Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (37 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
3.94Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
4 Hero and other artists on their label, Reinforced – Rufige Cru, Doc Scott, Nebula II – pioneered the
sound
of darkness too: metallic beats, murky modulated-bass, hideously warped vocals, ectoplasmic smears of sample-texture.
sound
of darkness too: metallic beats, murky modulated-bass, hideously warped vocals, ectoplasmic smears of sample-texture.
Holed up in Reinforced’s HQ – studio, a claustrophobic loft in Dollis Hill, 4 Hero and Rufige’s Cru’s Goldie embarked on marathons of sampladelic research. ‘I remember one session . . . which lasted over three days,’ Goldie told
The Mix
’s Tim Barr in 1996. ‘We’d come up with mad ideas and then try to create them . . . We were sampling from ourselves, and then resampling, twisting sounds around and pushing them into all sorts of places.’ The resulting audio-grotesquerie, collected on fifteen DAT cassettes, offered a vast palette of sinister textures and mindbending effects for Reinforced artists to draw upon. As Goldie put it, ‘we kind of wrote the manual over those three days’.
The Mix
’s Tim Barr in 1996. ‘We’d come up with mad ideas and then try to create them . . . We were sampling from ourselves, and then resampling, twisting sounds around and pushing them into all sorts of places.’ The resulting audio-grotesquerie, collected on fifteen DAT cassettes, offered a vast palette of sinister textures and mindbending effects for Reinforced artists to draw upon. As Goldie put it, ‘we kind of wrote the manual over those three days’.
Perhaps the most crucial component of Reinforced’s sonic arsenal was their mutant versions of the searing, snaking terror-riffs originally invented by Joey ‘Mentasm’ Beltram and the Belgians. The Beltram/ Belgian sound, says 4 Hero’s Dego McFarlane, ‘was like the punk rock of techno . . . Back in ’92, at clubs like AWOL, it was near enough slam-dancing and shit, people got very rowdy in those days.’ Reinforced’s roster took the ‘mentasm stab’ to new intensities of death-ray malignancy. On Nasty Habits’ ‘Here Comes The Drumz’, the riff morphs like the ‘liquid metal’ plasma-flesh of the robo-assassin in
Terminator 2
.
Terminator 2
.
The sound of dark-core is febrile, but it’s a cold fever. Take Rufige Cru tracks like ‘Darkrider’ and ‘Jim Skreech’: the staccato string-stabs, scuttling breaks and shivery textures always make me think of ‘crank bugs’, the speedfreak delusion that insects are crawling under your skin. These tracks are so riddled, so infested with fidgety nuance and frenetic detail, there’s never any point of repose or release: during the breakdown in ‘Darkrider’, midget-riffs keep revving away, like they’re straining at the leash, impatient for the beat to kick in again. So much unrest is programmed into dark era Reinforced tracks, you can’t just trance out, as with house or techno; you’re always on edge.
After the ‘Darkrider’ EP, Rufige Cru’s Goldie adopted the Metalheads moniker and released ‘Terminator’, a track whose anti-naturalistic rhythms constituted a landmark in the evolution of breakbeat hardcore into a
rhythmic psychedelia
. Using pitch-shifting so that at the breakdowns the pitch of the drums veers vertiginously upwards, Goldie created a jagged time-lapse effect: the drums seem to speed up yet simultaneously stay in tempo. ‘Terminator’ sounds as predatorial and remorseless as its movie namesake, the killing man-machine played by Arnold Schwarzenegger. Sent back through time as the ambassador of the sentient War-Machine of the future, the Terminator is the incarnation of will-to-death. In a similarly dystopian cyberpunk vein, Nebula II breakbeat-techno classics ‘Peacemaker’ and ‘X-Plore H-Core’ sound as a coldhearted, inorganic and implacable as a
Robocop
-style cyborg suppressing some twenty-first century inner-city insurrection; synths sting like tear-gas, riffs jab and jolt like electric cattle-prods, android vocals admonish and castigate.
Journey from the Lightrhythmic psychedelia
. Using pitch-shifting so that at the breakdowns the pitch of the drums veers vertiginously upwards, Goldie created a jagged time-lapse effect: the drums seem to speed up yet simultaneously stay in tempo. ‘Terminator’ sounds as predatorial and remorseless as its movie namesake, the killing man-machine played by Arnold Schwarzenegger. Sent back through time as the ambassador of the sentient War-Machine of the future, the Terminator is the incarnation of will-to-death. In a similarly dystopian cyberpunk vein, Nebula II breakbeat-techno classics ‘Peacemaker’ and ‘X-Plore H-Core’ sound as a coldhearted, inorganic and implacable as a
Robocop
-style cyborg suppressing some twenty-first century inner-city insurrection; synths sting like tear-gas, riffs jab and jolt like electric cattle-prods, android vocals admonish and castigate.
Nasty Habits’ ‘Here Comes The Drumz’ is the sound of inner-city turmoil; the track samples a snatch of Public Enemy rabble-rousing, with Chuck D declaiming the title phrase stagefront and Flavor Flav barging in to blurt ‘Confusion!!’ Produced by Doc Scott and released by Reinforced in late 1992, ‘Drumz’ is widely regarded as
the
dark track, the death-knell for happy-rave. What’s striking about ‘Drumz’ is how murky and muddy it sounds. It’s like all the treble frequencies have been stripped away, leaving just low-end turbulence: roiling drums, bass-pressure and ominous industrial drones.
the
dark track, the death-knell for happy-rave. What’s striking about ‘Drumz’ is how murky and muddy it sounds. It’s like all the treble frequencies have been stripped away, leaving just low-end turbulence: roiling drums, bass-pressure and ominous industrial drones.
Dance music theorist Will Straw argues that high-end sounds (strings, pianos, female voices) are coded as ‘feminine’, while low-end frequencies (drums and bass) are coded as ‘masculine’. Purging hardcore’s sped-up, Minnie Mouse vocals and melodramatic strings (the feminine/gay, pop/disco elements that made hardcore full of
jouissance
), darkside producers like Scott created masculinist/minimalist drum and bass, the stark sound of compulsion for compulsion’s sake. This was a connoisseur’s sound: ‘It was mostly DJs who were into dark,’ remembers Slipmatt, a populist DJ associated with the happier kind of hardcore, ‘all I heard from [the punters] was moans.’ Dark-core’s creators were motivated by a conscious drive to take hardcore back underground, by removing all the uplifting elements of commercial crossover rave. Disgusted by 1992’s chart-topping spate of squeaky-voiced, ‘toytown techno’, the scene’s inner circle decided to alienate all the ‘lightweights’ and see who was really down with the programme.
jouissance
), darkside producers like Scott created masculinist/minimalist drum and bass, the stark sound of compulsion for compulsion’s sake. This was a connoisseur’s sound: ‘It was mostly DJs who were into dark,’ remembers Slipmatt, a populist DJ associated with the happier kind of hardcore, ‘all I heard from [the punters] was moans.’ Dark-core’s creators were motivated by a conscious drive to take hardcore back underground, by removing all the uplifting elements of commercial crossover rave. Disgusted by 1992’s chart-topping spate of squeaky-voiced, ‘toytown techno’, the scene’s inner circle decided to alienate all the ‘lightweights’ and see who was really down with the programme.
That, says Dego McFarlane, was the meaning behind 4 Hero’s ‘Journey From the Light’ EP; time to move out of the commercial limelight, away from ‘all the happy stuff’. On this EP, all the effects formerly used to create a heavenly aura in hardcore are subtly tweaked, bent to the sinister. On ‘The Elements’, an angel-choir of varispeeded divas shriek in agony, like they’re been demoted or downsized to hell; a door opens with an ominous creak, then slams; there’s a sample from Don McLean’s ‘American Pie’ – ‘this’ll be the day that I die’ – sped up to sound horribly fey and enfeebled. ‘The Power’ teems with ghost-shivers and maggoty, squirmy sounds. ‘In the Shadow (Sundown)’ features mentasmic riffs so astringent and abrasive, you feel like your cranium is being scoured out, every last sentient speck of grey matter expunged.
Later in 1993, 4 Hero’s ‘Golden Age’ EP and its attendant ‘Golden Age Remixes’ cloaked darker-than-thou themes with a new soft-core sensuality, at once mellow and morbid. ‘Better Place Becomes Reality’ jibes against rave’s pleasuredome of illusions (amazingly, 4 Hero are all straight-edge non-drug users), with its soundbite of a girl complaining ‘we need some
reality
reality, not this artificial reality’. A worm-holey miasma of stereo-panning and disorientating backwards sounds, ‘Students of the Future (Nostradamus: The Revelation – Rufige Cru Mix)’ pivots around the sample: ‘Nostradamus tells us the world will finally come to an end’. The Nostradamus obsession is part of 4 Hero’s interest in prophecy, futurology, science fiction and the loopier end of speculative science writing (books like
Wrinkles In Time
and
Fingerprints of the Gods
). Hip hop and rave culture (4 Hero are children of both) are rife with millenarianism, a feeling that history is accelerating towards some kind of culmination, whether it’s a consummation devoutly to be anticipated or conflagration desperately to be dreaded. ‘A lot of things point to it,’ says McFarlane. ‘If you’ve got any common sense, you look through history: the Dinosaurs came and went . . . How long is it until something like that happens? I’m not saying the world will just blow up like that, but something will happen. The whole human race will die.’
Voodoo Magicreality
reality, not this artificial reality’. A worm-holey miasma of stereo-panning and disorientating backwards sounds, ‘Students of the Future (Nostradamus: The Revelation – Rufige Cru Mix)’ pivots around the sample: ‘Nostradamus tells us the world will finally come to an end’. The Nostradamus obsession is part of 4 Hero’s interest in prophecy, futurology, science fiction and the loopier end of speculative science writing (books like
Wrinkles In Time
and
Fingerprints of the Gods
). Hip hop and rave culture (4 Hero are children of both) are rife with millenarianism, a feeling that history is accelerating towards some kind of culmination, whether it’s a consummation devoutly to be anticipated or conflagration desperately to be dreaded. ‘A lot of things point to it,’ says McFarlane. ‘If you’ve got any common sense, you look through history: the Dinosaurs came and went . . . How long is it until something like that happens? I’m not saying the world will just blow up like that, but something will happen. The whole human race will die.’
‘In delusional insanity . . . we may have a diabolical mysticism, a sort of religious mysticism turned upside down. The same sense of ineffable importance in the smallest events, the same texts and words coming with new meanings, the same voices and visions and leadings and missions, the same controlling by extraneous powers; only this time the emotion is pessimistic: instead of consolations we have desolations; the meanings are dreadful; and the powers are enemies to life’
– William James,
The Varieties of Religious Experience
The Varieties of Religious Experience
Drugs loosen the tyrannical grip of the ego, but they also let loose all the predatorial phantoms and noxious paranoia of the id. So in darkside, there was a strong vein of superstition, surfacing in titles like Doc Scott’s ‘Dark Angel’, Nebula II’s ‘Seance’, Rufige Cru’s ‘Ghosts of My Life’ and Megadrive’s ‘Demon’ (with its ‘fury of a demon possessed me’ sample). Sometimes the imagery was directly drawn from horror-movies, sometimes it was inspired by the residues of a Christian upbringing or by amateur forays into cosmology, angelology and mysticism. But often the pagan, animist imagery simply seems to have seeped up from the collective unconscious, the Dark Ages that we all carry around in our souls.
Boogie Times Tribe’s ‘The Dark Stranger’ is a classic example of the Hollywood horror-movie influence on darkside. Samples from a documentary on the making of the Francis Ford Coppola film
Bram Stoker’s Dracula
– Anthony Hopkins pontificating about ‘the dark side of all human nature’, Gary Oldman muttering about the shadowy intruder ‘who comes for you in the night’ – are juxtaposed with the acid-house era wail ‘girl, I’m starting to lose it’. Where the original version of ‘The Dark Stranger’ verges on corn with its over-use of these soundbites and its hammy-horror soundtrack motifs, the Q-Bass Remix makes the music itself carry the full burden of dread. The remix starts with a hideously voluptuous slow-mo intro of slimy, shuddery sounds, like a chill running up a spine. Then the baleful bass and off-kilter beat kick in: the bass oozing and quaking like death-knell dub, the rhythm dominated by a deeply unsettling, hyper-syncopated hi-hat, like a heart skipping a beat then pounding triple time. Such cardiac arrythmia is a symptom of amphetamine overdose.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula
– Anthony Hopkins pontificating about ‘the dark side of all human nature’, Gary Oldman muttering about the shadowy intruder ‘who comes for you in the night’ – are juxtaposed with the acid-house era wail ‘girl, I’m starting to lose it’. Where the original version of ‘The Dark Stranger’ verges on corn with its over-use of these soundbites and its hammy-horror soundtrack motifs, the Q-Bass Remix makes the music itself carry the full burden of dread. The remix starts with a hideously voluptuous slow-mo intro of slimy, shuddery sounds, like a chill running up a spine. Then the baleful bass and off-kilter beat kick in: the bass oozing and quaking like death-knell dub, the rhythm dominated by a deeply unsettling, hyper-syncopated hi-hat, like a heart skipping a beat then pounding triple time. Such cardiac arrythmia is a symptom of amphetamine overdose.
The parallels between sampladelia and magic have not been lost on its exponents. With his contraptions and arcane, self-invented terminology, the hardcore producer lies somewhere between the mad scientist and the sorcerer with his potions, alembics and spells. Goldie has said that ‘rufige’ was his term for pop-cultural detritus (‘I was using fourth or fifth generation samples, just trash sound’), sonic scum that could nonetheless undergo alchemical transformation in the sampladelic crucible. The DJ too is often regarded as a shaman or dark magus. Rufige Cru’s ‘Darkrider’ is a tribute to Grooverider, worshipped to this day as a ‘god’ for his playing at the legendary dark-core club Rage. Consciously or not, the metaphor of the DJ as ‘rider’ echoes the voodoo notion that the trance-dancer is being ‘ridden’ by the gods, the
loa
. Grooverider’s role is equivalent to the
hungan
or high priest, whose drumming propels the voodoo acolytes into a frenzied state of oblivion. If this seems far-fetched, consider that in Haitian
voudun
, possession by the spirits occurs during the
cassée
, or dissonant percussive break. Dark-core is composed entirely of continuously looped breakbeats; in a sense, the whole music consists of
cassées
.
loa
. Grooverider’s role is equivalent to the
hungan
or high priest, whose drumming propels the voodoo acolytes into a frenzied state of oblivion. If this seems far-fetched, consider that in Haitian
voudun
, possession by the spirits occurs during the
cassée
, or dissonant percussive break. Dark-core is composed entirely of continuously looped breakbeats; in a sense, the whole music consists of
cassées
.
Darkside’s voodoo-imagery – 4 Hero’s ‘Make Yah See Spiders On The Wall (Voodoo Beats)’, Hyper-On Experience’s ‘Lords Of The Null Lines’ with its ‘fucking voodoo magic’ sample from
Predator 2
– was just the latest efflorescence of a metaphor with a long history in house music, from A Guy Called Gerald’s ‘Voodoo Ray’ to D.H.S.’s ‘Holo-Voodoo’. This trope of being bewitched, turned into a
zombi
, pervaded acid house and jack tracks – from Phuture’s ‘Your Only Friend’ (which personified Cocaine as a robot-voiced slave-master) to Sleezy D’s ‘I’ve Lost Control’, on which a dehumanized vocal ascends through panic (‘I’m
losing
it’) to fatalism (‘I’ve lost it’).
Predator 2
– was just the latest efflorescence of a metaphor with a long history in house music, from A Guy Called Gerald’s ‘Voodoo Ray’ to D.H.S.’s ‘Holo-Voodoo’. This trope of being bewitched, turned into a
zombi
, pervaded acid house and jack tracks – from Phuture’s ‘Your Only Friend’ (which personified Cocaine as a robot-voiced slave-master) to Sleezy D’s ‘I’ve Lost Control’, on which a dehumanized vocal ascends through panic (‘I’m
losing
it’) to fatalism (‘I’ve lost it’).
In the mid-nineties, Chicago house returned to the anti-melodic minimalism and slave-to-the-rhythm metaphors of the acieed era. Green Velvet released a series of brilliant ‘dark’ house tracks with Sleezy D-style spoken-voice monologues, ‘I Want To Leave My Body’, ‘Conniption’, ‘Help Me’, ‘The Stalker (I’m Losing My Mind)’ and ‘Flash’. The latter pivots around a hilarious scenario that touched a nerve with rave kids in 1995. The voiceover escorts a gaggle of concerned parents through clubland, showing them what the ‘naughty little kiddies’ do for fun, like smoking joints or inhaling from big balloons of nitrous oxide (‘laughing gas, but this is no laughing matter’). The ‘Flash’ of the chorus is the parents’ cameras taking pictures of the miscreants in the murky club, but it sounds more like a drug ‘flash’: when the track lets rip a double-time battery of martial snares, it’s like a heart going into spasm after too much amyl.
The truth is that there’s always been a dark side to rave culture; almost from the beginning, the ecstatic experience of dance-and-drugs was shadowed by anxiety. ‘Losing it’ is a blissful release from the prisonhouse of identity, but there comes a point at which the relief of ceding self-consciousness/self-control bleeds into a fear of being
controlled
(by a demonic Other: the malign logic of the drug/tech interface). Again and again, the moment of endarkenment recurs in rave subcultures; the nihilism latent in its drug-fuelled utopianism is always lurking, waiting to be hatched.
Darkness Lingerscontrolled
(by a demonic Other: the malign logic of the drug/tech interface). Again and again, the moment of endarkenment recurs in rave subcultures; the nihilism latent in its drug-fuelled utopianism is always lurking, waiting to be hatched.
By the autumn of 1993, the pioneers of dark-core were moving on. 4 Hero began their journey back towards the light. Rufige Cru/Metalheads’ Goldie disparaged the horde of Reinforced copyists, explaining: ‘ “Dark” came from the feeling of breakdown in society. It was winter, clubs were closing, the country was in decline. As an artist, I had to reflect it. But now all these kids have turned it into a joke, they think “dark” is about devil worship.’
Darkside paved the way for
both
the strands of breakbeat music that displaced it: the roisterous, ruffneck menace of jungle, and the densely-textured, ambient-tinged sound of drum and bass. With its premium on headfuck weirdness and disorientating effects, dark-core opened up a vital space for experimentation. In a way, ‘dark’, like the hip-hop term ‘ill’, is a sort of vernacular shorthand for ‘avant-garde’. Many darkside tracks sounded like the improbable return of early eighties avant-funk: PiL’s ‘Death Disco’, 23 Skidoo, Cabaret Voltaire, A Certain Ratio. Dark-core led directly to the artcore explosion of album artists like Goldie. At the same time, darkside’s baleful minimalism was a prequel to jungle’s gangsta militancy. Just like heavy metal kids signing up for Satan’s army, or rappers flirting with psychosis (Cypress Hill’s ‘Insane In The Brain’), aligning yourself with ‘the dark side’ is a way of proclaiming yourself one bad muthafucker.
both
the strands of breakbeat music that displaced it: the roisterous, ruffneck menace of jungle, and the densely-textured, ambient-tinged sound of drum and bass. With its premium on headfuck weirdness and disorientating effects, dark-core opened up a vital space for experimentation. In a way, ‘dark’, like the hip-hop term ‘ill’, is a sort of vernacular shorthand for ‘avant-garde’. Many darkside tracks sounded like the improbable return of early eighties avant-funk: PiL’s ‘Death Disco’, 23 Skidoo, Cabaret Voltaire, A Certain Ratio. Dark-core led directly to the artcore explosion of album artists like Goldie. At the same time, darkside’s baleful minimalism was a prequel to jungle’s gangsta militancy. Just like heavy metal kids signing up for Satan’s army, or rappers flirting with psychosis (Cypress Hill’s ‘Insane In The Brain’), aligning yourself with ‘the dark side’ is a way of proclaiming yourself one bad muthafucker.
Other books
The Little Book by Selden Edwards
Perfectly Able by Daniels, Suzannah
Convincing the Cougar by Jessie Donovan
The I.P.O. by Dan Koontz
Scarecrow’s Dream by Flo Fitzpatrick
Goodnight Mind by Rachel Manber
Keep Smiling Through by Ann Rinaldi
Princess by Sapphire Knight
Leena's Men by Tessie Bradford