Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (40 page)
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Authors: Simon Reynolds
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That said, +8 were eventually as perturbed by the evolution of trance as they were by Dutch gabba. ‘At one hard party in Limburgh in ’92, they had these Thorens turntables that could go to plus 25,’ remembers Aquaviva. ‘The DJ was playing this really heavy trance and the people were dancing like zombies, arms out and bouncing to the 160 – 180 b.p.m. rhythms. This freaked me out, I called it the Nazi waltz. Later I was DJ-ing, playing classic techno and house, and the DJ came up and said: “Can’t you play anything the crowd likes, and that’s y’know, faster?” I vowed never to play in Germany, and in fact it took me a year and half to play there again.’
Nonetheless, there did seem to be a striking affinity between the American Midwestern and German ideas of rave. There was an industrial influence, both environmental (in the Ruhr/General Motors sense) and musical (Euro Body Music). There was even a weird racial link, in so far as Michigan, Minnesota, Illinois and other Midwestern states had a high proportion of German and Scandinavian settlers. ‘I think the Midwest and Northern Europe have a lot of common bonds,’ concurs Aquaviva. ‘I DJ in the South of Europe a lot, and the Mediterranean people are much more laid back, so I play more groovier, house-ier music. Spain has very little in common with Detroit!’
As trance got more metronomic and monolithic, Richie Hawtin dedicated himself to bringing back ‘the groove, the soulfulness’ of the Roland 303 acid sound. ‘To me the 303 always had this weird funkiness, I always found the 303 really
sexy
.’ His response was a drastic drop in tempo on the second Plastikman album, 1994’s
Muzik
, resulting in mid-tempo 303 ballads that took you on a pleasant stroll through the cosmos instead of breaking the speed limit on the Astrobahn. As a DJ, Hawtin was also bucking the trance-core trend for full-on velocity, by mixing in house and even garage tunes. ‘That was during the years after the separation of [techno into different styles]. It was a depressing thing for a lot of us. I’ve always enjoyed playing longer sets. When I do them, I take things up-down, fast-slow, encompassing different kinds of music.’
sexy
.’ His response was a drastic drop in tempo on the second Plastikman album, 1994’s
Muzik
, resulting in mid-tempo 303 ballads that took you on a pleasant stroll through the cosmos instead of breaking the speed limit on the Astrobahn. As a DJ, Hawtin was also bucking the trance-core trend for full-on velocity, by mixing in house and even garage tunes. ‘That was during the years after the separation of [techno into different styles]. It was a depressing thing for a lot of us. I’ve always enjoyed playing longer sets. When I do them, I take things up-down, fast-slow, encompassing different kinds of music.’
This anti-rave philosophy informed +8’s parties in the Midwest. ‘It wasn’t just about playing all new superhard stuff,’ says Aquaviva, ‘It was about two DJs playing the whole night, embracing the old principles of house, when there weren’t enough records being made to play only one style all night.’ Says Hawtin: ‘We’re not putting on raves, we’re not putting on flashy coloured lightshows and your favourite ten DJs. It’s me and John and one or two other people . . . We create some kind of weird atmosphere in a room, put a great system in, and build an atmosphere for people to lose themselves into. Very minimal, stripped down, bare bones, but a lot of thought goes into it.’ +8 did an event called Heaven and Hell, with ‘a black room where it was just very intense, and a chill-out room which was all white – white mattresses, little children’s bathing pools, bowls of fruit. It was like heaven, and it was to make people realize that this music isn’t just about
losing it
.’ Despite the LSD-blotter cover of
Sheet One
, +8 also began to distance themselves from hallucinogens, as they saw the drug abuse get out of hand on the American rave scene. ‘People I know just went overboard with Ecstasy,’ says Hawtin. ‘So there’s a little tag line on the second Plastikman album, that says “Just because you like chocolate cake, doesn’t mean you eat it everyday.” That was just a backhanded way of saying “’Cmon guys, figure it out, get a grip.”’
We Are the Music Makerslosing it
.’ Despite the LSD-blotter cover of
Sheet One
, +8 also began to distance themselves from hallucinogens, as they saw the drug abuse get out of hand on the American rave scene. ‘People I know just went overboard with Ecstasy,’ says Hawtin. ‘So there’s a little tag line on the second Plastikman album, that says “Just because you like chocolate cake, doesn’t mean you eat it everyday.” That was just a backhanded way of saying “’Cmon guys, figure it out, get a grip.”’
Unlike Chicago acid house, Detroit techno was never a drug-oriented music. The word ‘rave’, with its connotations of frenzy and loss-of-control, had never been applicable to the elegant aestheticism of Derrick May and Co. By 1993, the more serious-minded producers in Britain and Europe were embarking on a return to Detroit principles, as a way of sidestepping what they perceived as the drug-determined dead ends of hardcore and hard trance. For guidance, they looked to three figures and three directions: the ‘hi-tech jazz’ being made by Mad Mike under the aegis of Underground Resistance and Red Planet, the austere minimalism of Jeff Mills, and the softcore romanticism of Carl Craig.
Born in 1969 and brought up in Detroit’s middle-class West Side, Craig took Detroit’s Europhile tendencies even further than his mentor Derrick May. As a sensitive teenager, he was into bands like The Cure, Bauhaus and The Smiths. ‘I could relate to Morrissey, ’cos he sounded like somebody who never got any women,’ he says. Alongside his diet of Anglo miserablism and avant-funk like Mark Stewart and Throbbing Gristle (he later named an EP ‘Four Jazz Funk Greats’ in homage to one of TG’s albums), Craig shared the typical Motor City appetite for synth-driven dance music. He dug Prince, Kraftwerk and Italian ‘progressive’ disco. Falling under May’s tutelage, he toured Europe as a member of Rythim Is Rythim, worked on the 1989 remix of ‘Strings of Life’, and in 1991 co-wrote the sublime ‘Kao-Tic Harmony’ (which was released as the flipside of Derrick May’s only nineties release to date, ‘Icon’). By this point, Craig was already making his own tracks and releasing them via his own labels RetroActive and Planet E, using a plethora of whimsical alter-egos: Psyche, BFC (it stood for Betty Ford Clinic), Piece, Six Nine, Shop, Innerzone Orchestra and Paperclip People.
Psyche’s ‘Elements’ was the solitary highlight of
Techno 2
, the disappointing sequel to the Virgin compilation that had first put Detroit on the map. Reflective, in both the ‘introspective’ and ‘opalescent’ senses of the word, ‘Elements’ revealed Craig to be Detroit’s most gifted miniaturist. With its open-hearted yearning and twinkling textures, ‘Elements’ conjured up the image of a lonely boy moping in a bedroom studio, where he combined his lo-tech palette of tone-colours and his teardrops to paint exquisite audio watercolours. There were shades of the electro-calligraphic brushwork of Thomas Leer, Japan and Sylvian/Sakomoto. This wasn’t party-hard music, but the pensive frettings of one of life’s wallflowers. Indeed, the low-key anxiety of ‘Neurotic Behaviour’ (from the first Psyche EP, released in 1990) was a world away from the psychotic tantrums of hardcore techno.
Techno 2
, the disappointing sequel to the Virgin compilation that had first put Detroit on the map. Reflective, in both the ‘introspective’ and ‘opalescent’ senses of the word, ‘Elements’ revealed Craig to be Detroit’s most gifted miniaturist. With its open-hearted yearning and twinkling textures, ‘Elements’ conjured up the image of a lonely boy moping in a bedroom studio, where he combined his lo-tech palette of tone-colours and his teardrops to paint exquisite audio watercolours. There were shades of the electro-calligraphic brushwork of Thomas Leer, Japan and Sylvian/Sakomoto. This wasn’t party-hard music, but the pensive frettings of one of life’s wallflowers. Indeed, the low-key anxiety of ‘Neurotic Behaviour’ (from the first Psyche EP, released in 1990) was a world away from the psychotic tantrums of hardcore techno.
Taking the Detroit desolation of May’s work towards an almost fey forlorn-ness, Craig became a role model for all those techno artists in Britain, like The Black Dog, who wanted to make album-length, home-oriented electronic mindfood. He became the producer’s producer, worshipped for the texturological detail and nuance in his compositions. On BFC’s ‘Galaxy’, the glowing synth-pulse really sounds like the spermazoic spangle of the Milky Way; on ‘Evolution’, the whispery treated breakbeat is a rustle that makes your brain itch, rather than your feet twitch. The guru of softcore, Craig’s tracks generally elevate atmospherics over energy; his rhythms are relentlessly, restlessly intelligent, but rarely that dance-coercive; the rudimentary looped breakbeat on BFC’s ‘Please Stand By’ is inspired by Shut Up And Dance, but it doesn’t capture their ’ardkore fervour. Another Craig classic – Innerzone Orchestra’s 1992 release ‘Bug In The Bassbin’ – has been hailed as a prototype for jungle. But the track’s loping double-bassline and breakbeat shuffle, while engagingly off-kilter, is neither jungalistic nor particularly danceable.
Journalist Tony Marcus’s verdict on the Six Nine track ‘Desire’ – closer to ‘an emotion bomb than a dance record’ – applies to most of Craig’s work. As with the May/Craig collaboration ‘Kao-Tic Harmony’, ‘Desire’ features a keening synth melody that soars up and slides down the octave in fitful lurches; it feels like a kite, whose strings are attached to your heart, being tugged and buffeted by the wind. 1993’s ‘At Les’ – released under Carl’s own name – is even more moistly melancholy. The trickle-down synth-pattern sounds like a syncopated sob, like fat teardrops rolling down a cheek. Like a couple of other early Craig classics, the song reappeared on his 1997 album
More Songs About Food and Revolutionary Art
. The title is a high-minded sounding but vague call to arms. In the spirit of the first-wave Detroit aesthetes, this is a bourgois-bohemian crusade for refinement, taste, elegance. As Craig puts it in the sleevenotes, ‘This is not a revolution against government. This is a revolution against ignorance.’
More Songs About Food and Revolutionary Art
. The title is a high-minded sounding but vague call to arms. In the spirit of the first-wave Detroit aesthetes, this is a bourgois-bohemian crusade for refinement, taste, elegance. As Craig puts it in the sleevenotes, ‘This is not a revolution against government. This is a revolution against ignorance.’
While Carl Craig became the touchstone for many British producers who wanted to make atmospheric home-listening electronica, those who remained committed to the dancefloor looked to Underground Resistance and its former members Jeff Mills and Robert Hood. With Mills and Hood departed, UR became a Mike Banks solo project in all but name. On the ‘Galaxy 2 Galaxy’ double-EP, Banks abandoned juggernaut industrialism for a rhapsodic fusion-tinged sound (‘Hi-Tech Jazz’, as the opening track put it), hints of which had been heard in earlier UR classics like ‘Eye of the Storm’ and ‘Jupiter Jazz’. The warrior-priest iconography endured: the labels depicted Bruce Lee and Geronimo, the latter a nod to Banks’ half Native American ancestry. But the music sounded pacific rather than militant – all fluttery arpeggiated twirls and nimble-fingered fluency. With the cosmic disco of ‘Starsailing’, UR seemed to have finally ascended into the mystic. Engraved into the run-out vinyl of the fourth side of the EP was a proclamation: ‘Alpha / Omega – Final Transmission: I Found It / There Is Existence Other than Us / I Have Transformed. The Tones are the Keys To It All! I’ll Be Back – Mad Mike.’
Any fears that Banks had swapped his rage for space-cadet serenity were partly assuaged by his series of Red Planet EPs. In Mars, the warlike planet, he found an image that perfectly reconciled the militant/ mystic dialectic. Although Jeff Mills now denies that there was ever any anger or politics involved in Underground Resistance, Banks – in his rare public utterances – has spoken out about the twin genocides in his family tree (his mother Blackfoot Indian, his father black) and how they fuel his struggle against the ‘forktongue’ propaganda of the ‘programmers’. Like the Wu Tang Clan’s use of rhymes as ‘liquid swords’, Banks proposes resistance through tribal rhythms, through the war dance. On the ‘Red Planet VI’ EP, the highpoint of the series, ‘Ghostdancer’ is named after the messianic religion that swept through the reservation-trapped and defeat-traumatized Native American tribes in the 1890s – the desperate belief that by dancing and chanting the white invaders could be magicked out of existence and the dead tribespeople brought back to life. Much of the time, however, the sleek sheen of tracks like ‘Skypainter’ and ‘Windwalker’ summons up the spirits of George Benson and Stanley Clarke rather than Crazy Horse and Eldridge Cleaver.
Mills and Hood, meanwhile, were developing their enormously influential brand of minimalist techno with the
Waveform Transmission
album series. 1993’s
Vol. 2
– recorded by Hood as The Vision – proclaimed: ‘This release is dedicated to the form of simplicity the reasoning of vision.’ Hood’s 1994 double-pack ‘Minimal Nation’ and
Internal Empire
album offered the aural equivalent of a bread-and-water regime. Jeff Mills’s output is at least energizing in its stark ferocity. On
Waveform Transmission Vol. 1
and
Vol. 3
, four-on-the-floor techno is taken as hard and fast as it can go without actually turning into gabba. This is techno as monastic discipline, rigour as mortification of the flesh. The spartan frenzy and flagellating pulses of ‘The Hacker’ and ‘Wrath of The Punisher’ are like a scourge for the hedonistic excesses of rave. Chaste, chastening, a chastisement: Mills’s music brings a whole new spin to the drug slang ‘getting caned’.
Waveform Transmission
album series. 1993’s
Vol. 2
– recorded by Hood as The Vision – proclaimed: ‘This release is dedicated to the form of simplicity the reasoning of vision.’ Hood’s 1994 double-pack ‘Minimal Nation’ and
Internal Empire
album offered the aural equivalent of a bread-and-water regime. Jeff Mills’s output is at least energizing in its stark ferocity. On
Waveform Transmission Vol. 1
and
Vol. 3
, four-on-the-floor techno is taken as hard and fast as it can go without actually turning into gabba. This is techno as monastic discipline, rigour as mortification of the flesh. The spartan frenzy and flagellating pulses of ‘The Hacker’ and ‘Wrath of The Punisher’ are like a scourge for the hedonistic excesses of rave. Chaste, chastening, a chastisement: Mills’s music brings a whole new spin to the drug slang ‘getting caned’.
Mills’s other big influence on Detroit purists is his conceptualism.
Waveform Transmission Vol. 3
came with lofty-sounding and frankly pompous sleevenotes: ‘As barriers fall around the world, the need to understand others and the way they live, think and dream is a task that is nearly impossible to imagine without theory and explanation. And as we approach the next century with hope and prosperity, this need soon becomes a necessity rather than a recreational urge.’ For the releases on his own Axis label, Mills’s music became increasingly concept-driven. ‘Cycle 30’, for instance, took the vinyl-innovations of UR to the furthest degree: the release consisted of nine locked grooves, five second riffs and beat-loops that were designed for DJs to use as mixing material. ‘Cycle 30’ also referred to Mills’s belief that ‘roughly every thirty years we seem to repeat ourselves in terms of music, fashion, design . . . In the sixties, there was this thirst for innovation . . . If you go back [thirty years earlier] to the thirties, it’s also a big time of innovation: New York’s World Fair,
Superman
, a lot of home appliances . . . the washing machine and all that crazy stuff, the toaster, the waffle iron.’ Based on his belief in such dubious cycles, Mills argues that the era of minimal techno (allegedly an echo of sixties minimalist art) is about to give way to a form of abstract expressionist techno, with producers bringing more of their signature back into the music.
Keeping the FaithWaveform Transmission Vol. 3
came with lofty-sounding and frankly pompous sleevenotes: ‘As barriers fall around the world, the need to understand others and the way they live, think and dream is a task that is nearly impossible to imagine without theory and explanation. And as we approach the next century with hope and prosperity, this need soon becomes a necessity rather than a recreational urge.’ For the releases on his own Axis label, Mills’s music became increasingly concept-driven. ‘Cycle 30’, for instance, took the vinyl-innovations of UR to the furthest degree: the release consisted of nine locked grooves, five second riffs and beat-loops that were designed for DJs to use as mixing material. ‘Cycle 30’ also referred to Mills’s belief that ‘roughly every thirty years we seem to repeat ourselves in terms of music, fashion, design . . . In the sixties, there was this thirst for innovation . . . If you go back [thirty years earlier] to the thirties, it’s also a big time of innovation: New York’s World Fair,
Superman
, a lot of home appliances . . . the washing machine and all that crazy stuff, the toaster, the waffle iron.’ Based on his belief in such dubious cycles, Mills argues that the era of minimal techno (allegedly an echo of sixties minimalist art) is about to give way to a form of abstract expressionist techno, with producers bringing more of their signature back into the music.
Jeff Mills belongs to a tradition of black scholar-musicians and autodidacts: Sun Ra, Anthony Braxton, Derrick May, DJ Spooky. Instead of inspiring thoughtless, sweaty fun, Mills believes dance music should be the vehicle for lofty intellectualism and weighty-verging-on-ponderous concepts. ‘Let me be very very clear,’ he says, with the barest hint of annoyance. ‘Underground Resistance wasn’t militant, nor was it angry . . . I’m not angry now . . . The music that I make now has absolutely nothing to do with colour. It has nothing to do with man/woman, East/West, up/down, but more [to do with] “the mind”. The mind has no colour . . . There’s this perception that if you’re black and you make music, then you must be angry. Or you must be “deep”. Or you must be out to get money and women. Or you must be high when you made that record. It’s one of the four. And the media does a really good job of staying within those four categories. But in these cases, it’s neither of those.’
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