Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (60 page)

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Authors: Simon Reynolds

BOOK: Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture
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‘Rob and I,’ he continued, referring to his engineer partner and ‘perfect interface’, Rob Playford of Moving Shadow, ‘we’re dealing with a subculture that’s took a lot of drugs. Rob and I know how to tap into their heads. When you’re on drugs, don’t go near “Timeless”,’cos it will take your soul out, take it on a fuckin’ journey, and hand it back to you,
smokin
’. We are about tapping into people’s innards.
‘Technically, “Timeless” is like a Rolex,’ Goldie continued, never shy to blow his own trumpet. ‘Beautiful surface, but the mechanism inside is a mindfuck. The loops, they’ve been sculpted, they’re in 4D.’ Drawing parallels between the perspectival trickery of Escher and the
trompe l’oreille
effects of the duo’s production, he claimed that he and Playford were so far ahead of the game that they’d had to coin their own private technical terminology for their favourite effects (‘igniting a loop’, ‘snaking out a break’, ‘tubing a sound’) and pet sounds (‘zord’, ‘blade’, ‘twister’, ‘sub-stain’). ‘We’ve learned to do magic with the bluntest of instruments,’ he said, referring to the way jungle producers work with relatively low-level technology. ‘It’s like my graffiti paintings: give a graphic designer an aerosol and he won’t be able to do shit with it. Nobody can come in and beat us at our own game.’
‘Timeless’ – the title track of Goldie’s major label debut album – took over a year to come out. In the mean time, two other semi-conceptual jungle albums hit the racks, both created by allies of Goldie’s: 4 Hero’s
Parallel Universe
and A Guy Called Gerald’s
Black Secret Technology
. The latter’s title had a double meaning that threaded through the album’s utopian/dystopian content. On one hand, it aligned Gerald Simpson with the black science fiction, Afro-Futurist tradition in pop: Sun Ra as Saturn-born ambassador for the Omniverse, Hendrix landing his ‘kinky machine’, George Clinton’s Mothership taking the Afronauts to a lost homeland on the other side of the galaxy, Afrika Bambaataa’s twin fetish for Kraftwerk’s Teutonic rigour and for Nubian science, Juan Atkins and Derrick May’s cybertronic mindscapes. But Gerald originally heard the phrase ‘black secret technology’ on a TV talk show about government mind control via the media.
The album’s title perfectly captured an ambivalence that runs through the junglist imagination, where technology figures as both orgasmatron (a pleasuredome of artificially induced sensations) and Panopticon (the terrordome in which every individual is constantly under Authority’s punitive gaze). Technology promises ‘total control’, but there’s a deadly ambiguity: does that phrase refer to empowering individuals and facilitating resistance, or to the secret agendas of corporations and government agencies? When it comes to state-of-the-art gadgetry, we’re all potentially in the position of Gene Hackman’s surveillance expert in
The Conversation
, who ends up fucked over by the very machinery of which he’s a virtuoso.
Jungle is a subculture based around abusing technology rather than being abused by it. And so Gerald takes a boyish delight in the sheer ‘deviousness’ of the ever-escalating, technology-mediated struggle between Control and Anarchy. ‘There’s always ways around it,’ he grins. ‘If someone was scanning into this room with a directional microphone, we could scan them back and find out their exact location. When we were at school, we used to fiddle fruit machines. They always came back with some new trick to stop us, but we always got round it. We’d find ways to get credits on Space Invaders’ machines. It was like,
ghetto technology
!’
As with a lot of post-rave producers, there’s something vaguely autoerotic or even autistic about Gerald’s techno-fetishism. When I ask him if he ever feels like a cyborg, in so far as his machines are extensions of his body that give him superhuman powers, he frankly admits that working in his studio, ‘it’s like your own world and you become like the god’. On the album, ‘Cybergen’ is all about an ‘imaginary drug that’s basically virtual reality, you’re in total control of the experience. The vocal says “It’s too late to turn back now,” and that’s making the point that it’s no use saying we can’t cope with this technology, that it’s going to ruin society. ’Cos the technology’s already here. You either cope with it or you’re lost. Kids today are already totally hooked into it. Kids today are frightening! I grew up with records, and now I know how to manipulate them. When today’s kids’ – the Playstation generation, he means – ‘grow up, they’ll know how to manipulate the visual side of it.’
With its synaesthetic textures and three-dimensional, audio-maze spatiality, Gerald’s music anticipates virtual reality. His music actually sounds like a datascape that’s sensorily intoxicating yet teeming with threat. On tracks like ‘Gloc’ and ‘Nazinji-Zaka’, breakbeats writhe like serpents, samples morph and dematerialize like fever-dream hallucinations, itchy ’n’ scratchy blips of texture/rhythm dart and hover like dragonflies. Like the labyrinthine, multi-tiered combat-zones in video-games, jungle offers a drastically intensified aural allegory of the concrete jungle; in Gerald’s case, the gang-infested, post-rave Manchester where he then still lived. ‘The samples of “you’re gonna be a bad motherfucker” are from
Robocop
,’ Gerald says of ‘Gloc’, which was named after the LA gangsta’s favourite automatic weapon, then retitled ‘Cyberjazz’ for the album. ‘It’s the scene where they’re rebuilding the cop as a cyborg after he got shot up. It fits, ’cos the track’s a remix, and I rebuilt it, put it through effects, armoured it.’
Leaving behind the ghetto for the visionary ether, 4 Hero’s
Parallel Universe
cleaved more to the mystical, utopian side of the Afro-futurist imagination. Space is the place where the race can escape terrestrial oppression. With its astrophysical imagery (titles like ‘Solar Emissions’, ‘Terraforming’ and ‘Sunspots’) and jazzy cadences,
Universe
is basically a digitized update of early seventies fusion
à la
Weather Report and Herbie Hancock. This is drum and bass freed of the surly bonds of gravity: quicksilver breakbeats vaporize and deliquesce, succulent keyboards ripple and striate like globules of liquid adrift in Zero-G. On tracks like ‘Wrinkles in Time’ and ‘Shadow Run’, the breaks seem to fluctuate in tempo and pitch, morphing as uncannily as Salvador Dali’s melting clocks. Throughout, the percussion is so extremely and exquisitely processed it’s tactile as much as rhythmic, caressing your skin and kissing your ears.
The Fusion Con
 
Parallel Universe
also illustrates some of the perils of ‘armchair jungle’, though. On the mellow jazz-funk glide of ‘Universal Love’, the creamy ‘real’ vocal and smarmy saxophone seem like a misguided grab for ‘real music’ legitimacy. Similar problems beset Goldie’s
Timeless
, finally released in the summer of 1995 to rapturous praise. Despite the hosannas,
Timeless
was jungle’s
Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts’ Club Band
: 50 per cent genre-bending brilliance, 50 per cent ill-advised attempts to prove Goldie’s versatility.
When he was collaborating with his drum and bass peers – engineer-programmers like Playford, Dillinja, Dego from 4 Hero – the results were astonishing: ‘This Is A Bad’, ‘Jah The Seventh Seal’, ‘Still Life’, ‘Timeless’ itself (a sort of nineties ‘A Day In The Life’, with sixties anomie replaced by nineties millenarian paranoia). But whenever Goldie roped in ‘luminary’ players and vocalists from the jazz-world – Steve Williamson, Cleveland Watkiss, Justina Curtis, Lorna Harris – the results were embarrassing: the jazz-rock odyssey of ‘Sea of Tears’, the mushy mystic quiet stormscape of ‘Adrift’ (which David Toop described as ‘Luther Vandross on acid’). Goldie’s motley array of influences – David Sylvian and Japan, Pat Metheny, Byrne and Eno, Visage, the third Stranglers’ album – proved both a strength and liability. On the worst of
Timeless
, two particularly distressing sources – the slicked-out, early eighties Miles Davis of
Decoy
and
Tutu
, the clinical New Age jazz-fusion of The Yellowjackets – came to the fore, and came perilously close to fulfilling Rob Playford’s fantasy of drum and bass as twenty-first-century progressive rock. Goldie’s second album – 1998’s
Saturnz Return
– went all the way into prog terrain with its sixty minute concept track ‘Mother’ which was recorded with a full string orchestra.
Why did so many artcore junglists avidly embrace the most conventional and middlebrow signifiers of ‘musicality’ – sax solos, over-melismatic singing? The reason was that underneath the bravado and the futurist rhetoric, a secret inferiority complex lurked. Jungle is the most digitalized and sampladelic music on the planet. No acoustic sound is involved, nothing is recorded through a microphone. Jungle is composed from data derived from recordings, video or sound-modules (Pop Tart sized encyclopedias of samples and synth-tones), and it is assembled using programs like Cubase VST (virtual studio technology), which presents loops and motifs in visual form on the computer screen. ‘You feel like a conductor with an orchestra,’ one producer told me. But because jungle relies so heavily on production and effects, many producers secretly believed that ‘musicality’ involved moving away from digital technology.
By the end of 1994, some producers in the intelligent sector of drum and bass had started to abandon samplers for old-fashioned analogue synthesizers and sequencers as used by the early Detroit techno and Chicago house pioneers; these instruments were felt to be more hands-on and ‘musical’ than clicking a mouse. And many began to talk wistfully of working with ‘real’ instruments and vocalists. Omni Trio’s Rob Haigh complained to me at the time, ‘There is nothing worse than seeing house artists trying to get into that live muso vibe. The live element of our music occurs on the dancefloor. House and jungle are sequenced musics, created on computers.’ But few heeded the warning.
When a genre starts to think of itself as ‘intelligent’, this is usually a warning sign that it’s on the verge of losing its edge, or at least its sense of fun. Usually, this progressivist discourse masks a class-based or generational struggle to seize control of a music’s direction; look at the schism between prog rock and heavy metal, between the post-punk vanguard and Oi!, between bohemian art-rap and gangsta, between intelligent techno and ’ardkore. Often, the ‘maturity’ and ‘intelligence’ resides less in the music itself than the way it’s used (reverent, sedentary contemplation as opposed to sweaty, boisterous physicality). The majority of ‘intelligent jungle’ tracks were no smarter in their construction than the ruff ragga-jungle anthems. ‘Intelligence’ merely indicated a preference for certain sounds – bongos, complicated hi-hat patterns, floaty synth-washes, neo-Detroit string sounds – over others that were harsher, more obviously artificial and digitally processed.
It had always been somewhat ironic that jungle’s experimental vanguard resorted to the same rhetoric used in 1992, by evangelists for progressive house and intelligent techno, to dismiss breakbeat hardcore as juvenile and anti-musical. By early 1995, my anxieties about jungle’s upwardly mobile drift towards an ill-conceived maturity became horrendous reality. In record shops, I overheard customers (ap)praising tracks in terms of how ‘clean’ their production was. LTJ Bukem’s club Speed – initially founded on the sound premise of playing the tracks that were too experimental for the ‘jump-up’ junglist DJs to play out – quickly became a smug salon for the new smooth-core sound. In 1993, jungle clubs had been banished to the scuzzy margins of London. With its location just off Charing Cross Road, Speed symbolized the artcore junglists’ desire to remake their once despised scene as a metropolitan élite, just another West End clique like rare groove, Balearic or acid jazz. And it worked: everyone from Deelite has-been Lady Miss Kirby Kier to ancient prog-rock bore turned techno bod Steve Hillage to acid jazz maestro Gilles Peterson to Goldie’s future lover Bjork were jostling to be seen there.
Esotericism, elegance and élitism were now the watchwords. Moving Shadow caught the mood when they coined the ghastly slogan ‘audio couture’; the label’s output suddenly got fatally slick, with almost every release featuring their new house sound of scuttling bongos and what sounded suspiciously like a fretless jazz bass as played by some pony-tailed session man. Throughout the intelligent sector, producers studiously shunned anything that smacked of ragga boisterousness or pop catchiness; instead of hefty chunks of melody/lyric, vocal samples were reduced to the merest mood-establishing tint of abstract emotion, while keyboard motifs rarely amounted to anything as memorable as a riff, just timbral washes and jazzy cadences.
The new hegemony of tepid tastefulness coincided neatly with jungle’s rehabilitation by the very people – critics, A & R people, radio programmers, techno producers – who had derided and marginalized hardcore in 1991 – 3. One example is the case of Pete Tong, Radio One’s leading dance music DJ and A & R for London Record’s dance imprint ffrr. In 1993, Tong had incurred the wrath of the hardcore scene when he remarked during an interview with a rave mag: ‘To be honest the breakbeat house and hardcore just drives me to despair and I’d rather give up than play this. The couple of thousand that still exist for what I call the rave audience, I just don’t want to cater for them. I’ll stand in front of anyone and say it, I think hardcore is boring, uninventive and not musically going anywhere, plus I don’t think it’s selling records anymore . . . When I say dead I mean it’s no longer inventive and it’s gone up its own arse. It’s had a good few years but now it’s time for it to give up.’ In 1994, Tong signed Goldie and DJ Crystl to ffrr; the following year he clinched an exclusive licensing deal with LTJ Bukem’s Good Looking/Looking Good label. At the end of 1995 Tong boasted in
Mixmag
that his proudest achievement that year was breaking Goldie internationally. Legend has it that jungle’s reintegration into the spectrum of ‘cool’ music was symbolized when Tong and Goldie embraced on the dancefloor at Speed.

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