Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (39 page)

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Authors: Simon Reynolds

BOOK: Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture
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Taking a tangent away from this Teutonic terrordome of the mind’s eye, Pennington’s next outing for UR was one disc of the 1994 double-pack ‘Dark Energy’, an explicitly Afro-centric statement. Bearing the slogan ‘escape the chains on your music’ and a black-edged silhouette of the Dark Continent, the label revealed that the tracks were recorded in the Black Planet Studios (a homage to Public Enemy’s third album
Fear of a Black Planet
) and that ‘Strike Leader James (Suburban Night) Pennington’ was commander in chief of these ‘sonic strikes against programming strongholds’.
On Pennington’s disc, the phosphorescent-sounding ‘Midnight Sunshine’ was inspired by his grandpa’s tales of anti-aircraft flares and by his own ‘infatuation with Playstation flight-simulation games’. ‘Mau Mau (The Spirit)’ was a tribute to the tribal guerrillas who harried white settlers in fifties Kenya. Pennington explains that the track is about how the Mau Mau ‘reigned over’ the European colonists, despite the latter’s technological superiority. With the Black Panthers’ inspired ‘Mind Of A Panther’ completing the tryptych, ‘Dark Energy’ as a whole was about ‘going back to my roots, man . . . my [curiosity about] never seeing my homeland. I can’t say I come from Somali Land, I don’t know. But I wanna get back there. It was great back in that day, with spears and shields, against the cannons and guns.’ The EP was an attempt to draw spiritual sustenance from this mind’s eye Motherland, in order to survive as an exile in AmeriKKKa. ‘It’s a struggle to find where our true roots are. We’ve still got brothers killing brothers. White on black killing. I just think it would be settled a lot more if you knew where you came from and all the things you’d been through as a people. Not just being a slave and colonialism. ’Cos that’s all we know – we don’t know any ethnic dishes. I think we’d be better as a people if we knew that, if I could honestly say to you, “I come from the Zulu tribe”.’
Forbidding Planet
 
Underground Resistance’s musical evolution chimes in with a dialectic that runs through ‘serious’ black pop, a tension between the militant tendency and the mystic impulse. On one hand, there’s the lineage of consciousness-raising agit-prop and righteous rage: The Last Poets, Gil Scott Heron, Public Enemy, KRS1. On the other, there’s the ‘black science fiction’ tradition of otherworldly dreamers and eso-terrorists: Sun Ra, Lee Perry, George Clinton, Earth Wind and Fire, A. R. Kane. With its outer-spatial imagery and utopian/dystopian futurism, most Detroit techno falls into the second camp: transcending terrestial oppression by travelling ‘strange celestial roads’ of the imagination.
Of course, some artists shift back and forth across the militant/ mystic divide; Underground Resistance are a prime example. ‘Where does my fascination with space come from? From wanting to escape from here,’ Mike Banks told
Jockey Slut
magazine in a rare interview. With the album
X-102 Discovers The Rings of Saturn
(1992), the trio left behind terrestial alienation for alien realms. ‘
X-102
was the first release where it became non-territorial,’ says Mills. ‘It’s a planet in the solar system, but it became non-mankind, it exceeded all those barriers and territories.’ Underground Resistance seemed fascinated by Saturn’s inhuman and inhospitable qualities, its hostility to life; the sleevenotes invite the listener to ‘imagine being in an atmosphere where all your god given senses are extinct . . . where your existence is but a mere fragment in a ring around a nucleus that glows like a ball of fire.’ Where most techno evocations of outer space are idyllic verging on twee,
X-102
is harsh and bleak; tracks like ‘Enceladus’, ‘Hyperion’ and ‘Titan’ offer a kind of astral industrial music.
With tracks for each of Saturn’s three rings and nine moons, and one for the planet surface itself,
X-102
was a concept album. The sleevenotes relate information on the composition and possible origins of Saturn’s satellites and rings; on the vinyl version, the grooves are patterned to correspond to the relative width of the rings and the distances
inter alia
. For the next instalment in the series, X-103, Mills and Co turned from one Sun Ra obsession (Saturn) to another: Atlantis. The group spent over six months researching the X-103 project. ‘We had to find out the theories and the facts of Atlantis . . . the shape of the city, what was actually in the temples, and relating things like that to vinyl, how we make the label actually significant, the grooves of the record.’ The inner sleeve depicts a city plan of Atlantis, with its tree-ring like districts orbiting the centre, its palaces, horse-racing stadium, gardens and gymnasia. Although both
Rings of Saturn
and
Atlantis
are brilliant albums, the conceptual overkill, with its odd echo of mid-seventies prog rock, was a worrying sign. It set the tone for Mills’s solo career, in which – by his own admission – concepts took up more of his energy than making the actual music.
Razing the Speed Limit
 
Like Underground Resistance, +8 – the other prime mover in Detroit’s second wave – gradually evolved from industrial-tinged hardcore to a trippy-but-minimal ‘progressive’ techno sound that increasingly came with high-falutin’ concepts attached. The label was formed by Richie Hawtin and John Aquaviva shortly after the pair met at The Shelter, where the nineteen-year-old Hawtin was DJ-ing. Both lived across the border in Canada. Aquaviva was a successful local DJ in London, Ontario, while Hawtin lived in Windsor (the Canadian automotive capital directly adjacent to Detroit), where his British father was a robotic technician at General Motors. Hawtin grew up in an intensely electronic atmosphere, surrounded by computers and the electrical gizmos constructed by his dad, and was exposed from an early age to Hawtin Sr.’s collection of Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream and other synth records. As a teenager, Hawtin got into Front 242-style Euro Body Music, then discovered Detroit techno.
When the pair met in 1989, Aquaviva had been DJ-ing for some time using the moniker J. Aquaviva +8. The name combined a pun on Chicago ‘jack’ tracks with the idea of playing with the Technics pitch-adjust shifted to plus 8 for maximum velocity. ‘At that time, as DJs we were all playing faster,’ remembers Hawtin, ‘When Jeff Mills played on the radio’ – as the Wizard, Mills could be heard six nights a week on WJLB – ‘everything was cranked up, and it was so intense and progressive. [In 1989 – 90] the whole vibe was “let’s go! Screw what’s going on today or yesterday, we’re about what’s going on
tomorrow
!”’
In this spirit, Hawtin and Aquaviva christened their label +8, and, for their second release, put out a white label that bore no artist or track information, just the slogan: ‘The Future Sound of Detroit’. This forthright proclamation – not just ‘we have arrived’, but the implication that the old guard were now history – got the fledgling label a lot of attention, but also put quite a few backs up amongst the first-wave Detroit music-makers: who the fuck were these Caucasian Canuck upstarts? When the track became more widely available in late 1990, ‘Technarchy’ by Cybersonik (Hawtin, Aquaviva and their mate Dan Bell) became a huge anthem in the European rave scene. Its ponderous bumble-bee of a bass riff slotted perfectly next to the bruising bombast of Euro-hardcore, but there was also a unique +8 quality, a cold Midwestern trippiness.
Over the next eighteen months, +8 unleashed a series of progressively faster and fiercer tracks, partly fuelled by their friendly rivalry with Underground Resistance. ‘Vortex’ by Final Exposure (a collaboration between Hawtin and Joey Beltram and Mundo Muzique of Second Phase/‘Mentasm’ fame) is like being sucked up inside a cyclone composed of African killer-bees. Recording solo as F. U. S. E. (it stood for Futuristic Underground Subsonic Experiments), Hawtin revived the acid house Roland 303 sound on mantra-nomic monsters like ‘Substance Abuse’ and ‘F. U.’ The latter might be his all-time masterpiece: an audio-analogue of Vasarely’s op art, ‘F. U.’ and its sequel ‘F. U. 2’ induce a dark exultation, a sense of locked-on-target propulsion.
+8’s headlong escalation to harder-faster extremities peaked in early 1992 with Circuit Breaker’s ‘Overkill’ / ‘Frenz-E’ and Cybersonik’s ‘Thrash’. The latter was intended almost as a piss-take on other rave producers who were equating intensity with hardness and velocity. ‘It got to the point where we felt “wooah, time to put the brakes on!”’ says Hawtin. He and Bell put out one final Cybersonik record at the start of 1993, ‘Machine Gun’ b/w ‘Jackhammer’, crediting its production to The White Noise Association. ‘We don’t even like that record, it was a statement [to the rest of the rave scene] – kind of, “we don’t know what you guys are doing, but it’s not what we’re about”.’
Like ‘progressive’-minded producers across the globe, +8 were aghast at the drug-fuelled dynamic that was driving hardcore techno to new extremes of braindead brutalism. Despite having played no small role in this escalation, they were now recoiling from the remorseless acceleration of the tempo, the increasingly regimented and funkless nature of the rhythms. The music was changing not just because of Ecstasy and amphetamine abuse, but because of the context it was designed for – raves, not clubs. ‘There was a revolution against clubs,’ remembers Aquaviva, ‘Kind of ‘fuck this tired old shit, we’re gonna do our own thing in a warehouse.’ At one-off raves, promoters booked a lot of DJs, so that instead of one or two DJs playing all night for their regular crowd, it shifted to shorter sets.’
Rather than taking the audience on a journey with peaks and lows, the rave DJs played full-on non-stop for the whole of their hour on the decks – partly to avoid being blown away by the next DJs and partly to pander to the drug-fuelled requirements of the audience. ‘Even though the DJs rose in stature, they were handcuffed in what they could do,’ says Aquaviva. ‘DJ-ing as an artform took a step back.’ The music also got harder and faster because the warehouse raves were one-offs. ‘Instead of going to a couple of clubs every week, the tendency was to save your pent-up energy for the one-off rave, go all out . . . All these factors came together and made rave culture into a different animal from club culture – the raves were more like illegal rock ’n’ roll concerts. It was fun at the time, but it got a little out of control.’
The turning point for Hawtin and Aquaviva came in early 1992 when they found themselves in a Rotterdam club called Parkzicht – the crucible for the Dutch ultra-hardcore sound called
gabba
. ‘Gabba is Dutch for buddy,’ says Aquaviva. ‘A lot of the guys are dock workers, they’re into harder music, so gabba is basically the sound of the buddies letting off steam.’ At Parkzicht, the DJs and crowd were very partial to ‘Thrash Beats’, the stripped down version of Cybersonik’s ‘Thrash’ – at 150 b.p.m., the fastest +8 release to date. Hawtin and Aquaviva noticed that the Rotterdam ruffneck audience were yelling along to the song. With slowly dawning horror, they realized that what sounded like a football chant was actually ‘joden, joden’ (‘jews, jews’). In fact, it
was
a football chant, used by supporters of Rotterdam’s team Feynoord against Amsterdam’s Ajax (whose fans sometimes flew the Israeli flag at games, as a proud nod to the city’s Jewish mercantile past). ‘Our Dutch friends are, like, “no worries, it’s just a football chant”,’ says Aquaviva. ‘But I’m like, “fuck that, that’s not who I am. I’m not a Nazi, I can make people rock without making them be hostile.”’
From that point on, +8 changed tack. ‘Intensity = good, hard = bad’ was now the label’s creed; bringing back the funk and the soul to electronic music was the quest. Aquaviva started the house-oriented sub-label Definitive, while Hawtin directed his energies towards the fusion of Detroit techno and Chicago acid via his new alter-ego Plastikman. ‘It was always the one sound that didn’t sound like anything you’d ever heard,’ he says, trying to explain the Roland TB 303’s magnetic appeal. Plastikman’s 1993 debut album
Sheet One
was one long paean to the synergy of 303’s and LSD. Tracks like ‘Plasticine’ offer a kind of monochrome, sensory-deprivation version of psychedelia. The cover – a simulation of a perforated sheet of acid blotters – is so convincing that a young man in Texas, pulled over for a traffic violation, was arrested when the cop saw the CD insert lying on his car seat. ‘He was thrown in jail for a couple of days while the cops tested it,’ says Hawtin, ‘I felt sorry for the kid but I don’t know if he was showing off to his friends, pretending he had acid. I know of other people who’ve sold the CD covers as real acid. There were people who ate the whole thing trying to get a buzz off it.’
Having helped kickstart gabba in Holland with ‘Thrash Beats’, +8 also contributed to the evolution of German trance. Hawtin’s neo-acid direction was an important influence, but the real catalyst was the streamlined kineticism of +8 artist Speedy J, aka Dutch producer Jochem Paap. ‘Along with other Detroit-sounding artists, we were some of the first people to go to Germany,’ says Aquaviva. ‘Towards the end of ’91, we performed at Berlin Independence Days.’ At this music festival, Speedy J played live, and ‘blew us and all the Detroit guys away. And that spurred his track “Pullover” into the huge success that it was. Although he’s Dutch, he’s one of the foreigners who helped put the second wave of Detroit on the map. Speedy is as much Detroit and Chicago as anyone, and he took it to that other level, he set the tone in Europe. [The Germans] had their own scene, but we certainly gave them impetus [to become] one of the techno powerhouses.’
In the mid-nineties, Berlin became a haven for many Detroit producers. Blake Baxter and Jeff Mills moved there for some time; Juan Atkins and Eddie ‘Flashin” Fowlkes released tracks via the Berlin purist techno label Tresor, and collaborated with 3MB’s Thomas Fehlmann and Moritz Von Oswald. Tresor subtitled their second compilation:
Berlin – Detroit: A Techno Alliance
. Underground Resistance were particularly influential on the Frankfurt labels Force Inc and PCP. Citing ‘The Art of Stalking’ as his favourite track of all time, PCP’s The Mover offered a Teutonic take on Suburban Knight’s creepy, crepuscular sound – tracks like ‘Nightflight (Non-Stop To Kaos)’, post-apocalyptic EPs like ‘Frontal Sickness’ and ‘Final Sickness’, and a 12 inch on R & Sreleased under the very UR-like alter-ego Spiritual Combat. Meanwhile, Richie Hawtin and Speedy J’s tracks for +8 influenced the 303-fired hardtrance of labels like Frankfurt’s Harthouse and Berlin’s MFS.

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