Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture

by Simon Reynolds

  Perhaps the most persistent sound-system collective, and certainly the most persecuted, is Luton’s Exodus. One member was unjustly tried for murder (and cleared), while in 1993 the arrest of Exodus leaders in order to thwart a planned rave provoked a three thousand strong protest outside the police station. The fervent support for Exodus stems as much from their community activism as their parties in abandoned farms and quarries. They established a squatter’s commune called HAZ manor in a derelict old people’s home, while their long-standing Ark project involves the creation of a community centre/ party-space for local youth. Short for Housing Action Zone, HAZ is a nod to Hakim Bey’s TAZ. The name Exodus itself is a homage to Bob Marley that reactivates the punk dream of a ‘white ethnicity’ equivalent to Rastafarianism: British bohemians as a lost tribe of internal exiles, stranded in a Babylon that’s burning with boredom. ‘Babylon’ may not be a paranoid figment of the ganja-addled imagination. The anti-Exodus campaign of harassment seems to stem from the malign influence of the Freemasons and the brewing industry on the local Conservative Party, from whose ranks emerged Luton MP Graham Bright, the man behind the 1990 Parliamentary legislation targeted at orbital raves.

  The new breed of post-CJA sound-systems follow the precept ‘small-is-beautiful’. By carefully choosing isolated locations and restricting the size of events by keeping them word-of-mouth, collectives like Smokescreen, Krunch, Quadrant and Elemental can pull off micro-raves in the countryside, simply because it’s too much trouble for local police to break up the party once it’s running. Keeping a low profile may not result in mythic confrontations with Babylon, à la Spiral Tribe, but it’s a sound long-term strategy, ensuring the survival of a free-party scene that provides the only alternative to the increasingly costly and commercialized clubbing mainstream.

  The one attempt in recent years to score a Castlemorton-scale triumph ended in humiliating disarray. In the summer of 1995, less than a year after the passage of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, a group called United Systems attempted to stage the biggest free rave since Castlemorton. A breakaway offshoot from the Advance Party, United Systems believe not in campaigning but in direct action to contest the CJA: ‘Only free parties can save free parties.’

  The mega-rave was named Mother, at once an echo of the terra-technic, Gaian mysticism of the Spirals and a declaration of overweening ambition (as in ‘the mother of all parties’). The site was a failed theme-park called Corby Wonderworld in Northamptonshire, with a parallel party at Smeatharpe Airfield in Devon. But details of the rave leaked out on to the Internet, and both mega-raves were met with roadblocks and policemen wielding Section 60 of the CJA to turn away ravers. At Corby, three members of the Black Moon sound-system were arrested, with the police using their CJA powers for the first time; the perpetrators were eventually fined, and their equipment was impounded. Mini-raves did take place, however, at Sleaford, on the beach at Steart, and at a site in Grafham Waters, Cambridge, where Anglia Water let the travellers stay for a night.

  Defeated but defiant, United Systems declared: ‘We are unbloodied, unbowed, undaunted and remain totally commited to our cause. They may have nailed the Mother but she had babies throughout the country that weekend. We live and learn and there’s always a next time – we’re not going to go away.’ Later that year, they started the legitimate club DMZ in the heart of London, in order to a build a ‘fighting fund’ to defend the eight United Systems members on trial for Mother. The location was the Soundshaft (the club where I first met Spiral Tribe) and the soundtrack was hardest-core gabba: martial music for tekno troopers, the militant sound of post-CJA rage. ‘It’s people beating back, ’cos they’ve been beaten just for having a good time,’ DMZ organizer Nick told me. From the guerrilla lingo of their flyers and communiqués to the camouflage decor of the club, DMZ’s stance was ‘All about preparedness. DMZ stands for Demilitarized Zone. And that implies the rest of the world is a war zone, right?’

  SIX

  FEED YOUR HEAD

  INTELLIGENT TECHNO,

  AMBIENT AND

  TRANCE

  ‘Are you sitting comfortably? Artificial Intelligence is for long journeys, quiet nights and club drowsy dawns. Listen with an open mind.’

  – sleevenote on Warp’s Artificial Intelligence compilation, 1992

  ‘No breakbeats, no Lycra.’

  – typical slogan for an ‘intelligent techno’ club, 1992

  On the cover of Artificial Intelligence, a robot reclines in a comfy armchair, blowing perfect smoke rings in the air and chilling to the atmospheric sounds wafting from a sleek hi-fi unit. In his left hand, there’s a fat spliff; at his feet, what looks like a can of Sapporo. Joint-making materials – Silk Cut, extra-long Rizla papers – are strewn on top of an album sleeve on the carpet. Two other LPs are clearly recognizable as classic ‘head’ music, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of The Moon and Kraftwerk’s Autobahn. With no little wit, Artificial Intelligence’s cover tableau of domestic bliss-out heralds the birth of a new post-rave genre, which Warp Records christened ‘electronic listening music’. Other names followed – armchair techno, ambient techno, intelligent techno, electronica – but all described the same phenomenon: dance music for the sedentary and stay-at-home.

  The most striking thing about the gatefold sleeve (a deliberate prog rock echo) isn’t the robot’s sweatless, supine serenity so much as the fact that he’s on his own. Coinciding with the emergence of a new ‘chill out’ culture, Artificial Intelligence offered a soundtrack for the raved out, for people who’d either given up on, or grown out of, the rave myth of mass communion and social mixing. And the reason? When the myth became reality, when the plebs turned up en masse for the party in 1991 – 2, ‘rave’ became a dirty word; Ecstasy was passé, more than a little undignified. Musically, battle lines were drawn around the question of breakbeats and samples: they were the stylistic core of ’ardkore, but for the post-rave refugees, they signified techno’s corruption and commercialization.

  Warp’s baldly descriptive term ‘electronic listening music’ was rapidly displaced by a more loaded epithet, ‘intelligent techno’. Beneath the rhetoric lurked the perennial bourgeois-bohemian impulse to delineate a firm border between the discerning few and the undiscriminating mass. Hence the not uncommon 1992 slogan for ‘intelligent’ or ‘pure techno’ clubs: the promise ‘no breakbeats, no lycra’. On the surface, ‘no breakbeats’ merely indicated that a particular sound – the breakbeat-driven hardcore that dominated the big raves and pop charts alike – wasn’t on the menu. But by implication, it proposed the purging of the black, hip-hop influence that had ‘polluted’ the Detroit-descended genealogy of pure techno. ‘Lycra’ was blatant snobbery: a reference to the clingy, sweat-absorbent clothing in which raver-girls shook their funky stuff, this was code language that summoned the folk-myth image of the ‘techno Tracey’ (the working-class latecomer who wants to join the scene but doesn’t really get it). In just four words, ‘no breakbeats, no lyrca’ conflated racism, classism and sexism into a rallying cry for a mostly male connoiseur élite, self-appointed custodians of the techno canon.

  Part of this return to the ‘original principles’ of Detroit and Chicago involved shunning the sampler in favour of analogue synthesizers, including the Roland 303 ‘acieed’ bass-machine. Analogue sound was often characterized as ‘warmer’ than digital; the ‘hands on’ nature of these early synths, with their knobs, dials and filters, was also felt to be more ‘musical’. When intelligent techno artists did resort to sampling, their use was governed by an ethos of masking and warping sources, in explicit opposition to the recognizable quotes and lifts that characterized’ardkore’s cut-up approach.

  For all its rhetoric of ‘progression’, intelligent techno involved a full-scale retreat from the most radically posthuman and hedonistically funktional aspects of rave music towards more traditional ideas about creativity, namely the auteur theory of the solitary genius who humanizes technology rather than subordinate
s himself to the drug-tech interface. There was even a resurgence of rock notions like the ‘concept album’ and ‘live musicianship’, with bands like Underworld and Orbital developing new forms of onstage improvisation based around the live mixing of sequenced, pre-recorded parts.

  Perhaps you can detect my reservations about these developments. None of the above means to argue that electronic listening music wasn’t a necessary initiative: the white-label hardcore boom had saturated the dance scene with derivative, poorly produced tracks composed of Nth-generation samples, and there was a gap crying out to be filled by contemplative, home-compatible music. Nor is it to deny the fact that a lot of truly beautiful and innovative music was made under the ‘intelligent’ banner. But because it was founded on exclusions (musical and social), electronic listening music ultimately paved the way for its own dead-end redundancy. What started as a fresh, innovative idea – techno liberated from the demands of the dancefloor – quickly turned into a new form of myopic orthodoxy. The root of the problem was the retreat from dance itself: resurrecting progressive rock’s elevation of head over body, melodic complexity over rhythmic compulsion, the new home-listening electronica set itself on a course that led to New Age.

  Furniture Music

  For Warp, ‘electronic listening music’ was simultaneously an aesthetic initiative and a business strategy. Aiming to evade the fate that befell most independent dance labels – getting burned out by the high-turnover of dancefloor trends – Warp decided to take measures to foster brand and band loyalty. ‘We’d seen from running the shop how dance labels had about a year of being on top,’ says Steve Beckett. ‘We were determined that wasn’t gonna happen to us. The only way to avoid it was to get more artist-oriented and album-oriented’.

  At hardcore’s height in early 1992, remembers Beckett, ‘you started to hear tracks by B12 and Plaid and Speedy J that just didn’t fit into any category, B-sides and last tracks on EPs. We realized that they weren’t meant for 12 inches, it was just that this was the only outlet for that kind of music. We realized you could make a really good album out of it. You could sit down and listen to it like you would a Kraftwerk or Pink Floyd album. That’s why we put those sleeves on the cover of Artificial Intelligence – to get it into people’s heads that you weren’t supposed to dance to it!’

  By early 1992, there was a demand, among worn-out veteran ravers, for music to accompany and enhance the comedown phase after clubbing ’n’ raving. ‘That’s still the highpoint of most people’s nights,’ argues Beckett. ‘That’s when you start hearing the really interesting, mindblowing stuff. If you’re coming down off [drugs], you can get really lost in your own thoughts and concentrate on the music, pay more attention to detail . . . From our point of view, it also felt like a lot of the dance music around had gotten really throwaway, just white labels from people jumping on the bandwagon to make a quick five hundred or thousand quid out of it. It felt like somebody should start paying attention to the production and the artwork – the whole way the music was presented.’

  Responding to Artificial Intelligence and similar compilations like The Philosophy of Sound and Machine, the music press and style magazines began to run pieces spotlighting an international network of anti-rave ‘dissidents’: artists like The Black Dog, B12, Kirk DeGiorgio and Mixmaster Morris, labels like Infonet, Irdial, Rephlex, Tresor, Beyond, Porky’s Productions, Time. Speaking to iD, crusading ambient DJ Mixmaster Morris articulated the common sentiment that Detroit’s original spirit had been obliterated by a welter of ultra-thrash drug-noise: ‘. . . Detroit techno was much more ambient than it was hardcore . . . It had such lightness of touch, it was radically beautiful. In the rave scene now, everyone demands instant gratification, a cliché every four bars.’ In Lime Lizard, Porky’s Dave Brennand railed against the loved-up cheesy sentimentalism of hardcore, boasting that he had ‘no interest in doing anything that has one ounce of mozzarella . . .’

  Although Beckett claims the title Artificial Intelligence was ‘a tongue in cheek reference to the idea that this music is totally made by computers, you just press a button and a tune comes out,’ the word ‘intelligent’ rapidly took on a dubious life of its own. Many shared the attitude of Mixmaster Morris, who in 1994 defined ‘intelligent techno’ as ‘the opposite of stupid hardcore’, and declared that ‘techno got boring when hardcore took all the weirdness and creativity and innovation out of Acid House . . .’ Morris’s slogan ‘I Think Therefore I Ambient’ recast progressive rock’s neo-Cartesian split between head and body as the struggle between atmospheric mindfood (ambient) versus thoughtless rhythmic compulsion (hardcore). By 1993, with ‘progressive house’ and ‘trance’ set in place as dancefloor-friendly adjuncts to electronic listening music, a firm line had been drawn. On one side, still raving after all these sneers, was the moronic inferno of hardcore, with its heedless (head-less?) hedonism; on the other, the post-rave cognoscenti, with their intimate clubs and chill-out zones.

  Listening to Artificial Intelligence now, it’s hard to imagine why the album had such an impact. Speedy J’s ‘De-Orbit’ and the two tracks by Musicology (alter-ego of Detroit-pietists B12) constituted little more than test-card muzak. Electro-Soma, B12’s debut long-player that followed as part of Warp’s Artificial Intelligence series of single-artist albums, took its name from soma: the Prozac-like tranquillizer in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which was derived from an Ancient Indian intoxicating plant juice venerated as a drink of immortality by Vedic worshippers. Electro-Soma’s effect is more akin to a queasy docility, like being forcibly anaesthetized with Glade air-freshener. Artificial Intelligence did however showcase material from three outfits destined to become major players in the realm of electronica: Autechre, The Black Dog and The Aphex Twin.

  Autechre – the Manchester based duo of Sean Booth and Rob Brown – followed a typical trajectory for English techno boffins. Having grown up on electro, graffiti, and Mantronix, they were dislodged from their B-boy path by the phuture shock of acid house. Profiling the duo for The Lizard, writer Peter McIntyre identified a sort of constructivist/Cubist aesthetic running through Autechre’s output, which he connected with Brown’s studies in architectural design. ‘We’re big fans of geometry in both design and sound,’ the duo confirmed. ‘There’s nothing better than tight geometry.’ On albums like Incunabula, Amber and Tri Repetae, and EPs like Garbage and Anvil Vapre, they constructed unlovely but queerly compelling sound-sculptures: abstruse and angular concatenations of sonic glyphs, blocs of distortion and mutilated sample-tones, with occasional light relief in the form of pretty pulse-scapes of chime-colour like ‘Yulquen’.

  Comparisons with Leger and Mondrian aside, Autechre’s music is most redolent of wildstyle graffiti, where typography is convoluted and abstracted to the point of illegibility. The graf parallel fits because their music is basically avant-garde electro: Man Parrish meets Pierre Henry, or The Art of Noise meets Luigi Russolo’s ‘The Art Of Noises’. The cryptographic opacity carried through to the song-titles: ‘c/pach’, ‘gnit’, ‘rsdio’, ‘second scepe’, ‘vletrmx21’. Although Artificial Intelligence’s sleevenotes had insisted that the new electronica ‘cannot be described as soulless or machine made’, what’s most interesting about Autechre’s work is the absence of heart and humanity, the way that the listener’s impulse to forge an emotional connection simply ricochets off the impenetrable, gnomic surfaces of their sound. At times you can’t help wonder if the ‘aut’ in their name stands for autism: listening, the mind’s eye conjures up a vision of two small boys surrounded by tekno toys, lost in their own little pre-verbal world of chromatics and texture and contour.

  The Black Dog – the trio of Ed Handley, Andy Turner and Ken Downie – were almost as hermetic as Autechre, but more committed to traditional art notions of ‘expression’. They once defined their project as the quest for ‘a computer soul’, while Ken Downie told Eternity that The Black Dog started in order to fill ‘a hole in music. Acid house had been “
squashed” by the police and rinky-dinky Italian house music was getting played everywhere. Emotion had left via the window.’

  The musical emotions in The Black Dog (and alter-egos Plaid and Balil) aren’t the straightforward, run-of-the-mill, everyday sort, but rather more elusive: subtle, indefinable shades of mood, ambiguous and evanescent feelings for which even an oxymoron like ‘bittersweet’ seems rather crude. Eschewing live appearance and seldom doing interviews, The Black Dog nonetheless created a cult aura around their often hard-to-find discography. One of their chosen mediums was cyberspace: long before the current craze for techno web-sites, The Black Dog established a computer bulletin board called Black Dog Towers. Visitors could gawp at artwork and learn more about the Dog’s interest in arcane knowledges, such as paganism, out-of-body experiences, UFOs, Kabbalah, and ‘aeonics’ (mass shifts in consciousness). Ken Downie – the principal eso-terrorist in the band – has described himself as a magician. One of The Black Dog’s earliest tracks, ‘Virtual (Gods in Space)’, features a sample – ‘make the events occur that you want to occur’ – which gives a magickal spin to the punk DIY ethos.

  Although far from the euphoric fervour of rave, The Black Dog’s early 1990 – 92 material is remarkably similar to the breakbeat hardcore of the day. Like Hyper-On Experience, DJ Trax et al, the mode of construction is basically the Mantronix collage aesthetic updated for the rave era: incongruous samples + looped breakbeats + oscillator riffs. But the mood of ‘Seers + Sale’, ‘Apt’, ‘Chiba’ and ‘Age Of Slack’ is quirky Dada absurdism rather than Loony Toons zany. The crisp, echoed breakbeat and keyboard vamp on ‘Seers + Sale’ recalls 2 Bad Mice classics like ‘Waremouse’, except that the riff sounds like it’s played on a church organ, so the effect is eldritch rather than E-lated. On 1991’s ‘Chiba’, the Morse Code riff has a glancing lightness of inflection that anticipates the Detroit-breakbeat of Innerzone Orchestra’s ‘Bug In The Bassbin’.