the republic of rave (30 years on)

an article for the Italian newspaper La Repubblica on 30 years of rave

"Once Upon a Time in the Rave"
Robinson magazine, part of La Repubblica
02 Ottobre 2018

by Simon Reynolds

Thirty years ago, the U.K. was convulsed by the birth of arguably the last real youth movement. Rave was a proper subculture, with rituals and its own clothing style as well as music. Between the winter of 1987 and the summer of 1989, a new template for youth leisure emerged that would ultimately spread across the world: massive parties in which hordes of young people, clad in brightly colored clothes, danced all-night-long to electronic rhythms, united not just in the trance caused by the hypnotic beats but through a blissful communion generated by the drug MDMA. As rave proliferated, DJs were idolized, but the true star remained the dancing crowd itself. Raves were fiestas of anonymous collectivity, where individual self-consciousness dissolved in a tribal vibe.

The story of rave actually begins outside the U.K., when a coterie of London deejays traveled to Ibiza in 1987 and there experienced the synergy between MDMA (also known as Ecstasy, or E) and house music (a post-disco style spawned in Chicago’s gay clubs). Attempting to bring back the summery “Balearic” vibe to wintry London, the deejays Danny Rampling and Paul Oakenfold launched the clubs Shoom and Spectrum. Their atmosphere of relaxed intimacy broke with the preexisting clubland ethos of cool and posing.

Meanwhile, in the Northern city of Manchester, a similar energy coalesced at the Hacienda, a cavernous and somewhat desolate club started earlier in the Eighties by Factory Records. House’s music brisk rhythms plugged into a regional taste for uptempo black music, reactivating the fevered spirit of Northern Soul (a Seventies subculture based around cult-worshipped deejays, imported black American dance singles, and amphetamines). The “Madchester” scene spawned some of the first UK artists to take the imported sounds of Chicago house and Detroit techno and apply a unique British spin to them, such as A Guy Called Gerald and 808 State. There were also Manchester indie-rock groups who assimilated the new feeling, like Happy Mondays, who built a local following not just through their music but by selling pills of E direct to the audience. Their onstage frontline included a character known as Bez whose sole function was to swallow as much E as he could and do a bizarre twitchy dance. A holy fool of Ecstatic excess, Bez modelled a new dance culture archetype: the raver, whose uncool delirium superseded the club scene’s premium on elegance and composure.

“Rave” was actually an old word, dating back to the Sixties, when psychedelic bands like Pink Floyd threw All Night Raves.  The term was reactivated in 1988 as the logic of the new culture demanded ever larger events: the more people in attendance, the more that the MDMA-induced feeling of unity was amplified. In the autumn of  1988, promoters began to throw events in warehouses and abandoned factories in run-down inner-city zones like London’s East End, or the industrial areas of Northern cities like Bolton or Sheffield.  That logic of escalation then led in the summer of 1989 to even huger raves in the English countryside. Promoters took over farms (sometimes with the owner’s permission, but never notifying the authorities or following appropriate safety regulations) or they illegally occupied abandoned airfields. Long before mobile phones were widely available, rave organisers developed sophisticated methods of directing ravers to the secret locations, using phone messaging systems and “meet points” where cars of revelers drew up to receive further instructions.  The strategy was to assemble a large number of people at a location before the police found out, at which point they would be forced to accept the de facto rave for fear of causing a riot if they attempted to shut it down.

The huge convoys of cars that arrived on the M25 motorway that encircled London every weekend, the massive assemblies of bizarrely dressed youngsters shattering the quiet of the English countryside with futuristic electronic noise  - these disruptions could hardly fail to draw attention. And rave quickly became the most demonized British subculture since punk. Even without the drugs involved, you can see why both the political establishment and the general public might fear raves. Unruly gatherings of working class youths recalled the mass pickets during the Miner’s Strike of 1984-85. But rave stirred more inchoate fears. From the outside, raves did look like a pagan cult – kids flailing their limbs like voodoo worshippers. The word “rave” has connotations of madness, hysteria, or extreme forms of enthusiasm or fanaticism.  In the Sixties, “raver” had been a slang term for a sexually wild girl. Many of the newspaper scare stories about rave in 1988-89 concerned classic scenarios designed to alarm parents: tales of teenage girls having their tender minds blown on LSD, of orgies and creepy strangers preying on helpless young females.

Actually, if anything, MDMA instilled a sexless vibe.  Because MDMA’s effect encouraged tactile affection but suppressed sexual lust, the drug created an atmosphere in which women came into their own, free from the predations of the male gaze.  Rave clothing was baggy, its looseness ideal for dancing in hot sweaty environments, but also child-like, hiding the curves of sexual differentiation. When the word “love” appeared in house tracks, it wasn’t a reference to erotic coupling but a feeling of open-hearted trust towards the strangers with which you shared the dancefloor– a marvelous sensation of “collective intimacy”. That’s why, in a playful postmodern nod to the hippie Sixties, ravers talked about 1988 as the Second Summer of Love.   Later, in the early Nineties came a spate of rave tunes that sampled the melodies of children’s TV programmes. Rave as a culture involved a mass regression into innocence, a flight from adult responsibilities but also adult desires (remember, this was also the era of peak fear about AIDS).

Rarely directly political in its themes, rave’s collectivity offered an implicit rebuke to Margaret Thatcher’s worldview of competitive individualism, crystallized in her infamous statement that “there is no such thing as society” . Rave’s more fervent converts believed that the love drug Ecstasy could change the world. “They could settle wars with this…  imagine the world’s leaders on pills” is how The Streets’s Mike Skinner recalled the feeling at the time in his 2002 rave-flashback song “Weak Become Heroes”. Indie-rock converts to rave The Farm, from Liverpool, scored a 1990 hit with “All Together Now”, a song inspired by the 1914 Christmas truce between British and German troops.  And certainly in the early days of rave, the divisions between races, classes, and sexualities seemed to be dissolving in the woozy unity of the rave. Even the warring supporters of football teams fraternized in clubs and on the stadium terraces.

After the failure of police forces to thwart the big outdoor raves of 1989, Thatcher’s Conservative government passed the Entertainments (Increased Penalties) Act of 1990, legislation that threatened rave promoters with huge fines. For a while, the culture retreated back into the clubs. But then in 1991, the large-scale events resurged. Some were fully licensed and increasingly commercial, with spectacular lights and lazers and amusement-park side-shows. But there was also a new surge of illegal raves thrown by renegade outfits like Spiral Tribe, rough-and-ready parties without the amenities (like toilets or food) provided by the legal raves, but infused with a thrilling sense of adventure as you danced under the stars in remote areas of England.

As the music got harder and faster, matching the escalating drug consumption of the ravers, everything seemed to be hurtling towards some kind of catastrophic climax. It came with the May 1992 mega-rave at Castlemorton Common in the rural west of England. Urban ravers joined with hippie travelers, who for decades had traditionally migrated between summer festivals in their gaily painted buses and caravans and buses.  Forty thousand revelers attended Castlemorton during the rave’s six days of existence, during which it made the front covers of every newspaper in the country and led to questions in Parliament. Ultimately the Conservative government responded with the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994, which increased police powers to crush raves and harass travelers until their lifestyle became barely viable.

1992 may have been the peak of rave as a countercultural force, but the electronic dance culture only grew bigger as the Nineties unfolded. Musically it fragmented and mutated into a huge range of genres and micro-scenes. But its mainstream of house and trance-techno also became a well-organised and profitable leisure industry, with the rise of superclubs like Cream, Ministry of Sound and Gatecrasher: mini-corporations who raked in the money with merchandising, sponsorship deals, even club tours that took their legendary "vibe" around the county. Paralleling this professionalization was the emergence of a Premier League of super-deejays who travelled up and down the UK (and internationally too), earning thousands of pounds for each two-hour set and often playing several gigs per night at the weekend.

By the turn of the millennium, club culture had become a predictable and even controlling institution. It arguably still largely operates as a kind of social safety-valve, encouraging youth to live for the temporary utopia of the weekend rather than invest their idealism in a long-term collective project of political change.  Yet there are other legacies that still retain elements of the dissident potential of the original rave movement. The gay roots of electronic dance music have been reaffirmed by a new breed of queer and trans electronic artists like Arca, Elysia Crampton and Lotic. Then there’s the black British genre of grime, which emerged in the early 2000s from London’s illegal pirate radio culture (which earlier fostered the fiercest and strangest mutants of rave music, like jungle).

Demoting the status of the deejay, grime elevated the MC – hitherto a secondary figure in UK rave – and pushed his lyrics and vocal charisma to the fore. Initially apolitical and socially irresponsible in the gangsta rap style, grime’s political consciousness has matured and at the last UK election in June 2017 the genre threw its weight behind Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. The support of leading grime MCs like Stormzy and Novelist appears to have actually encouraged inner-city youth not just to register to vote but actually to turn up at the polling stations, resulting in Labour electoral gains and an unexpectedly close result that denied Prime Minister Theresa May an outright victory. In that sense, rave could be said to still be resisting Conservatism. At the Labour Party conference this week, Corbyn took to the stage to the tune of The Farm’s “All Together Now” and in his speech laid out a vision of reborn socialism that would effectively cancel the Thatcherite consensus of the last 35 years.

KLF

The KLF

The Observer, April 7th 1991

by Simon Reynolds 

"We lurch a lot," says Bill Drummond of The KLF. "I've never followed a set path. There has only been this feeling of getting closer to something. A beckoning peak!"

Over the past four years, Drummond and his partner Jimmy Cauty have veered chaotically from mammoth success to dismal catastrophe, leaving a trail of half-completed projects and unrealised pipe dreams. Operating under a variety of cryptic names, they've been guided only by a loose philosophy that Drummond calls "zenarchy", based on improvisation, getting bored quickly, and moving on.

Drummond's active involvement in pop began in the late Seventies as guitarist in the Liverpudlian art-punk group Big In Japan, and a subsequent role as manager of Echo and The Bunnymen. Several years later, working as an A&R consultant for WEA Records, Drummond met a like mind in Cauty, and in 1987 the pair formed The Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu, taking the name from a mythical anarchist secret society.

Their first single 'All You Need Is Love' quickly became notorious for its barefaced samples of the Beatles and Sam Fox, and a subsequent LP was withdrawn following an injunction instigated by Abba, in reprisal for samples from their 'Dancing Queen'.

In the summer of 1988, the duo reached Number One as The Timelords with their novelty hit 'Doctor In The Tardis', an annoying hybrid of Gary Glitter and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and documented the escapade in the book The Manual; How To Have A Number One The Easy Way.

Such stunts earned Drummond and Cauty the reputation of pranksters. For some they were heroic mischief-makers in the mould of Malcolm McLaren, for others merely an irritant in the gimmicky, self-publicising tradition of Jonathan King.

Drummond, now 37, sees it differently. "McLaren has a hunger for a public profile, whereas I think Jimmy and I shy away from that. We don't have a master plan, just impulses that we act upon. We've never set out to irritate but I know that we annoy people because we seem to be very knowing — simply because of all our experience in the business, we do know a lot more than a bunch of 19-year-olds who are completely instinctive and naive."

None the less, the duo rapidly grew sick of their reputation. "There was a point when we really only existed on the pages of the music papers. And we wanted out of it. We liked the idea of achieving something that had no irony and no reference points."

They drew inspiration from acid house and rave culture, which they found refreshing precisely because it was unmediated and unselfconscious. "The rave scene was a complete rejection of Eighties 'Style culture' mentality, which I always loathed because it was elitist and joyless. Acid house was all-embracing and inclusive, but like anything new, it quickly built up its own class structure and code. But then in 1989, when the big raves started along the orbital motorways, the scene opened up again."

Early in 1990, as The KLF, the duo released Chill Out, an album of beat-free "ambient house", designed as a soothing soundtrack to the crack-of-dawn come-down after all-night raves. Despite a record cover that spoofed Pink Floyd's Atom Heart Mother and samples that ranged from Fleetwood Mac's 'Albatross' to Acker Bilk, for many people Chill Out was the first time the duo had made music without having their tongue wedged in their collective cheek.

Towards the end of last year, The KLF had a huge hit with the manic techno-mantra 'What Time Is Love'. But any doubts that Drummond and Cauty were finally succeeding on their own musical merits were scotched in February when their '3AM Eternal' got to Number One, and their new album, The White Room, entered the Top Ten.

Despite their two Number One hits, The KLF are "perpetually broke", partly because they run their own record label and partly because of 'the never-ending saga' of their full-length movie The White Room. "We've spent £200,000 on it already, but we need £1.5 million to finish it," says Drummond ruefully. So they've released the soundtrack album first, and are waiting to "knock on doors to ask for money". In the meantime The KLF are determined to avoid a planned career. Says Drummond, "We prefer just to roam."

The KLF + Massive Attack

The New York Times, August 18th 1991

by Simon Reynolds

So volatile is the club scene that few artists have been able to make a career out of dance music, which is released mostly as singles. When dance groups do make an album, it usually consists of a few singles and a heap of filler.

But in the aftermath of Britain's "acid house" revolution — the psychedelic trance-dance music played on samplers, synthesizers and drum machines — a new breed of dance group has emerged, one that looks to the album format as an opportunity to explore its ideas. The last year has seen probing albums like 808 State's Ex:el, Bassomatic's Set the Controls for the Heart of the Bass and the Shamen's En-Tact.

Now Massive Attack's Blue Lines and the KLF's White Room suggest a breakthrough for dance music intended to be heard at home. They may even herald the return of the concept album, not seen in disco since the days of Earth, Wind and Fire. And after building a reputation in England — the KLF has had three hit singles, Massive Attack glowing reviews — the two groups are poised to conquer the United States.

Massive Attack's origins lie in an early 80's rap collective called the Wild Bunch, from Bristol, in England's West Country. The band's 1986 cover version of 'The Look of Love' is credited with influencing Soul II Soul's hybrid of funk, reggae and hip-hop. But because Massive Attack was slow to record its debut album, the group is regarded as a follower in Soul II Soul's shift toward a laid-back, contemplative dance sound. Blue Lines (Circa/Virgin America 2-91685; CD and cassette) takes this to the next phase.

Although Massive Attack uses house and hip-hop techniques like sampling, rapping and turntable-scratching, most of its songs are much slower than the club norm of 120 beats per minute; they range from about 90 beats per minute to a torpid 67. Dance records usually simulate the uproar of communal celebration, but Massive Attack's vibe is meditational rather than gregarious. The group has talked of its admiration for Pink Floyd, its desire to be considered primarily an album band and its reluctance to have its records categorized as dance music.

On the liner notes, Massive Attack pays tribute to the inspiration of such unlikely ancestors as the post-punk experimental group Public Image Limited, the jazz-rock cosmonauts the Mahavishnu Orchestra and fusioneers like Herbie Hancock. More predictably, Massive Attack cites Isaac Hayes, the pioneer of symphonic soul, and the legendary reggae production team Studio One.

Mr. Hayes's influence comes through on the epic 'Safe From Harm' and the mournfully sweeping, string-laden 'Unfinished Sympathy', both of which were hit singles in Britain. But Massive Attack's real originality lies in more tranquil tracks like 'One Love', with its mesmerizing clockwork rhythm and jazzy, electric-piano pulsations. The title track, 'Blue Lines', combines purring keyboards, a sleepwalking beat and a soft-spoken rap soliloquy that's far from the self-assertive bluster associated with hip-hop. As the rapper 3D declares, "No tension in my life/'Cause the way I deal is hazy."

On 'Daydreaming', 3D lets his mind drift on a stream of consciousness in which he refers to Robert De Niro and quotes from 'Fiddler on the Roof' and the Beatles, in between expounding an almost Zen Buddhist philosophy of sublime inertia. He talks of "living in my headphones," of floating like helium above the hyperactive "trouble and strife" of everyday life.

On the similarly mystical 'Hymn of the Big Wheel', Horace Andy's vocal is swathed in eddies of ethereal sound more appropriate to Brian Eno's production style than a dance record. Like the music of the cosmic rock groups that Massive Attack admires, its sound evokes interstellar imagery. But Blue Lines is really about being lost in inner space. This record is the dance-music equivalent of Miles Davis's Kind of Blue, a shift toward a more interior kind of music.

^^^^^^^^^^

The KLF flirts with the cosmic and the conceptual, but in a less lofty, more tongue-in-cheek fashion than Massive Attack. In the video for the single '3 A.M. Eternal' (which recently appeared in the Billboard Top 10), the KLF. is garbed in ceremonial robes and moves in formation as though enacting a religious rite. On the album The White Room (Arista AR8657; CD and cassette), the group mythologizes itself as a nomadic cult of outsiders on a vague quest. The obsession with secret societies dates back to the band's earlier incarnations.

The KLF's core members, Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, met in 1987 and formed a rap group called the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (the Jamms), taking the name from a fictional anarchist organization said to have been fighting authority since the dawn of history. Later, they called themselves the Timelords, after another mysterious sect of warriors against evil, this time taken from the BBC's cult science fiction series Doctor Who.

As the Jamms and the Timelords, Mr. Drummond and Mr. Cauty were known principally as pranksters. Mr. Drummond described their philosophy as "zenarchy." Promoting their first single, 'All You Need Is Love', they daubed their logo on billboards throughout Central London. The Jamms' 1987 album had to be withdrawn after Abba, one of many groups sampled on the record, threatened legal action. As the Timelords, the duo scored a No. 1 hit in England with a novelty single called 'Doctorin' the Tardis'.

But Mr. Drummond and Mr. Cauty grew tired of their reputation as mischievous pop strategists. They decided that, in Mr. Drummond's words, "irony and reference points are the dark destroyers of great music." The duo longed to shed the British post-punk trait of having a master plan to, say, shock every grandmother in England. Inspired by the acid-house scene's lack of self-consciousness, they dedicated themselves to making serious trance-dance music. Renaming themselves the KLF. (it stands for the Kopyright Liberation Front, an allusion to their sampling problems), they recorded the febrile electro anthem 'What Time Is Love?'

Still, the group has never completely shed its playful side. Last year, it released Chill Out (Wax Trax 7155; all three formats), an album of "ambient house" — house music with the beat removed to leave a tranquilizing sound-bath for tired dancers. Aware of the album's affinity for the cosmic rock of the early 70's, they put a photograph of sheep grazing on the album cover — a reference to Pink Floyd's Atom Heart Mother. The joke is continued by another ambient group, the Orb, on its soon-to-be-released album Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld (Big Life/ Mercury 511034; CD and cassette), the cover of which spoofs Pink Floyd's Animals.

This year the KLF released The White Room, the soundtrack to its unfinished movie of the same title. On songs like 'Church of the KLF', the duo brings the mystical side of Britain's youth culture to consciousness. The song '3 A.M. Eternal' celebrates the feeling of having transcended time through spending a night in nonstop trance-dancing. Earlier this summer, the KLF. held a summer solstice party on the remote Scottish island of Jura, where the group and its guests dressed in yellow robes and burned a giant wicker man in imitation of a Celtic pagan ritual.

The KLF is simultaneously celebrating and mocking acid house's revival of the transcendental imagery of the hippie era. When the acid craze swept Britain in 1988, participants called it the "second summer of love." Album-oriented groups like Massive Attack and the KLF. suggest that the psychedelic dance revolution has now entered its progressive rock phase. So long as bands can avoid resurrecting the sterile monumentality and self-indulgence of groups like Yes and Emerson, Lake and Palmer, this is a promising development.

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.  

GREEN VELVET - Hardcore Jollies
Village Voice April 25 2000

by Simon Reynolds

Last year's renaissance of interest in house was based largely on a craving for pleasantness in dance music. With techno and drum'n'bass both locked in grinding hair-shirt minimalism, house's sensuousness beckoned hipsters like a quenching oasis. But in truth, house can be as punishing and dehumanized as the hardest-core techno. Right from the start, there's been a vital tension within house culture: "songs" versus "tracks"; diva passion and gospel-descended uplift versus treadmill beats, trippy FX, and blurts of inorganic synth-slime.

Called "tracky" or "trackhead" by cognoscenti, this mechanistic side of house began with the mid-'80s jack tracks (palsied vamps, stutter-afflicted vocal riffs, mind-evacuating "jack your body" chants), then mutated into acid house in 1987. Acid contained its own microgenre of vocal-based tracks, a world away from the melisma-drenched fabulosity of Ultra Nate and Robert Owens. On the flipside of Phuture's "Acid Tracks," the very first house tune to deploy the fractal wibbles of the Roland 303 bass-synthesizer, the astonishing "Your Only Friend" personified cocaine as a robot-voiced tyrant: "I'll make you lie for me, I'll make you die for me." Other classics of this ilk include Adonis's "No Way Back," Bam Bam's "Where's Your Child?" and Sleazy D's "I've Lost Control," all themed around disorientation, mindwreck, abduction, and sexual dread.

Green Velvet's Curtis Jones single-handedly brought the creepy monologue back to house in the mid '90s. This Berkeley dropout founded two Chicago labels: Cajual, for effervescent disco cutups (including his own Cajmere releases), and Relief, for cranium-denting beats and drug-noise delirium. Jones first made an impact with 1995's "Flash," now the opening track of a Green Velvet anthology just released via the Warners-affiliated dance subsidiary F-111. Over a battery of rivet-gun snares, Jones plays a mushmouthed guide escorting a tour group of worried parents armed with cameras through "Club Bad" and revealing all the decadent things their teenage kids get up to. Like sucking on balloons of nitrous oxide—"laughing gas, but this is no laughing matter." Slyly playing on the wired paranoia of ravers ("Ohmigod, what if Mom and Dad really do arrive and see me all fucked up?!?!"), the chorus "cameras ready, prepare to flash" transforms the club's occult murk into a panopticon space of exposed and documented delinquency.

Green Velvet songs are so funny, the temptation is just to reprint the lyrics and be done with it. "Answering Machine" is a litany of bad news deposited on some luckless chump's incoming message cassette: a landlord's eviction notice, his fiancée announcing that the baby's not his, a Psychic Friend advising, "Stay in your house today, tomorrow, and FOREVER." "Water Molecule," originally from Green Velvet's 1999 debut album, Constant Chaos, is a fantasy about being reincarnated as H2O—the appeal being the access-all-areas (including human bodies) privileges. Mind you, deadpans Jones, entering the sewage system would be a drag: "Not that I've got anything against rats, I just don't want to hang out with them." Most darkly hilarious of all is "Abduction," an unnerving ditty about being molested by aliens midway through doing the dishes. Jones delivers lines like "They touched a part of me that I didn't know existed" in the faded, faltering voice of a survivor's confessional, with a feel for conversational cadence that's Method acting in excelsis.

Of course, none of this would work so well if the backing tracks weren't so compulsive, deranging, and, well, tracky. Green Velvet's sound reactivates a forgotten branch of house's family tree: not the symphonic sashay of Philly and Salsoul, but post-Moroder artpunk—the heavy breathing, guttural vocals, and pervy pulsations of DAF and Liaisons Dangereuses (both huge on Chicago's early-'80s dance floors), the soiled electronics of Throbbing Gristle, the Normal, and Suicide. Built around a kinky, rubberwear-glossy analog synth bassline that lodges in your brain like a tapeworm, "The Stalker" is Cabaret Voltaire if they'd been drag queens. What saves Green Velvet from Les Rhythmes Digitales/DMX Crew retro-kitsch, though, is the production, which incorporates '90s house's advances in programming and texturizing beats. Back in 1982, they didn't know how to make kick drums so thick and wide and voluptuously concussive.

Jones has described what he does as "folk music for the rave scene." Like the Horrorist, he's adept at finding narratives that fit the abstract emotions and weird energies generated by techno but don't detract from its posthuman intensity. He is also a star in a faceless scene, and one of the few live performers in electronica whose physical presence really adds something to the records. Playing live with two synth-wielding minions in Twilo's Y2K Lounge a few weeks ago, Jones showed off his trademark luminous green plastic scalp nodules, changed his buff-chest-hugging outfits a couple of times, deployed a panoply of voice-warping devices, and generally palpated the audience in the palm of his hand. What came across as unexpectedly forceful was Green Velvet's electro-punk attitude. Jones even indulged in some autodestruction theatrics, fake-smashing aNew Romantic-style guitar-shaped shoulder-strap synth. One new track pivots around a chorus ("They say, 'It's just a phase'/IT'S NOT A FUCKING PHASE!!") that Jones delivers with the defiant staccato phrasing of Negative Approach or Bad Brains. Which brought a whole nonrave spin to the crowd's cries of "HARDCORE!!!!" at the end.

GREEN VELVET

Groove, 2001

by Simon Reynolds

From Basement Jaxx and the French filter-disco sound to the rediscovery of vocals by everyone from Herbert to Luomo to Photek, the last few years have seen a remarkable renaissance of interest in house music on the part of hipsters. And the primary drive behind this, I think, was a craving for pleasantness, for music that doesn't want to hurt the listener but makes you feel....  nice.  With techno locked in grinding hairshirt minimalism and drum'n'bass becoming ever more oriented around distorted bass-riffs (to the point of sounding like headbanging heavy metal or old Killing Joke records), house's sensuousness beckoned hipsters like a quenching oasis.

But the glitterball dazzle of filter disco, the warm, organic musicality of Body 'N Soul and Nuphonic, these represent only one side of house music. In truth, house can be as mechanistic, punishing, and dehumanized as the hardest-core techno, the darkest drum 'n'bass. Right from the start, there's been a schism, or more accurately, a vital tension, within house culture: "songs" versus "tracks"; diva passion and gospel-descended uplift versus treadmill beats, trippy FX, and slimy blurts of inorganic synthesiser.

Called "tracky" or "trackhead" by cognoscenti, this side of house began with the mid-Eighties jack tracks (palsied vamps, stutter-afflicted vocal-riffs, mind-evacuating "jack your body" chants), then mutated into acid house in 1987. Acid contained its own micro-genre of vocal-based tracks, a world away from the melisma-drenched fabulousness of Ultra Nate and Robert Owens. On the flipside of Phuture's "Acid Tracks," the very first house tune to deploy the fractal wibbles of the Roland 303 bass-synthesizer, the astonishing "Your Only Friend" personified cocaine as a robot-voiced tyrant: "I'll make you lie for me, I'll make you die for me/In the end, I'll be your only friend." Then there was Sleezy D's ""I've Lost Control," a Sabbath-inspired Marshall Jefferson track featuring an "Iron Man" vocal and padded-cell-as-dub-chamber screams. Other classics of this micro-genre include Adonis's "No Way Back", Bam Bam's "Where's Your Child?" and Pierre's Pfantasy Club's "Dream Girl", all themed around disorientation, mindwreck, abduction, and sexual paranoia.

Green Velvet's Curtis Jones singlehandedly brought the creepy monologue back to house in the mid-Nineties. This Berkeley drop-out founded two Chicago labels: Cajual, for effervescent disco cut-ups (including his own Cajmere releases), and Relief, for cranium-denting beats and drug-noise delirium. Jones first made an impact with 1995's "Flash". Over a battery of rivet-gun snares, Jones played a slurred-voiced guide escorting a tour group of worried parents armed with cameras through "Club Bad" and revealing all the decadent things their teenage kids get up to. Like sucking on balloons of nitrous oxide---"laughing gas, but this is no laughing matter". Slyly playing on the wired paranoia of ravers ("ohmigod, what if mom and dad really do arrive and see me all out of my head?!?!"), the chorus "cameras ready, prepare to flash" transforms the club's occult murk into a Panopticon space of exposed and documented delinquency.

"Flash" was apparently intended as an anti-drug song, Jones talking about some of the fucked-up freaky shit he saw going on in clubs where he was doing PAs. But the song is cunningly pitched so that it works just as well as an anthem for drug-fiends. (For a long while, until I listened to the lyrics closely, I thought the "prepare to flash" chorus was a drug exhortation, referencing the "flash" or total-body rush some amphetamine users experience, or "flash" as in an LSD flashback). "La La Land", a standout track on the new Green Velvet album Whatever, is similarly ambiguous. Reviving all those classic early rave metaphors that involve imagery of madness, brain damage, derangement, the pursuit of oblivion through concussive bliss, "La La Land" is sung by a hardcore hedonist who's always "looking for the after-party to begin." The chorus is brilliantly catchy--"something about those little pills/unreal/the thrills/they yield/until/they kill/a mill/ion brain cells" (the rhymes work better if you adopt a black American accent, with the 'd' in 'yield' left unpronounced).  But if that chorus sounds like a "Just Say No" warning, the lines "la la land is the place I need to be/the place that sets me free" contradict them. Is this profoundly ambivalent, or just a cowardly refusal to adopt a consistent standpoint? Does Jones accept that drug-abusers are seeking things the real world can't offer, escaping an intolerable world into a chemical utopia?  Or does he simply not want to alienate his primary market, drugged up ravers, by unreservedly condemning their self-destructive pleasures?

Up until now, Green Velvet's emphasis has been on black humour, like "Answering Machine" with its a litany of bad news deposited on some luckless fellow's incoming message cassette: a landlord's eviction notice, his fiancee announcing that the baby is not his, a "psychic" fortune teller advising him to "stay in your house today, tomorrow, and FOREVER". Or "Abduction", a simultaneously hilarious and disturbing ditty about being molested by alien beings midway through washing the dishes: Jones delivers lines like "they touched a part of me that I didn't know existed" in the faded, faltering voice of a survivor's confessional, with a feel for conversational cadence that's method acting in excelsis.  Then there's the tripped-out whimsy of songs like "Water Molecule" (off the 1999 debut album Constant Chaos), where a zonked-out Jones imagines being reincarnated as H2O. The appeal? Water's access-all-areas privileges: "I would be a part of all different types of people, 'cos I would travel around in my vapor state, and I would turn into my liquid state and enter their glass and they would swallow me and I'd be part of their bodies". 

The new album, though, is surprisingly serious, even militant. "When?" is straightforward anti-racist protest, a "don't judge me" plea to purge from your mind the prejudices and ethnic stereotypes caused by media brainwashing. The only hint of  comedy here is his anti-humanist quip "we're all inferior".  Propelled by a harsh, scouring riff, "When?" is a bit like if Mad Mike let his  anger come out through a vocal tirade rather than just song-titles and slogans etched into the vinyl.  Elsewhere, the spirit is pure punk rock: the staccato, accusatory "Stop Lyin'", the "don't mess with my mind" aggression of "Dank", the searing instrumental "Minimum Rage" with its title punning on the bottom-level income earned by American 16 year olds at fast-food restaurants and similar dead end jobs.  "GAT (The Great American Tragedy)" is an anthem for teenage freaks who start dressing weird and acting out, only to get the condescending "you're just going through a phase" treatment from parents and elders. Jones delivers the chorus-howl "THIS IS NOT A FUCKING PHASE!!"  with the percussive phrasing of  arly Eighties US hardcore punk bands like Black Flag, Bad Brains, Minor Threat, and Negative Approach. This is slamdancing techno, moshpit rave.

None of this would work so well if the backing tracks weren't so compulsive, deranging, and, well, tracky. Green Velvet's sound reactivates a forgotten branch of house's family tree: not the symphonic sashay of Philly and Salsoul, but post-Moroder artpunk--the panting, guttural vocals and kinky pulsations of DAF and Liaisons Dangereuses (both huge on Chicago's early Eighties dancefloors), the soiled electronics of Throbbing Gristle, The Normal, and Suicide.  Whatever's sound has a retro-Eighties feel,  at times closer to industrial and EBM than even the most tracky of modern house. Songs like "Stop Lyin'" are clockwork mechanisms pulsating in strict time, all square-sounding, stiff beats and 16th note sequenced bassline patterns that chatter and pummel. "Gendefekt" is a rigid grid of quantized drums and eerily spiralling synth-noises that make you think of the DNA helix; Kraftwerk's Computer World lost in a ketamine void.  Propelled by slinky bass-riffs that writhe and squirm through your ears like frantic mind-worms in a hurry to get to the chewy center of your brain, "Sleepwalking"--the new album's absolute killer tune--is like Cabaret Voltaire on amyl nitrate.

Jones has described what he does as "folk music for the rave scene". Like that other pioneer of story-telling techno The Horrorist a/k/a Oliver Chesler, he's adept at finding narratives that fit the abstract emotions and weird energies generated by electronic music but that don't detract from its posthuman intensity. Jones also stands out in a faceless scene as one of the few live performers in electronica whose physical presence really adds something to the records. His live show is not to be missed, involving costume changes, voice-warping FX, auto-destruction theatrics (he's wont to fake-smash an Eighties shoulder-strap synth as if it were an electric guitar), and loads of charisma. The guy's a star.