, which pivoted around an unnerving soundbite from a BBC documentary about near-death experiences: ‘felt that I was in a long dark tunnel’. And then there were self-reflexive dark tracks that enshrouded the dancefloor in twilight-zone malaise, like Metalheads’ ‘Sinister’ and Bay-B-Kane’s ‘Hello Darkness’ (the title phrase came from a cheeky but thoroughly creepy sample from Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘The Sound of Silence’). Another major darkside trope was the idea of drug intensities as a sinister power source, a malign forcefield in which the raver is suspended and entrapped: DJ Crystl’s ‘Warpdrive’, 4 Hero’s ‘The Power’, and DJ Hype’s ‘Weird Energy’.
Perhaps most perturbing of all was an entire mini-genre of panic-attack songs – Remarc’s ‘Ricky’, Johnny Jungle’s ‘Johnny’, Subnation’s ‘Scottie’ – all of which were based around a sample of someone shouting out a name, as a cry for help or in sheer horror. ‘Scottie’ is the real chiller-killer, both for its superbly rhythmic use of
Evil Dead
soundbites and for the way it dramatizes a psychic struggle between hysteria and resilience: the track oscillates giddily between the whimpered ‘I don’t wanna die’ and the scared-but-determined ‘we’re not gonna die, we’re gonna get out of here’. With its horror movie dialogue (‘is there a way around the bridge?’) doubling up as a musical reference (‘bridges’ being the percussion-only Jame Brown-style breakdowns out of which the track is entirely composed), ‘Scottie’ is horribly claustrophobic.
The stark ’n’ severe drum and bass minimalism of ‘Scottie’ was just one of darkside’s sonic strategies. Using effects like timestretching, pitchshifting and reversing, the darkside producers gave their breakbeats a brittle, metallic sound, like scuttling claws; they layered beats to form a dense mesh of convoluted, convulsive polyrhythm, inducing a febrile feel of in-the-pocket funk and out-of-body delirium. ’Ard-kore’s anthemic choruses and sentimental melodies were stripped away, in favour of gloomy, slimy-sounding electronic textures. Vocal samples were sped-up, slowed-down, reversed and ‘ghosted’, resulting in grotesque hall-of-mirrors distortions of ‘the human’. Sounds swooped and receded within the stereo-field, creating a hair-raising atmosphere of apprehension and persecution; sustained drones and background hums induced tension.
All these sound-warping effects literalize the old ’ardkore imagery of ‘madness’ and ‘going mental’. According to Achim Szepanski, whose Frankfurt label Mille Plateaux attempted a German take on dark-core breakbeat in 1992, these techniques of ‘schizophonia’ (the splitting of sounds from their physical, real-time source) take the listener into the heart of schizophrenic experience. ‘Echo effects allow sound hallucinations to occur . . . forms of perception develop that, strangely, one had previously attributed to lunatics or schizophrenics.’ Harking back to the heavily treated timbres in fifties
musique concrète
and post-punk industrial music, darkside’s repertoire of noises – ‘screaming, chirping, creaking, hissing’, as Szepanski put it –
sound like going insane.
Darkside also imitated or sampled the dissonant motifs developed by horror-movie and thriller soundtrack composers to evoke derangement, foreboding and trauma. (Indeed, Hollywood soundtrack and incidental music is one of the few areas in pop culture where the ideas of avant-garde twentieth-century classical music – serialism, electro-acoustic,
concrète
– have filtered into mass consciousness).
Exuding bad-trippy dread and twitchy, jittery paranoia, dark-core seemed to reflect a sort of collective come-down after the E-fuelled high of 1991 – 2. Alienated, ravers deserted in droves to the milder climes of happy house and mellow garage. But a substantial segment of the rave audience mobilized between 1990 – 92 followed through hardcore’s drug-tech logic all the way into the unknown, the twilight-zone. Forming a sort of avant-garde within Britain’s recreational drug culture, these were ravers who had perversely come to enjoy bad trips and weird vibes. Why? Perhaps because, rather than readjust to normality, it seemed preferable to stick with rave’s ‘living dream’ even when it had turned to living nightmare. Perhaps because any kind of intensity is better than feeling numb.

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