Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (86 page)
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Authors: Simon Reynolds
BOOK: Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture
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In a cruel irony, electronica reached the American mainstream not as crossover pop music that grabbed your attention full-on, but as background music, the soundtrack to TV commercials or ‘interstitial’ music as used on channels like Bravo and ABC News. Massively touted as a star for 1998, Fatboy Slim never really had a proper hit in America, but his tunes were heard in countless commercials and dozens of Hollywood movies, with Moby and the Crystal Method close behind him. Sped-up breakbeats, acid riffs and other Ecstasy-associated sounds were plastered as a glaze of ‘cool’ and ‘contemporary’ over products as square as Mastercard, BMW, Smint breath fresheners and even the US Army. Big beat briefly became the signifier of ‘youth today’, even though far more actual American youth were listening to nu-metal and rap. There were technical reasons why it worked well in commercials: big beat’s high-energy style suited the frantic fast-cut pace of advertising. It also just happens that the advertising industry is based in hipster-dense cities like New York, Los Angeles and London, where electronica at that point was the music of choice for information-technology--wielding young professionals.
Music usually becomes Muzak only after it has been chartpop for a good while, but in America electronica skipped the radio hegemony stage and went straight to ubiquity. The combination of overexposure and lack of real success left American dance culture in an unhappy limbo – neither underground nor mainstream. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the ailing rave scene then started to get a battering from the authorities – a non-coordinated but virtually nationwide campaign of anti-rave legislation at the State or City level local police forces cracking down on promoters and club owners for drug use at their events, and, in New York, overzealous enforcement of the ‘cabaret law’, which forbade dancing in bars unless the proprietor had purchased an expense licence. Continuing the ‘quality of life crimes’ campaign of his predecessor Rudy Giuliani, this was Mayor Bloomberg appealing to property owners concerned about nocturnal noise in their neighbourhoods.
Hang on a minute, why were people
dancing in bars
anyway? The rise of the DJ bar wasn’t just an American trend, but happened on both sides of the Atlantic. As the formerly packed superclubs closed, moved to smaller venues or went irregular, club nights increasingly moved into pubs and bars. These could be vibey (especially if the bar was an illegal after-hours drinking den) and the intimacy was cool compared to the impersonal megaclubs. But small-is-beautiful had serious downsides. Through its evolution at raves and big clubs, this music had reached the point where it was made for large sound systems; the music didn’t achieve the right degree of scale and sensory overload on a bar’s titchy audio set-up. The reduction in the size of events was also a knock to the scene’s self-image. When the massive is no longer
massive
, the vibe diminishes significantly. Dance had contracted to the hardcore believers and the cognoscenti, but the fly by night fashionista types actually play an important role in creating a sense of ‘this is the place to be’. And that floating hipster vote had simply drifted off elsewhere.
dancing in bars
anyway? The rise of the DJ bar wasn’t just an American trend, but happened on both sides of the Atlantic. As the formerly packed superclubs closed, moved to smaller venues or went irregular, club nights increasingly moved into pubs and bars. These could be vibey (especially if the bar was an illegal after-hours drinking den) and the intimacy was cool compared to the impersonal megaclubs. But small-is-beautiful had serious downsides. Through its evolution at raves and big clubs, this music had reached the point where it was made for large sound systems; the music didn’t achieve the right degree of scale and sensory overload on a bar’s titchy audio set-up. The reduction in the size of events was also a knock to the scene’s self-image. When the massive is no longer
massive
, the vibe diminishes significantly. Dance had contracted to the hardcore believers and the cognoscenti, but the fly by night fashionista types actually play an important role in creating a sense of ‘this is the place to be’. And that floating hipster vote had simply drifted off elsewhere.
You knew things were ailing in America’s post-rave dance culture when DJs started emigrating to Europe. In the USA (and in the UK too), smaller crowds and the decreasing number of clubs meant fewer gig opportunities and smaller fees. The superstar jocks clung onto their position at the top (albeit often having to journey much further afield, to territories that were only just entering their dance culture boom-phase, like Latin America). It was the mid-level DJs, the ones who had been making a solid living or were on the verge of going full-time professional, who really felt the crunch. Noticing that the vibe was still alive in Europe, DJs started moving to cities like Barcelona and Berlin because the work prospects were better, the cost of living cheaper and the cultural climate more supportive. The most high-profile émigré was Richie Hawtin. His move to Berlin in 2003 confirmed that Germany was now the spiritual homeland for electronic culture.
Germany was setting the tone musically too. Most of the decade’s leading record labels – Kompakt, B-Pitch Control, Perlon, Playhouse, Get Physical – are based there. And for the greater part of the noughties, the connoisseur consensus sound has been a German invention, microhouse – nowadays an unsatisfactory umbrella term for an increasingly diverging array of sub-styles, but originally a useful and era-defining concept coined by techno writer Philip Sherburne in 2001. As the term suggests, microhouse basically entails the transposition of the minimal techno aesthetic onto the warmer sound-palette and more relaxed, inviting tempo of house.
The groundwork for the genre’s emergence had been laid down in the mid to late nineties by the cluster of producers surrounding Berlin’s twinned labels Basic Channel and Chain Reaction, artists like Porter Ricks, Various Artists, Monolake and Vainqueur. Drawing on dub’s spatiality and subtractive aesthetic, they distilled house down to its barest essence – no songs, no vocals, barely any melodies, sometimes not even a drum track. The result was a music made entirely of texture, pulse-rhythm and space. Initially monotonous, Basic Channel/Chain Reaction’s often ten-minute-long tracks gradually revealed themselves to be endlessly inflected, fractal mosaics of flicker-riffs and shimmer-pulses. The musician/critic Kevin Martin coined the term ‘heroin house’ to describe the amniotic/narcotic aura of this sound, as warmly cocooning and spongy as the womb’s velvety lining. The BC/CR minimalist impulse involved seeing just how reduced – in terms of notes – you could make a pulse without it becoming purely percussive, just another beat. On tracks like Maurizio’s ‘M6’ and Resilient’s ‘1.2’, riffs were miniaturized to the point where they became two-note sub-vamps, texture-ripples and tectonic sound-shudders so contourless they were at the lowest threshold of memorability. Yet for all the sound’s abstraction, the BC/CR heart-pulse connected back to Chicago and its primordial ‘jack’ rhythm.
Another key figure who paved the way for microhouse was producer Wolfgang Voigt aka Mike Ink, who, like Basic Channel, gathered around him a coterie of like-minded musicians to record for his labels Profan and Studio 1. Voigt made some ‘heroin house’ himself under the appropriately amorphous moniker Gas, most notably 1998’s awesome
Konigsforst
. Here he sampled refrains and sonorities from German classical music, weaving them into a subtly shifting tapestry over a muffled, changeless four-to-the-floor beat, the reverberance and majesty of the original orchestral recordings creating an atmosphere of airy vastness and altitude that felt positively alpine. In terms of being a midwife to microhouse, though, Voigt’s crucial contribution was founding the record label Kompakt. Just as Basic Channel/Chain Reaction was based around the Berlin techno store Hard Wax, Kompakt took its name from Voigt’s record shop in Cologne, where he worked alongside his partner Michael Mayer, soon to become the most renowned and popular DJ in the microhouse genre.
Konigsforst
. Here he sampled refrains and sonorities from German classical music, weaving them into a subtly shifting tapestry over a muffled, changeless four-to-the-floor beat, the reverberance and majesty of the original orchestral recordings creating an atmosphere of airy vastness and altitude that felt positively alpine. In terms of being a midwife to microhouse, though, Voigt’s crucial contribution was founding the record label Kompakt. Just as Basic Channel/Chain Reaction was based around the Berlin techno store Hard Wax, Kompakt took its name from Voigt’s record shop in Cologne, where he worked alongside his partner Michael Mayer, soon to become the most renowned and popular DJ in the microhouse genre.
There’s a subtle but crucial semantic difference between ‘minimal’ and ‘micro’. Minimal evokes modernist austerity and severity – stark lines, clarity of form, absence of ornament. ‘Micro’ suggests the miniaturization of detail. Where minimal techno records were so reduced they were almost empty, just pure body-battering percussive insistence, microhouse could often be relatively busy, teeming with tiny sonic events. This aesthetic drifted into dance music from the post-Oval realm of glitchtronica, music made out of the hums, tics and crackles generated by vandalized CDs, traumatized hardware and daydreaming machinery. Initially known as ‘clickhouse’ before Sherburne’s neologism caught on, the genre’s brain-tickling intricacy was also influenced by the latest developments in computer software – sequencing and virtual studio programmes like Reason and Fruity Loops, digital signal processing and plug-ins, and Ableton Live. A quantum leap in home studio production, these ‘digital audio workstations’ altered the entire aesthetic of dance music from the late nineties onward. Their dramatic expansion of artists’ ability to fine-tune and fiddle encouraged producers to make tracks full of densely layered detail and to programme rhythms where changes occurred in every single bar. The result was an aesthetic of ‘audio trickle’, as critic Matthew Ingram terms it – music that kept the listening ear diverted with its constant peripheral fluctuations but which often lacked a strong central core.
Mille Plateaux’s
Clicks & Cuts
compilations of 2000 and 2001 corralled a bunch of left-field electronica figures like Curd Duca and Kit Clayton but also a number of key figures who would take the ‘sound dust’ aesthetic onto the dance floor: Jan Jelinek (aka Farben), Vladislav Delay, Thomas Brinkmann, Hakan Libdo, Geez ’n’ Gosh. At this emergent point, microhouse had an eerie but compelling blend of ascetism and sensuality. Listening to artists like Pantytec and Isolee, it was as though house’s song-flesh had been stripped to reveal the music’s inner organs, the grotesque gurgles and base bubblings generated by its gastro-intestinal plumbing. Grooves were constructed out of
musique-concrete
-like timbres, an onomatopoeic cornucopia of ploots, crickles, schlaaps, grunks. But even at their most tic-riddled and Tourettic these were definitely grooves, with an unmistakable wiggle to their walk. Although the rhythmic feel was house, micro’s sensibility still bore the hefty imprint of minimal techno and IDM. But Vladislav Delay made a key shift that pushed the emerging genre closer to deep house. Under the name Luomo, he introduced elements of songfulness and the human voice on the album
Vocal City
. For the sequel,
The Present Lover
, he pushed even further, creating an eighties-tinged quasi-pop even more prominently daubed with female air-freshener vocals, music that had all the dazzling gloss and prissy delicacy of Prefab Sprout and Scritti Politti but little of the melodic memorability.
Clicks & Cuts
compilations of 2000 and 2001 corralled a bunch of left-field electronica figures like Curd Duca and Kit Clayton but also a number of key figures who would take the ‘sound dust’ aesthetic onto the dance floor: Jan Jelinek (aka Farben), Vladislav Delay, Thomas Brinkmann, Hakan Libdo, Geez ’n’ Gosh. At this emergent point, microhouse had an eerie but compelling blend of ascetism and sensuality. Listening to artists like Pantytec and Isolee, it was as though house’s song-flesh had been stripped to reveal the music’s inner organs, the grotesque gurgles and base bubblings generated by its gastro-intestinal plumbing. Grooves were constructed out of
musique-concrete
-like timbres, an onomatopoeic cornucopia of ploots, crickles, schlaaps, grunks. But even at their most tic-riddled and Tourettic these were definitely grooves, with an unmistakable wiggle to their walk. Although the rhythmic feel was house, micro’s sensibility still bore the hefty imprint of minimal techno and IDM. But Vladislav Delay made a key shift that pushed the emerging genre closer to deep house. Under the name Luomo, he introduced elements of songfulness and the human voice on the album
Vocal City
. For the sequel,
The Present Lover
, he pushed even further, creating an eighties-tinged quasi-pop even more prominently daubed with female air-freshener vocals, music that had all the dazzling gloss and prissy delicacy of Prefab Sprout and Scritti Politti but little of the melodic memorability.
A curious but productive tension bubbled inside microhouse, a conflicted relationship to the Black American traditions it drew on. On the face of it, this was house music distanced from its black and gay roots, a European abstraction and distillation that felt ethereal and disembodied even as it worked your body in the club. Yet there was also a pronounced vein of homage to the traditions of blues, gospel and soul that nourished disco and house, from the Playhouse label-affiliated club called Robert Johnson, to artist names like Losoul, to Thomas Brinkmann’s Soul Center records (woven from snippets of raspy R & B vocal and snatches of call-and-response) and Geez ’n’ Gosh’s gospel-sampling albums
My Life With Jesus
and
Nobody Knows
. At the same time there was an equally strong impulse towards Germanic identity. Wolfgang Voigt talked presciently in the late nineties of his fervent desire to create ‘something like a “genuinely German pop music” and throw off the influence of Anglo-American pop (largely based on black American music). This interest in nationality (as opposed to nationalism) led him to investigate Wagner, schlager, Alban Berg, volksmusik, brass bands playing polkas, marches and so forth, all in the quest to locate some kind of German audio-cultural DNA. Hence the Gas records: attempts ‘to ‘bring the German forest to the disco’ that were informed by childhood memories of Voigt family expeditions to the Konigsforst near Cologne and to the Alps.
My Life With Jesus
and
Nobody Knows
. At the same time there was an equally strong impulse towards Germanic identity. Wolfgang Voigt talked presciently in the late nineties of his fervent desire to create ‘something like a “genuinely German pop music” and throw off the influence of Anglo-American pop (largely based on black American music). This interest in nationality (as opposed to nationalism) led him to investigate Wagner, schlager, Alban Berg, volksmusik, brass bands playing polkas, marches and so forth, all in the quest to locate some kind of German audio-cultural DNA. Hence the Gas records: attempts ‘to ‘bring the German forest to the disco’ that were informed by childhood memories of Voigt family expeditions to the Konigsforst near Cologne and to the Alps.
This push-and-pull between Afro-America and Mittel Europa reflected German youth’s mixed feelings about its own culture and history. In a weird way, the German techno community’s obsession with Detroit (Tresor’s talk of a Berlin-Detroit alliance, the 313 phone code T-shirts on sale in Hardwax) was a form of displaced patriotism. Worshipping Detroit became a way back to embracing their own Germanness, which could be comfortably affirmed because Kraftwerk and Moroder were mediated through black people (Detroit’s own Germanophilia). As microhouse evolved, though, the Euro aspect came into the ascendant. Listening to the genre’s leading figures in 2002 – 3, DJs like Michael Mayer and Superpitcher, you started to hear more elements of a strictly nineties and Nordic provenance: sounds that flashed back to Jam & Spoon circa ‘Stella’ and ‘Age of Love’, tunes that bordered on fluffy trance, even tracks that were like a midtempo and tasteful version of gabba. In 2003, Mayer talked of the Kompakt sound as ‘a German sound . . . which is not rooted in black music, but maybe German folk music and polka.’
But instead of tapping into the kind of cultural legacy Wolfgang Voigt had sought to reclaim, microhouse was much more a reflection of contemporary Germany, the modern, forward-looking centre of a unified Europe. The pounding, punishing techno that ruled E-Werk and Tresor in the early nineties had fit the old clichés of Prussian discipline and severity; microhouse, in contrast, was far more sensual, representing a hedonism tempered by taste. Again, the contrast between ‘minimal’ and ‘micro’ was telling. ‘Micro’ has none of ‘minimal’s intimations of renunciation and ascetic spirituality. Micro is suggestive more of exquisitely finessed design features that only the connoisseur appreciates, or even
notices
. Microhouse is music for the generation that grew up with mobile phones and iPods and the gamut of chic portable pleasure-tech (the label name Kompakt is perfectly attuned to this sensibility). You could see this minimal-to-micro shift in men’s hairstyles: the slaphead look of the early nineties techno soldier was replaced by short-but-not-severe hairstyles suggestive of a kind of restrained dandyism, often with a Neu Romantique ironic-retro eighties quality.
notices
. Microhouse is music for the generation that grew up with mobile phones and iPods and the gamut of chic portable pleasure-tech (the label name Kompakt is perfectly attuned to this sensibility). You could see this minimal-to-micro shift in men’s hairstyles: the slaphead look of the early nineties techno soldier was replaced by short-but-not-severe hairstyles suggestive of a kind of restrained dandyism, often with a Neu Romantique ironic-retro eighties quality.
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