Gabba - Melody Maker December 2 1995

 

Routes and futures

 

Various Artists

Routes from the Jungle: Escape Velocity Volume 1

Melody Maker, 1995

by Simon Reynolds 

El Ef Oh!

 

Oddly, never made the connection between the electro roots of Mark 'n' Gaz (who met as members of rival teams in a breakdance contest) and the fact that Tommy Boy put out Frequencies in the USA. 

Tommy Boy also put out 808 State's Ninety, in a remixed form. 

LFO

Sheath

(Warp)

Observer Music Monthly, 2003

It’s a tough time for dance music believers. Mainstream house culture has imploded, with superclubs closing, dance magazines folding, and average sales for 12 inch singles on a steady downward arc. The more cerebral end of home-listening electronica suffers from stylistic fragmentation, overproduction (there’s just too many "pretty good" records being made), and the absence of a truly startling new sound (even a Next Medium-Sized Thing would be a blessing at this point). Trendy young hipsters think dance culture’s passe and really rather naff: these days they’re into bands with riffs, hooky choruses, foxy singers, and good hair, from neo-garage groups like The White Stripes to post-punk revivalists like The Rapture. 

Little wonder, then, that the leading lights of leftfield electronica have been looking back to the early Nineties, when their scene was at the peak of its creativity, cultural preeminence, and popularity. There’s been a spate of retro-rave flavoured releases from the aging Anglo vanguard--a reinvocation (conscious or unconscious, it’s hard to say) of the era when this music was simultaneously the cutting edge and in the pop charts. 

LFO’s Mark Bell is a case in point. Today he’s better known for his production work with Bjork and Depeche Mode, but back in 1990, he was one half of a duo who reached #12 in the UK singles charts with their self-titled debut "LFO". This Leeds group pioneered a style called "bleep", the first truly British mutation of the house and techno streaming over from Chicago and Detroit. In 1991 they released Frequencies, the first really great techno album released anywhere *(unless you count ancestors Kraftwerk, alongside whose godlike genius LFO’s best work ranks, if you ask me). Just about the only bad thing about Sheath, LFO’s third album and first release for seven years, is its title, which I fear is being used in its antideluvian meaning of "condom" (only "rubber johnny" could have been worse). Really, this record should be called Frequencies: the Return. 

Deliberately lo-fi opener "Blown" instantly transports you back to the era of landmark records like Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works 1985-91. All muddy heart-tremor bass, creaky hissing beats and tinkling, tingling rivulets of synth, it has the enchanted, misty-eyed quality of those childhood mornings when you wake to look through frost-embroidered bedroom windows. "Mokeylips" teems with fluorescent pulses and those classic LFO textures that seem to stick to your skin like Velcro. As bracing as snorting a line of Ajax, "Mum-Man" is industrial-strength hardcore of the kind that mashed-up the more mental ravefloors in ’92. With its robot-voice dancemaster commands and videogame zaps, "Freak" harks back further still to LFO’s Eighties roots as teenage electro fans body-popping and spinning on their heads in deserted shopping centres. "Moistly" shimmers and surges with that odd mixture of nervousness and serenity that infused the classic Detroit techno of Derrick May and Carl Craig. And the beat-less tone-poem "Premacy" pierces your heart with its plangent poignancy. 

Electronic music may be suffering from the cruel cycles of cool at the moment, but Sheath (ugh, I really don’t like that title) shows that music of quality and distinction is still coming from that quarter. Yet more proof (if any were still needed) that all-instrumental machine-music can be as emotionally evocative, as sensuously exquisite, as heart-tenderising and soul-nourishing as any rock group you care to mention. (Like for instance Radiohead, whose Thom Yorke, as it happens, was a huge fan of the Northern "bleep" tracks released by Warp in the early Nineties). One can only hope this album finds the audience it deserves.

And some bits from my 2008 FACT celebration of Bleep

LFO

"LFO"

(Warp, 1990)

Kraftwerk reincarnated as a pair of teenage ex-breakdancers from Leeds, LFO's Mark Bell and Gez Varley took bleep into the Top 20 with this immortal classic. Portentous and momentous like "Trans-Europe Express", the opening synth-chords make you feel like you're being ushered you into the presence of greatness. Then that dark probe of a bassline bores its way into the depths of your brain, via your anus. LFO would go on to record the immaculately inventive Frequencies, one of electronic dance music's All Time Top 5 Albums.

LFO

What Is House EP

(Warp, 1992)

Where better to end than with LFO voicing the question originally raised by bleep itself--just how far can house music be stretched and still be house? With its gnarly synth and electronically-distorted spoken-not-sung vocal, the title track sounds like the Fall if Mark E. Smith was reborn as a 20 year old South Yorks pillhead. The concise lyric pays homage to "the pioneers of the hypnotic groove"--from Phuture, Fingers Inc and Adonis to Eno, Tangerine Dream, YMO, Kraftwerk and Depeche--but like all tributes implies: we're more-than-worthy inheritors.

* the first really great techno album

Is this unfair to 808 State, who did Ninety  a year earlier? Maybe, but not really, as I don't really think of that album as techno - it's more like a dreamy, ambient-tinged house record.  Great album, and one that has lasted for me whereas Ex:Cel (which is slightly more techno, even has some hardcore-aspiring tunes on it, and came out in '91) hasn't endured. 

Unfair to anyone else? Not sure what month it came out in '91, but Ultramarine might have pipped LFO to the post - but then again, Every Man and Woman Is A Star isn't really techno, is it? It's more acid meets chillout meets pastoral fusion. 

Also that year was Orbital's debut - but Frequencies wipes the floor with that. 

LFO labelmates Nightmares on Wax also debuted at album length in 1991 but Word of Science is already trying to expand beyond bleep and touching on the downtempo smoker's muzik of their later discography.

Unique 3's Jus' Unique came out in 1990. There's great stuff on it: deep-bleep like "Phase 3" and "Digicality", tuff little unit of a toon "Code 0274", plus the classic singles up to that point. Overall, though, it's not quite on a par with Frequencies - bit too much of an eclectic sprawl, with some Rebel MC-ish rap tracks that are fun but a bit dated.  

DHS did The Difference Between Noise and Music in '91 - I'll have to give that a relisten. Possibly a real contender against LFO.  (I did give it a relisten and it's pretty interesting stuff but not as consummate as Frequencies)

Oh, blimey, how could I forget - there's A Guy Called Gerald's Automanikk, from 1990. I don't  recall it quite being on a par with Frequencies, or even with Ninety (the apposite comparison). The great, all-time Gerald album is Black Secret Technology, with '92 's 28 Gun Bad Boy also a strong statement. 

A couple of contenders - 4 Hero's In Rough Territory (but it's before they've really found their path, and I don't remember it being a great album - a bit rough, in fact, and not ruff-rough). And then Nexus 21's The Rhythm of Life (from as early as '89), which I think is pre-bleep and when they are still very much Detroit-emulative and specifically Kevin Saunderson fanboys.  

Where else could we look for pipping-Frequencies-to-the-post possibles? Detroit? I don't think any of the major artists had done an album-album by that point.  Germany? 

Even more consistent and long-running LFO / Warp / bleep + bass celebration (for the benefit of  certain folks who should know better, and in fact, I wager, actually do know better)

Warp Influences / Classics / Remixes

VARIOUS ARTISTS

Warp 10+1 Influences

Warp 10+2 Classics

Warp 10+3 Remixes

(Warp/Matador)

Spin, 1999

by Simon Reynolds

UK rave started out as that strange thing--a subculture based almost entirely around import records. In 1988-89, British DJs had several years backlog of  feverish house classics to spin,  plus fresh imports from  Chicago, Detroit and New York every week. Homegrown tracks, mostly inferior imitations, couldn't compete. All this changed by early 1990 with a UK explosion of  indie dance labels and the emergence of a distinctively British rave sound  that merged house with elements of hip hop and reggae. Based in the Northern English industrial city Sheffield, Warp was the greatest of these dance independents, and one of the few to survive the era. Released to commemorate the label's tenth anniversary, these three double-CDs showcase the sharp ears and canny self-reinvention skills that have ensured Warp's longevity and continued relevance.

Warp's first phase of cool came as the prime purveyor of  "bleep-and-bass"--a style that owed as much to electro's pocket-calculator melodies and dub reggae's floorquaking sub-bass as it did to acid house's trip-notic compulsion. Much of Classics sound like a direction Kraftwerk could have followed after 1981's Computer World. Sweet Exorcist's "Clonk," for instance, is like Ralf und Florian lost in the K-hole, an inner-spatial  maelstrom of  weird geometry and precise derangement. Ranging from Tricky Disco's cartoon-quirky almost-pop, through the cold urgency of  LFO and Forgemasters, to Nightmares On Wax's proto-darkside disorientation, Classics is a fabulous document of a forgotten era of UK dance culture. Fortuitously, bleep-and-bass sounds fresher than ever today, chiming not just with the electro renaissance within techno (i/F, Ectomorph) but with the dry, drum machine beats, geometric stab-riffs, and chilly-the-most synth-tones audible in recent rap/R&B--Cash Money bounce boys like Juvenile, Ja Rule's "Holla Holla", Timbaland/Missy/Ginuwine.

Influences mostly consists of  sinister acid house from the import-dominated era of Brit-rave. But two inclusions locate the blueprint for early Warp more precisely in that late Eighties phase when twilight electro merged with the harder, tracks-not-songs side of  house. New York outfit Nitro Deluxe's  1987 "Let's Get Brutal" is a vast drumscape underpinned with tectonic shock-waves of sub-bass and topped by a shrill, staccato keyboard vamp made out of a vocal sample played several octaves too high. Kickstarted by the hilarious vocoderized mission statement "we are the original acid house creators/we hate all commercial house masturbators," and motored by a miasmic bassline that recedes into the  mix then swarms back to subsume your consciousness like malevolent fog,  Unique 3's "The Theme"  was actually the first bleep tune; as their old skool name suggests, the group was a North of England B-boy crew turned ravers.

Where Influences works as a superb primer in early house, Remixes intentionally fails to document the post-bleep Warp that most people know-- revered home of Aphex Twin, Black Dog, Autechre and Squarepusher, those godfathers of IDM  (Intelligent Dance Music, or dance music you can't really dance to). Instead, the double-CD  aims to capture the shape-shifting spirit of  the post-rave network (with its one-off collaborations, multiple aliases, and omnivorous eclecticism) by subjecting some of  Warp's finest to remixes from a host of  suspects usual and unusual.  UK post-rockers Four Tet, for instance, take a track from Aphex's Selected Ambient Works Vol II and turn what was originally as lustrous and near-motionless as crystals forming in a solution into a frisky work-out reminiscent of an over-caffeinated Tortoise. 

Highly listenable, the double-CD nonetheless suffers from the cardinal drawback of modern remixology--rather than enhancing the beloved original or locating some latent potential within it, the remixers almost invariably replace it with an all new track containing only a token trace of the ancestor. In that sense, Warp 10+3 Remixes  effectively evokes the present moment in electronica, where too many producers have got so infatuated with technique, they've lost contact with the dancefloor. Whereas Classics captures a lost moment of perfect coexistence between auteurism and popular desire, when experimentalists (like Sweet Exorcist's Richard H. Kirk, formerly of Cabaret Voltaire) briefly got on the good foot.  

Hardcore! - New York Times, January 1993

 For over a year, the most vibrant dance cult in Britain has been "hardcore".  The term originally came from "hardcore techno", a style of electronic rave music that's faster and more brutal than its melodic cousin, house.  A year ago, "hardcore" meant bombastic synthesiser-riffs, programmed machine-rhythms, and a clinical but crazed vibe.  But during 1992, hardcore has evolved into a mutant hybrid of hip hop and techno, merging the former's grit with the latter's futuristic weirdness.  Dee-jays and producers started to take breakbeats from rap records and speed them up. In the process, they retained hip hop's funky syncopation, but at tempos (140 - 150 beats per minute) far faster than any flesh-and-blood drummer couldsustain.

     Like most rave music, hardcore (or 'ardkore, as it's sometimes misspelt in order to exaggerate the subculture's delinquent aura) is brazenly druggy, both in its sound and its lyrical allusions. Hardcore's manic pace has been influenced by the fact that Ecstasy, the raver's stimulant of choice, has become steadily more adulterated with amphetamine. But beyond its function as the soundtrack to the frenetic club-going of a dissolute subculture of speed-freaks, hardcore has been a strong force in the British pop charts in the eighteen months, attracting large numbers of teenyboppers too young to attend raves.  Hardcore is music for the Nintendo generation.  Its hyper-kinetic aesthetic provides a sexless exhiliration similar to that offered by computer games.  (There was even a hit single based around the theme from the game "Tetris"). The music's non-stop barrage of samples and sonic gimmickry appeals to reduced attention spans.

     Like other dance cults, hardcore thrives on a rapid turnover of tracks. Dee-jays search out the latest and most obscure 12 inch singles in order to stay ahead of the competition.  This lack of brand loyalty makes for a climate inimical to long-term careers or artistic development.  Nonetheless, some figures have emerged out of the faceless morass of one-hit wonders.  The most consistently successful of these groups - The Prodigy, Messiah, Eon, Bizarre Inc, Utah Saints, Altern-8 - have recorded albums, and these are now being picked up by American major labels.  The problem is that hardcore works best in 12 inch single form, as mixed into a 'total flow' by a club or pirate radio dee-jay.  The next best format for the music is the 'various artists' compilation, as put out by "hot" labels like Kickin', XL, Rising High, and others.  It's not clear yet whether the scene has generated artists capable of sustaining the listener's interest over the duration of a CD.

     If anyone has come close to achieving this, it's The Prodigy, a techno unit from Essex, near London, whose tally of four consecutive UK chart hits in eighteen months is a feat of longeveity quite remarkable by hardcore's standards.  The Prodigy's creative core, 21 year old Liam Howlett, originally began in the hip hop field, but was drawn into rave culture by its celebratory, socially inclusive atmosphere.  In The Prodigy, he combines the turntable-manipulating skills of rap, with a flair for melody derived from a classical training in piano.  The album "Experience" (Elektra, 9 61365-2) is a breakneak onslaught of bustling beats, soul vocals sped up into shrill chipmunk histrionics, and stuttering synthesisers. Everything in The Prodigy sound is designed to heighten the sense of rush, of headlong, goal-less acceleration.  Like much rave fare, The Prodigy's music is self-reflexive: the songs celebrate the transitory but real communion of the dancefloor ("Everybody In The Place"), the Prodigy's prowess ("Out Of Space", which promises to "take your brain to another dimension"), and the sensation of speed in itself ("Hyperspeed").

     "Experience" includes The Prodigy's smash hit, "Charly", which incorporates a cartoon cat's 'miaoouw' and a toddler's voice from a public service announcement aimed at kids.  Tapping into an infantilistic strain in rave culture (gaudy clothes, dancers sucking on pacifiers), "Charly" inspired numerous imitators, who sampled bygone children's TV themes and playground refrains (Urban Hype's "A Trip To Trumpton", Smart E's "Sesame's Treet", Major Malfunctions' "Ice Cream Van").  On the stand-out track "Ruff In The Jungle Bizness", The Prodigy responds to the hardcore scene's vogue for "junglist" rhythms (dense, roiling percussion and seismic basslines taken from reggae). Throughout the album, there's frequent recourse to another hardcore fad, sampling "ragga" singers.  Ragga is reggae's equivalent to rap, a patois chanting style whose insolent, uproarious quality ('ragga' comes from "raggamuffin") fits perfectly with hardcore's rough, rowdy rhythms.  "Experience" is a perfect document of the hardcore state-of-art. Mr Howlett's genius is his ability to take underground idioms and combine them with the hooks and structure of pop. Similarly, he uses samples not as tacked-on novelty effects but as integral, functioning elements in his songs.

     Utah Saints pull off a similar trick on their hit single "Something Good", the opening track on the debut album "Utah Saints" (London/PLG ------). The song's principal hook - a sample from Kate Bush's "Cloudbusting" - is at once gimmicky and gorgeous. Utah Saints take the first syllable of Ms Bush's chorus, "ooh, I just know that something good is going to happen", and modulate it on a sampling keyboard, distending this single vowel like a glassblower shaping an intricate bauble. In the process, Ms Bush's wide-eyed anticipation is amplified into a spine-tingling shiver of euphoria. This little masterstroke of sampling sorcery is the jewel that elevates an otherwise basic hardcore anthem, complete with raucous chants and octave-hopping piano riffs. On the rest of album, Utah Saints try to pull off the same trick again and again, with diminishing returns. "What Can You Do For Me" is totally dependent on its samples (Annie Lennox, Gwen Guthrie), while "New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84)" is a pointless remake of the Simple Minds song of the same title.  Too often, Utah Saints don't rework their samples or frame them in a new context, like The Prodigy does, but rely on them to make their songs memorable.

   Like "Something Good", Messiah's "Temple Of Dreams" (Def American maxi-single, 9 40655-2) is another fine example of chart-friendly hardcore (both songs were hits in Britain).  Indeed, the track's focal sample is a sped-up incantation by Liz Fraser, whose ethereal style is not too many mystic moons away from Ms Bush. Taken from This Mortal Coil's "Song To The Siren", Ms Fraser's enquiry "did I dream, you dreamed about me?" floats over a locust-swarm of synthesier noise.  Other stray squiggles of noise resemble massively amplified gastric rumblings.  In the UK, Messiah's records are released by Kickin', one of the country's top independent dance labels.  But in the US, Messiah have signed to Def American, whose supremo Rick Rubin is convinced that techno is the new punk. Judging by "Temple Of Dreams", Messiah are more like purveyors of bubblegum hardcore.  Their debut album, to be released this spring, will doubtless reveal more about Messiah's balance of pop appeal and hardcore frenzy.

     Where Utah Saints, Messiah and The Prodigy rely, to varying degrees, on a collage aesthetic, Eon's version of hardcore is based more on pure electronic textures.  On "Void Dweller" (Vinyl Solution/Columbia CK 52472) Eon (London-based DJ-producer Ian B) plays with the idea of disco as a sinister form of possession or mind-control.  Starting with a line hijacked from a science fiction movie ("we will control all that you see and hear"), "Inner Mind" elaborates eerie ripples and vortices of synthesiser drones.  It sounds like a brainwashing machine.  The track that cleaves closest to the contemporary hardcore sound is "Basket Case (White Coat Mix)", whose title chimes in with hardcore's imagery of psychosis, disorientation and catatonia (good records are praised as "mad" or "mental").  The track combines horror soundtrack motifs, spooky laughter, deranged screams and eerie electronic pulsations to create a bedlam of sound.  If "Void Dweller" is successful as an album-length experience, it's because it's mood-muzak, establishing a chilly, creepy atmsophere. This is techno as isolation chamber, rather than party music.

     Rave music has provoked much hostility from rock fans. Ironically, its critics often use the same kind of derogatory terms with which alarmed adults in the Fifties lambasted early rock'n'roll: as mindless, repetitive, barbaric, nihilistic in its pursuit of sensation and kicks.  Veterans of punk, in particular, are offended by hardcore techno, accusing it of "not saying anything", of being apolitical, escapist and nullifying.  Certainly, hardcore is one-dimensional music.  But it commands that dimension with a singleminded intensity that's as close to the primal essence of rock'n'roll as you can get.  It's a techno-pagan celebration of dance, of staying up way past your bedtime, of the sheer kinetic exhiliration of rhythm. Perhaps hardcore techno is the new rock'n'roll - it's certainly erected a new generation gap.

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.

N-Joi / K-Klass / Bassheads / M-People - 20th December 1991

 

review published January 11 1992, Melody Maker

Techno!

TECHNO!

dirctor's cut, Details, 1992 

by Simon Reynolds

2021 preface: below is the first substantial article I did on techno / rave, and probably the first deeply reported piece journalism I ever did, courtesy of the budget of the men's magazine Details, who actually sent me to Belgium (as well as Sevenoaks!). (They drew the line - plus deadline was approaching - at paying for a trip to LA so that bit is a tad second-hand and broad strokes).  (Big up to Jon Savage, originally assigned to do the piece but had to drop out and recommended me as his replacement). In the course of doing it, I interviewed many more people than are actually quoted, including several figures whose enormity in the scheme of things was not quite as apparent then as it would be now. Even those quoted, the bits used are a fraction of the actual interview. (Along the way I also met briefly a shy-seeming Jeff Mills). This was written in spring '92, so I'm still figuring out the scene, taking information on trust from people who weren't necessarily reliable guides. And I've yet to have my "breakbeats are the phuture" revelation. Still it's a relief to see how much I've got right here. You may recognise some bits that get recycled later in Energy Flash - and in a sense this is where that book begins,  doing it gave me a map of the scene and early inklings of how it worked, why it mattered, what it might become. 

Midnight, Saturday, and we're prising our way through a jungle

of hyperactive limbs, exploring the maze of murky catacombs and

fluorescent grottos that is The Labrynth, a hardcore techno club in

North East London. The ultra-violet radiation makes teeth glow with

an eerie, extra-terrestrial hue. It also highlights the dancers'

Ecstasy-ravaged complexions unflatteringly. 

First thing you notice is that every other boy is wearing a

woolly bobble hat, despite the fact that it's like a sauna in here

and that 80 per cent of body heat exits via the your head. The

next thing you notice is that an awful lot of kids here seem to

have flu. Why else would they be rubbing Vicks VapoRub on their

necks, or surreptitiously passing around tubes of nasal decongestant

spray? In fact, it's another drug enhancement technique; the

menthol fumes increase the Ecstasy buzz, and the tingly feeling of

the ointment on the skin helps to bring on a "rush".

    

The Labrynth's denizens are young, proletarian, mostly white

kids from the East End and from Essex, a county on the periphery of

London. Along with the North of England, Essex is one of the UK's

techno strongholds. Although both are very much part of rave

culture, techno is quite different from house music: it's almost

entirely non-vocal, and has little relation to disco or black pop

tradition. There are many kinds of techno, but right now the style

that's all the rage is "hardcore", which is fast-paced (130-140

beats per minute compared with house's 120 b.p.m.), bass-heavy, and

melody-free.

     

Next on the itinerary is The Breakfast Club in Central London,

which starts at 5AM and goes on until midday on Sunday, drawing a

hardcore of the most maniacally committed dancers. The clientele

are mostly male, gaunt and rough-looking. Despite a intensive

bodysearch on entrance, inside there's no shortage of disreputable

types who whisper offers of drugs: "whizz" (speed), "charly"

(cocaine) and various brands of Ecstasy. On the floor, the

atmosphere's somewhere between a Nuremberg rally and a soccer

match. Apocalyptic and bombastic, the music's an ambush of sound

and fury, cyber-Wagner fanfares, bass-quake uproar and blaring

samples.  Juddering, staccato rhythms enforce a new kind of

dancing, all twitches and jerks, like disciplined epilepsy. Close-

cropped boys dance like they' re engaged in kung fu with an

invisible adversary.  Others mold their hands into the shape of

cocked pistols and shake them in cryptic, combative patterns.

    

"The rush is ON", proclaims the MC in a hoarse Cockney holler.

Drugs have a lot to do with the hardcore vibe. Most tablets sold as

Ecstasy are concoctions of amphetamine cut with valium or LSD. Some

kids "neck" (swallow) as many as five in a night, at $25 a shot.

The hardcore fashion for face-pulling or "gurning", probably began

with someone afflicted by temporary ampetamine psychosis. When

you're buzzing on speed, you want to dance frenetically, to tracks

that are "nutty", "turbo-mental", "kickin'", "bangin'", "bone"

(boneheaded), tracks that come in "Nosebleed" mixes and are

broadcast over "plate-shaking" sound-systems.

 But amphetamine hasn't just whipped up the tempo, it's changed

the whole vibe of rave culture. Speed promotes megalomania and

aggression, rather than E's effusive, tactile intimacy. You can see

the difference on the dancefloor. The kids seem self-absorbed, lost

in autistic bliss. In the words of Human Resource's hardcore anthem

"Dominator": "I'm bigger and bolder and rougher and tougher/In

other words, sucker, there is no other/I wanna kiss myself".

Pleasure is expressed in a masochist slang of concussion and

cretinised catatonia: on a good night, you're "faced" (off your

face), "sledgied" (into oblivion), "cabbagded" (braindead).

Complaining that it's so fast all you can do is headbang to it,

the older rave crowd dismiss hardcore as "the new heavy metal".

Alienated by the barbarian influx of techno's young, male fans,

they're trying to institute "the garage revival", a retreat to

smooth, soulful, song-oriented house. For their part, the techno

youth detest "that garage shit" as bland, pseudo-sophisticated,

mediocre jazz-funk. Battle lines have been drawn.

    *       *       *       *       *       *       *           *

Brash, brutal, rowdy and rampant, European techno is produced

and consumed by an almost entirely white subculture. LA Style's

sacrilegious stomping anthem "James Brown Is Dead" proudly

proclaims techno's lack of soul, its severance from black music

history. But the irony is that when it first emerged, techno was

the elegantly minimalist brainchild of black Americans obsessed

with an idealised image of Europe. The story of techno begins in

late Seventies Detroit where three teenage friends - Derrick May,

Kevin Saunderson and Juan Atkins - were literally electrified by

the sound of Kraftwerk's "Trans-Europe Express". Kraftwerk turned

May, Saunderson and Atkins into Europhiles and Futurists,

infatuated with Visage, Ultravox, Depeche Mode, New Order - groups

whose cold, clinical precision was the opposite of black music's

fiery passion and healing warmth.

Juan Atkins was the first to make music, as early as 1981 with

the electro era outfit Cybotron, and then in 1985, as Model 500.

Soon afterwards,  Kevin Saunderson (Reese) and May (Mayday, Rhythim

Is Rhythim) recorded tracks too. May's "Nude Photo" and "Strings

Of Life" stripped disco of its flash and dazzle, turned it into a

theorem. Superficially icy and austere, the music manifested a ne w

kind of "soul", in the sheer power of the rhythms and the

crystalline poignancy of the arrangements.

But techno was always a small, neglected subculture in Detroit,

whose membership has never been more than a few hundred. Even now,

with new artists and labels springing up constantly, there are

still only two techno clubs in the area (Industry in Detroit itself and Vertigo in nearby Windsor, Canada). "There's a sceptical attitude to new things here," says Derrick May. "There's no young beautiful community bubbling. Detroit is like a ghost town".

"British techno is made for raves, so it's in-yer-face, but Detroit

techno is mind-music, it's a more isolated sound," says Richie Hawtin, co-founder of the hip, Windsor-based label +8.   Nonetheless, May, Saunderson and Atkins' ghostly, ghost-town tracks, made in a void, went on to spawn a huge British subculture.

Neil Rushton, a British pop entrepreneur who'd licensed the early

tracks, sold the idea of a "Detroit Techno" compilation to Ten Records. Kevin Saunderson's pop-techno outfit Inner City had two huge world-wide hits with "Big Fun" and "Good Life". But then, abruptly, it all started to go wrong. Disillusioned, Atkins and May dropped

out of music; Saunderson took Inner City in a disastrous "soul "

direction. But the seed had been sown. "Our absence opened the door for a lot of novices in England," says May, who's only just returning to music. "And the door was called 'bleep'."

The Nineties began with a new breed of UK whizzkids making records in their bedrooms, using cheap samplers and outmoded Analog synths (because they sound more artificial, more futuristic, than the latest digital computers), fired up by a do-it-yourself fervour

redolent of punk. Warp Records in Sheffield was a hotbed of talent, with groups like Forgemasters, Sweet Exorcist and the brilliant LFO; Manchester had A Guy Called Gerald and 808 State. But early UK techno's finest moment came with Orbital's "Chime", a  shimmering mantra of hymnal minimalism. Recorded in a couple of hours for a

few dollars, "Chime" went on to become a Top Twenty hit.

Orbital are two brothers, Phil and Paul Hartnoll, from the London commuter belt town of Sevenoaks. They represent the progressive wing of the techno underground; they record poignant techno-symphonies like "Belfast" as well as rampant floor-fillers,

and are one of the few groups who improvise when they play live. Sadly, their exploratory approach became marginalised as the hardcore mentality solidified in 1991.  These days virtually any musical illiterate can cobble together a white label 12 inch by

tossing a few samples from current tracks over a looped, sped-up breakbeat. The market has been flooded with limited edition white labels, whose obscurity makes them highly-sought after by DJ's competing to to play the latest, most underground tracks,

regardless of long-term worth.  Such consumer fetishism fits only

too well, say the Hartnolls, with the hardcore scene's "work hard,

play harder" ethos, where you slave all week to pay for the

weekend's excesses, such is the inflated cost of clubbing and

drugging.

"Everbody goes out on Friday night and again on Saturday," says Paul Hartnoll. "They take their so-called Ecstasy, have a totally mad time, release all their frustrations. By Monday, they're deadbeat zombies, saying 'yes sir, no sir'. All week they're just waiting for Friday. The drugs and the lifestyle subdues them into accepting the drudgery of working life".

 While the likes of Orbital chafe against the dominance of manic b.p.m., others have embraced hardcore. Altern-8's Mark Archer and Chris Peat began as Nexus 21, making Detroit-influenced 'armchair techno' that, unlike hardcore, didn't depend on a huge club system to sound good. When they started to make hardcore tracks based

around seismic bass, gimmicky samples and frenetic break-beats,

they invented Altern-8 as a frivolous alter-ego, in order to keep

Nexus 21's reputation clean. But Altern-8 took off so hugely that

Nexus has been put on hold. With their scams and their wacky

outfits (chemical warfare protection suits and gas-masks, which

simultane ously mock the idea that techno is "faceless" and turn

anonymity into a marketable image) Altern-8 are KLF-style

pranksters. Their Top Three hit "Activ-8" featured a sample of

their label boss' five year old daughter saying "nice one, top one,

get sorted" - a slang phrase for getting high on E that completely

bypassed the BBC censors. Appearing on Top Of The Pops, Altern-8

got the cameraman to zoom in on the jar of Vicks they'd put on top

of their sampler - the equivalent of flaunting a bong or coke spoon

on prime time TV.  Their latest single "E-Vapor-8" cheekily

manages to compact two drug references into a single word.

    *       *       *           *           *           *

 A pop historical analogy: in the Sixties, British groups like

The Stones, Yardbirds, Cream, listened to Robert Johnson, Muddy

Waters, etc, then created their own stylized version of the blues.

Then a new generation of bands, raised on white blues and ignorant

of the original Black American music, arose with their own

coarsened, monstrously exaggerated version of its lust and

aggression. They called it "heavy metal". In the mid-Eighties,

urban blacks in Chicago and Detroit, inspired by Kraftwerk and DAF,

created their own version of Teutonic electronic dance music. By

the early Nineties, a new generation of white European kids,

ignorant both of Kraftwerk and the disco tradition, emerged with

their own brutal, simplistic version of electronic dance. And they

called it "hardcore".

    Talk to rave culture afficianados and you start to hear the

same language that appalled counter culture veterans used to

dismiss heavy metal: techno's been "bastardised", "corrupted",

"degraded", it's macho, bombastic, a soul-less travesty, fascistic.

"I don't even like to use the word 'techno' because   it's been

prostituted in every form you can possibly imagine," says Derrick

May.

 "It's almost as though the Detroit pioneers have spawned a

Frankenstein monster", says rave culture commentator Louise Gray.

"Back in 1988, there was a vague manifesto behind acid house clubs

like Trip and Hedonism, to do with creating some kind of community.

But the next generation of ravers only picked up on the speed of

the music. On the hardcore scene, people are shoving five tablets

of E down their throat a night, in the same way they used to pour

ten pints of beer down their throats."

For people like Derrick May and Louise Gray, hardcore techno

offers the paradox of a degraded avant-gardism, a futuristic music

that's mired in conservatism. In their view, techno can't really

progress, because it lacks any sense of its own history. Certainly,

it's true that techno is in deadlock at the moment, that there's an

intense turnover of tracks but little real advance. But for me,

what's exciting about hardcore is precisely its closeness to rock's

aggression, noise and visceral impact. There's a different vibe to

rave culture today than the heady euphoria of 1988/89.  Just as

psychedelia turned heavy in 1969/70, so rave music's energy has

turned sinister. It's no coincidence that one of the top hardcore

clubs in London goes by the name of Rage. Hardcore is a mad jumble

of emotions, a mix of the celebration of rave and the fury of punk.

All it needs is a group to take that abstract anger and make it

explicit, and you could have the birth of a new insurrectionary

music.

Warriors in the "fight for the right to party", Spiral Tribe

believe techno is an inherently revolutionary music.  A shadowy,

nebulous collective, Spiral Tribe organise illegal parties and out-

door raves, and record and distribute their own white label tracks.

They're part of the crossover between the rave scene and the

"crusty" subculture (squat-dwelling anarcho-punks, nouveau hippies,

and downwardly mobile slackers, who got the name 'crusty' from

their matted dreadlocks and apocalyptic garb).

Hoping to interview the Tribe, I find myself in a dilapidated

squatters' house in North East London, the site of one of the

Spirals' weekly illicit parties. Ten years ago, an equivalent squat

party's soundtrack would have been dub reggae or hippy rock.  But

tonight, a thick, tactile web of techno-voodoo rhythms pulsates

through the murk. Gyrating light-beams glance off walls mottled

with dry rot and mildew, illuminating the Spirals' cryptic

insignia, or refract through the curlicues of marijuana smoke.

Downstairs in the chill-out room, assorted figures huddle by a gas

fire, rolling joints. Some snort ketamine, a drug that's suddenly

returned to favour with the seriously psychedelic wing of rave

culture.  Originally a veterinary anesthesic, at low doses ketamine

induces a sensation of disassociation and floating. Current slang

terms for the drug are 'baby food' (users sink into a blissful,

infantile inertia) and " God' (some users are engulfed in a

heavenly radiance, and, if they're at all religious, become

convinved they've met the Almighty).

A week later I finally get to interview the core members of

Spiral Tribe in the aftermath of another party, this time at a

derelict pub. Upstairs, survivors lie slumped and glazed on soiled

mattresses. On the wall, someone has aerosol-sprayed a pentagram

with the number 23 in one corner. The uncanny power and

omnipresence of the number 23 is one of a motley array of

supernatural beliefs to which the Spirals subscribe.  Expounding

the Tribe's anarcho-mystical rave creed, bobble-hatted spokesperson

Mark has the visionary gleam of a prophet in his eyes.

   

"We keep everything illegal because it's only outside the law

that there's any real life to be had. The real energy in rave

culture comes from illegal dance parties, pirate radio stations,

and white label 12 inches that bypass the record industry

altogether.  Rave is about people creating their own reality. Last

summer, we did a party that went on for fourteen days non-stop.

It's a myth that you need to sleep. Stay awake and you discover the

real edges of reality. You stop believing in all the false reality

that was hammered into you from birth."

  

"In the old days, rock bands had to go to record companies and

sign their souls away just to be able to put out a record." says

Seb, a dishevelled, saucer-eyed music student who's largely

responsible for Spiral Tribe's mutant techno, although he refuses

to be credited on the EP because the Tribe's credo is "no money, no

ego". "But now cheap technology means anyone can do," he continues.

"Just compare the music released on white labels with the stuff

released by major companies - you can taste the freedom.

Rock'n'roll had that freedom once, but very briefly, before it was

turned into a commodity. The industry turns energy into money. We

want to release the trapped energy."

 In the week I've been chasing them for an interview, Spiral

Tribe have been lying low after being the brunt of police

persecution. Following a rave in rural Wiltshire, 34 of them were

arrested, their vehicles were trashed, and the phone line they use

to publicise the location of Spiral events was cut-off. Undaunted,

Spiral Tribe are gearing up for what they anticipate will be "the

maddest summer since 1989", a non-stop conflagration of illegal

raves and altercations with the cops. Kicking it off will be "Sound

System City" on June 21 (Summer Solstice). The aim is to hold a

massive rave as near as possible to Stonehenge, the mystic stone

circle in Wiltshire. Stonehenge was a traditional Solstice

celebration site for hippies and pagan worshippers, until the

police instituted a four-mile exclusion zone around it a few years

ago. This followed a bloody battle with "the travellers", hippy

nomads who wander up and down the British Isles attending "free

festivals".

In the old days, the staple fare of the free festivals was hippy

trance-rock like Hawkwind and Here And Now. But now the travellers

have turned onto rave music. "They recognise that it's free music,"

says Seb. "Last years festivals were the best attended in years,

with the widest range of people ever." The Spirals intend Sound

System City to be the culmination of this process, and the dawn of

a New Age. While they recognise that the club-based hardcore scene

is just the latest version of the working class 'living for the

weekend' ethos, they like to imagine people coming to their parties

and seeing the light. "Sometimes, people come to our parties and

say 'fuck it, I'm not going to work tomorrow'," says Mark. "Next

thing, they've sold the house, bought a vehicle, and they're

sorted." 'Sorted', in Spiral Tribe parlance, means more than just

fixed up with E, it means attuned to a new reality, 'spiral

reality'.  Like a lot of apocalyptic sects, Spiral Tribe combine

paranoid conspiracy theories with fantasies about returning to a

lost golden age. They call their philosophy 'terra-technic', which

is all about using technology to unleash the primordial, female

power of the Earth. "Like music from primitive or non-Western

cultures, techno's based on harmony and rhythm, not melody," says

Seb. "With our music and our parties, we're not trying to get into

the future, we're trying to get back to where we were before

Western Civilisation fucked it all up."

        *       *           *           *           *           *

Famous for its chocolate, lace, and political neutrality,

placid Belgium has been a major player in the techno revolution.

Since the Nineties began, Belgium has unleashed a steady stream of

hardcore tunes that have incited pandemonium on the dancefloors of

Britain, Europe, and, most recently, America. The office of

Belgium's leading techno label, R&S Records, is overshadowed by the

Gothic glory of St Baaf's Cathedral in Ghent; turquoise-and-yellow

trolleybuses cruise past the window, relics of a quainter era. In

the Middle Ages, Ghent was the centre of the European wool trade;

today it's at the crossroads of the global traffic in techno. R&S

are Renaat and Sabine Van De Papeliere, a husband and wife team

who look like any thirtysomething professional couple. But last

year, the pair sold more 12 inch singles in Belgium than all the

major labels combined. In the summer, when the Belgian Top Ten was

swamped by rave music, the disgruntled majors decided to stop

funding the chart. The result: there is no pop chart in Belgium.

    

The Belgian story began with a late Eighties dance craze

called New Beat. DJs started to spin house records at 33 rpm rather

than the correct 45 rpm records, creating an eerie, viscous,

trance-dance groove. At the height of New Beat, remembers Renaat,

the Ghent club Boccaccio "was like a temple. Everyone was dressed

in black and white, dancing this weird, robotic dance."  When

groups like Lords Of Acid and A Split Second started to make

records with that uncanny, slow-motion beat, they were hugely

successful in Belgium and a fad-of-the-month everywhere else. The

bubble soon burst, but not before New Beat had ended Belgian pop's

inferiority complex .  As the Nineties progressed, the b.p.m.

accelerated, as DJ's started playing techno with their turntables

set to + 8. And like with New Beat, groups started making records

at that speed: "Acid Rock" by Rhythm Device, Second Phase's

"Mentasm", T99's "Anasthesia".  Belgian hardcore was born,

characterised by what's been dubbed "the Belgian hoover" effect, an

ominous drone that sounds like a diabolic choir or a swarm of

killer bees.

For Renaat, the appeal of techno is that it's resurrected the

generation gap - it's the new noise that parents and older brothers

just can't accept as music. Even those who should know better, the

punk veterans, can't deal with it, although their complaint is

that's techno's not subversive, just mindless noise that reduces

listeners to braindead zombies. But although techno has no explicit

politics, Renaat thinks it's implictly utopian, allowing people to

create their perfect world on the dancefloor. "Because there are

no words, it leaves your imagination totally free. The way parties

are developing now, it's exciting to enter that total fantasy

wold. You can escape from everything." 

Although Belgium still leads the way with the music, Renaat says the frontiers of clublife are being pushed back in Rotterdam, Frankfurt, Berlin. He raves about a

club in Cologne where temperatures reach tropical levels and DJ 's

wear oxygen masks, about Berlin's Tresor, a disused bank vault

that's been turned into a strobe-blitzed body-bath of naked, sweat-soaked flesh. And he dreams of holding a Techno Woodstock, on the same site in the US as the original festival, but modelled on Berlin's annual rave carnival 'The Love Parade'.

The techno starting to come out of Berlin and Frankfurt is insanely frenetic and mercilessly dissonant; DJ's are talking about 180 b.p.m. as a plausible goal. Others are saying the pace has got to come down or people will be dropping dead on the dancefloor. Renaat is starting up an R&S subsidiary called Apollo that will specialise in more ambient and meditational techno, like Jam and Spoon's serene "Tales From a Danceographic Ocean" EP. But Renaat

still loves hardcore's Dionysian frenzy. His latest signings are The Aphex Twin (a London-based prodigy who makes his own instruments) and Mescalinum United (apocalyptic, industrial noise from Frankfurt).  And R&S' star producers are a pair of hardcore

boffins only just out of their teens, Joey Beltram and CJ Bolland.

  Brooklyn-based Beltram revolutionised techno twice before his twentieth birthday, with "Energy Flash" and Second Phase's "Mentasm". A DJ since the age of 12, Beltram is unusual in that he's a huge rock fan - he worships Metallica and Queensryche, and sampled

a Robert Plant orgasm on a track called "The Omen". The vibe of Beltram's tracks is as baleful as Black Sabbath and as frenzied as thrash-metal. 

By contrast, CJ Bolland typifies a new generation who never listened to rock'n'roll. Born in Newcastle, England, but raised in Belgium, the teenage Bolland loathed the sound of guitars

but loved Electronic Body Music (Severed Heads, Skinny Puppy, Front

242). Bolland's music takes Body Music's sinister, industrial

textures and replaces its stiff beats with rave music's stomping

sync opation.  His masterpiece is Ravesignal III's "Horsepower":

imagine "I Feel Love" if Giorgio Moroder has made it with

Schwarzenegger in mind, not Donna Summer. But Bolland recognises

that hardcore's reached a creative dead end. "Most new tunes aren't

tunes anymore , just a very hard kick and a very mad sound. In

Belgium, people have gotten so into the drugs that the music is

made to cause a reaction on that drug. If you hear it when you're

straight, it won't do anything for you."

        *       *           *           *           *           *

Belgian and British hardcore has spawned a thriving underground

of techno-freaks in New York, who congregate at "Future Shock" (

Limelight on Fridays) and "Adrenalin" (Palladium on Thursdays).

Initially, techno was the preserve of Italian youth from Brooklyn,

Bensonhurst and Staten Island. In the first years of this century,

the Italian Futurists worshipped technology and speed, and

prophesised a new music based around 'the art of noises'. In the

last decade before the millenium, young Italian Americans worship

the high velocity, futurist noise that is techno.

"Fifty per cent of the kids are just into the music," says

Lord Michael, the DJ/producer who introduced techno to the Staten

Is land/Bensonhurst crowd, and then lured them into the Manhattan

clubs. "They get off on the aggression, 'cos New York's a very

aggres sive city. The other fifty percent are taking Ecstasy or

acid. Some of them smoke PCP. It's wild." 

Wild is the word. At the Palladium on Saturday (a transitional night, alternating between

'happy house' euphoria and techno mayhem), a huge hole opens up in

the dancing throng. Brawny Italian American boys jostle and

ricochet off each other. These kids are slamdancing. In a disco.

"If you weren't into the music, you'd think these were violent,

angry people", says Romeo Romeo, who MC's at Adrenalin and other

techno nights. "But really it's just a way for kids to release

themselves. With techno you don't have to dance well, you just let

yourself go." Recording as The Revolution, Romeo is developing a

style of hard'n'fast rap-style vocals, that he calls "rage". Maybe

' rage' will evolve into the insurrectionary techno-punk I

fantasised about earlier.

These days, the New York techno scene has opened out somewhat,

while remaining almost entirely white (although techno seems to have a mysterious allure for Asian kids) and suburban. "Most of the kids come from outside Manhattan, from Long Island, New Jersey, New York State, Conneticut," says Moby, a Future Shock DJ and techno

artist. Moby's "Go", a moody, atmospheric track that sampled the

 'Twin Peaks' theme, was a big hit in the UK. "I'm glad it's opened

out more, because the Italian contingent were too into macho

posturing. I supported The Shamen when they played the Limelight

earlier this year, and I was looking forward to playing to a

homecrowd , but it was depressing, like performing in a

penitentiary."

 At 26, Moby is relatively old for a techno whizzkid. As a teenager, he was a hardcore punk fan and briefly played in the seminal drone rock band Flipper. The weird thing about his

conversion to rave culture is that Moby is a Christian, straight-

edge vegan who abstains from alcohol and drugs. "I'm ascetic, but

at the same time, I love drug culture. If you look at the Sixties,

the music and the art that came out of drugs was so interesting.

Personally, I prefer adrenalin highs, and I would never encourage

anyone to do drugs. But I like being in a nightclub where 5000

people are buzzing on them. As for my religious beliefs... well,

the first rave that I know of was when the Ark of Covenant was

brought into Jerusalem and King David tore off all his clothes and

danced like crazy."

Despite Moby's Biblical precedent for raving, and the Limelight's stained glass windows, the atmosphere at Future Shock is closer to a pagan bacchanal than anything ecclesiastical. The metronomic beat and sequencer-riffs thresh and scythe, and it's

like being fed through a pop abbatoir. Young bucks with slicked-

back hair and sideburns barge into the fray, stripped to the waist

with T-shirts hanging out of the back jean pocket like Springsteen.

The pace escalates, from the stealthy voodoo throb of D.H.S. "House

Of God", through the out-of-control carousel that is The Prodigy's

"Everybody In The Place", to the epileptic intensity of F.U.S.E's

"F.U.".  At this speed, just about all you can do is

 oscillate. Or headbang. Or pogo.

       

While New York has a hyperactive techno scene, for real

rave culture, you have to look to Los Angeles and the West Coast.

The British idea of driving out to secret dance parties in secluded

locations could never be transplanted to New York because so few

people have cars. But LA, with its vast infrastructure of freeways

and population accustomed to driving large distances for entertainment, has proved to be the ideal environment for raving.  As with most cities, house and techno began as the preserve of a hip club scene, mostly twentysomethings with a high proportion of black,

Hispanic and gay participants. But in the last 18 months, hordes of

white suburban teenagers have turned onto techno, and parties have

swelled from select gatherings of eight hundred people to huge four

or five thousand raves. And like Britain, the scene has shifted

from illicit warehouse parties to legal, highly organised    mega-

events, complete with expensive light/video/lazer shows and massive

sound systems.

In some respects, the LA rave scene has overtaken its UK

prototype: it has its own techno radio station, MARS, and a

magazine, Urb, dedicated to documenting and articulating rave

culture. The LA scene has also developed its own ideas about rave-

enhancing drugs: Ecstasy and LSD are big there as everywhere,

but so are mushrooms, crystal meth and nitrous oxide (laughing

gas). At raves, vendors sell balloons full of laughing gas, and

there was a recent tragedy in which a gang of kids asphyxiated in

a car after leaving a nitrous oxide canister open.

For some drugging and dancing are purely hedonistic, a way of

letting off steam at the weekend. But others on the West Coast

scene see rave culture as a spiritual revolution. Perhaps because

the city was the Mecca of the psychedelic era, the San Francisco

rave scene is developing a Nineties version of Timothy Leary's

"politics of ecstasy". The idea is that hypnotic lights and lasers,

bass-heavy trance-music and the hyperventilation induced by hours

of aerobic dancing, all combine to create a blissed-out state of

"higher understanding". The next step will be "cyberdelia",

combining music with a computer-generated "virtual reality" to

provide the ult imate holiday from everyday life. 

"They're starting to call DJ's 'digital shamen' here," says Todd Roberts from Urb

magazine. Like Spiral Tribe's "terra-technic" creed, it's all about

using futuristic technology to go back to the ancient purpose of

music: communal release through ritual, non-stop ecstatic dancing.

At LA's Club Fuck, neo-pagans heavily into bodypiercing and ritual

adornment dervish-dance to the voodoo uproar of hardest-core

techno. It's an End of the Millenium freak-out - apocalypse now.

ADDENDA

TECHNO: THE CASE FOR THE DEFENCE

But it's soul-less, inhuman, cold...
    Feel the heat on the dancefloor, the crush of frenzied flesh,
and tell me that techno's not a celebration of human energy.

But it all sounds the same...
    Non-cognoscenti say that about metal, rap, alternative. It's
just not true.

But it's mindless escapism...
    The best things in life involve switching your brain off and
taking an excursion from reality.

But it's just not music...
    They said it about rock'n'roll, they said it about punk. Do you
want to be on history's losing side, or do you want to get down
with the future?


ESSENTIAL TECHNO

ANCESTORS
Kraftwerk - "Radioactivity", "Trans-Europe Express", "Computer
World" (all              Capitol), "The Mix" (Elektra)
DAF - "Alles Ist Gut", "Gold Und Liebe" (Virgin)

DETROIT
Rhythim Is Rhythim/Derrick May/Mayday - "Innovator" (Network)
Various Artists - "retrotechno/detroitdefinitive" (Network)
Various Artists - "Techno One and Two" (Ten)
Inner City - "Good Life" (Ten 12 inch)

EARLY UK TECHNO
Orbital - "Chime", "Midnight", "Belfast" (all London/ffrr 12 inch)
808 State - "ex:cel" (Tommy Boy)
LFO - "Frequencies" (Warp/Tommy Boy)
Various Artists - "Pioneers Of The Hypnotic Groove" (Warp)

HARDCORE
Second Phase - "Mentasm" (R&S 12 inch)
Beltram - "Energy Flash" (R&S 12 inch)
Human Resource - "Dominator" (R&S 12 inch)
Ravesignal III - "Horsepower" (R&S 12 inch)
Altern-8 - "Activ-8", "Frequency", "E-Vapor-8" (all Network 12
inch)
Bizarre Inc - "Playing With Knives" (Vinyl Solution/Columbia 12
inch)
Eon - "Spice" (Vinyl Solution/Columbia 12 inch)
Moby - "Go" (Outer Rhythm 12 inch)
Orbital - "Mutations" (London/ffrr EP)
Various Artists - "XL Recordings: The Second Chapter" (XL)
                -  "Order To Dance" (R&S)
                - "This Is Hype!" (Hype)
                - "Technorave 2" (Network/Next Plateau)

Underground Resistance, "Riot" EP

THE FUTURE
The Aphex Twin - "Didgeridoo/Analogue Bubblebath" (R&S EP)
Jam and Spoon - "Tales From A Danceographic Ocean" (R&S EP)
Spiral Tribe EP - (white label, contact 154, Maygrove Rd, London
NW6, UK)
Various Artists - "Blueprints For Modern Technology Vol. 1" (+8)
                - "Frankfurt Trax Vol. 2" (PCP)

RELIABLE LABELS
Warp, Network, XL, PCP (Planet Core Productions), R&S, +8, Rising
High, Underground Resistance, Vinyl Solution