Beltram

Joey Beltram

Classics

R&S

eMusic (i think) (mid-2000s?)

It was once  rumored that Joey Beltram was going to produce the next Metallica album. Back in 1992 that didn't seem so fanciful, though. Techno was considered the Next Big Thing,  US record industry mavens like Rick Rubin were signing up rave acts, and Queens boy Beltram was one of the hottest producers around.  Techno landmarks, his all-time classics "Energy Flash" (1990) and "Mentasm"  (1991) announced and then intensified a new hard, dark direction in rave music, a literally divisive  development that ultimately caused the  global subculture to fragment into radically opposed genres.

The curious thing about "Energy Flash" is that while many house connoisseurs were horrified by what it spawned (an ultra-fast, industrial-tinged  style  from Northern Europe they dissed as "heavy metal techno"),  the original  track itself is almost universally loved.  House purists dug it as a late-period "acid" track, while in America the tune was licensed by Derrick May's Transmat label, revered by all Detroit disciples. Yet equally the young ravers who would soon invent jungle, gabba and trance could smell the future in "Energy Flash".

What does it sound like, though? The pummeling, naggingly hypnotic bass-pulse is the obvious hook, and the sinister synth-ripples and creepy male voice whispering "acid, ecstasy" add atmosphere. But what really makes "Energy Flash" is the fantastic drum track, those massively reverbed snare crashes in the back of the mix that create the feeling of a  controlled stampede. "Flash" is a paragon of the tricky techno art of building and building the intensity without ever  losing the quality of maniacal fixatedness.

"Mentasm", a collaboration with Mundo Muzique as Second Phase,  took this hard-riffing style even further.  To use a metal  analogy, if "Flash" was "Whole Lotta Love", then "Mentasm" was  "Iron Man".   Its signature sound--a  snaking, gaseous synth-noise evocative of  dangerously delirious bliss--is the selling point, but as with  "Flash,"  clever drum programming (metallic snare crashes coming in at a strange angle to the groove) plays a crucial role in keeping you rapt by this exercise in monstrous monotony.  "Mentasm" served as a huge polarizer, its apocalyptic bombast being taken by many techno aficionados as the harbinger of a troubling new Brutalism in dance music -  barbaric and even faintly fascistic (an impression strengthened by imitators with titles like "Dominator")

The rest of Classics comprises Beltram's other quality productions of  the early Nineties,  tunes like "My Sound" and "Sub-Bass Experience" in a similarly cold and punitive mold to "Flash" and "Mentasm" but lacking their titanic aura.  After inventing "hardcore", Beltram  veered away in a minimalist direction, becoming a respected but minor auteur--a trajectory that mirrored techno's own journey from being the sound that  mobilized ravers across the world to being just one of a panoply of post-rave genres.

JOEY BELTRAM / THE ADVENT, Tresor versus Limelight, New York

Village Voice, November 14th, 2000

by Simon Reynolds

It's a strange notion, this idea of clubs going on tour. For what else defines a club if not the specificity of a space and the vibe generated there by resident DJs and a regular crowd? Limelight's bimonthly collaboration with Berlin's legendary Tresor seems especially bizarre, because physically the two places couldn't be less similar. Tresor's main floor—-once the subterranean safe of Europe's biggest department store—-is a low-ceilinged sweatbox, whereas Limelight's is airily voluminous, like you'd expect from a converted church.

Musically, they're more compatible, given Limelight's recent self-reinvention as home for "serious" techno as purveyed by DJ/producers like Jeff Mills and Surgeon, who've both recorded for the Tresor label. Last Saturday, the Berlin-New York alliance was inaugurated by two other Tresor affiliates, Joey Beltram and the Advent. Both emerged at a time when "techno" referred to the soundtrack of rave in its entirety, and was unashamedly bangin', kickin', and slammin'. And both have followed the logic of purism that transformed techno from people's choice in the early '90s to its current status as just one of many subgenres.

Queens boy Beltram earned his place in the Rave Hall of Fame with two eternal classics: 1990's "Energy Flash" (a foundational track for everyone from tranceheads to junglists to gabba fiends, possibly the last anthem of the era when the rave nation was one) and 1991's "Mentasm" (whose dark-swoon swarm-drone of blaring synth distortion is one of rave's six or seven immortal sounds). At some point, Beltram crossed the subtle but crucial divide between hardcore and hard techno, purging the E-rush triggering elements in his sound and settling for a more subdued but "credible" post-rave career. His Limelight set alternated between spangly filter house and minimal-but-muscular techno, and, while never as perfunctory as his old friend/foe Frankie Bones, still felt like a hard day's night at the pleasure factory. Oh, the kids dug it well enough, but gazing at their pursed lips and rolled-back eyes, I couldn't help thinking they were wasting good drugs on nothing special. From the passed-out guy on a pew to the candy-raver hypnotized by her gyrating glowstick-gadget and the clean-cut techno warriors punching the air with grim fervour, it's the same old scene(s) you've seen since the East Coast first got it on back in 1991, courtesy of Beltram's erstwhile Brooklyn buddies—-but with a little less in the way of surprise, or point, every passing year.

Recently slimmed from a duo to just Cisco Ferreira, the Advent immediately broke Beltram's deadlocked groove with some Gothic electro, introducing such barely-heard-that-night novelties as syncopation, basslines, even melody. But even in more typical pump 'n' pound mode, the Advent's live set had way more internal frisk than Beltram's dour scour, changing gait from surge to lope to sprint to shimmy. Relentlessly abstract, built from loop-riffed sounds like the creak-hiss of a fissuring ice floe or a windshield's smash-tinkle, and offering few latch-points of real-world emotion, it's a sound that can only be evoked via onomatopoeia: This music grunks and rackles. But like Richie Hawtin, the Advent showed that purism doesn't have to mean imaginative poverty or deadening ends. At the set's several peaks, you could stand near a clutch of manic smiley-faced Asian kids, say, and still believe rave's the best fun in town.