Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture

by Simon Reynolds

  Carl Craig, the producer behind Innerzone Orchestra, clearly recognized The Black Dog as kindred spirits in sonic watercolours; in 1992 his Planet E label released their classic Balil track ‘Nort Route’. Strangely redolent of the early eighties – the Sinophile phunk of Sylvian and Sakomoto’s ‘Bamboo Music’, the phuturistic panache of Thomas Leer – ‘Nort Route’ daubs synth-goo into an exquisite calligraphic melody-shape over an off-kilter breakbeat. The track trembles and brims with a peculiar emotion, a euphoric melancholy that David Toop came closest to capturing with his phrase ‘nostalgia for the future’. What The Black Dog/Balil/Plaid tracks most resembled was a sort of digital update of fifties exotica. But instead of imitating remote alien cultures, as the original exotica did, it was like The Black Dog were somehow giving us advance glimpses of the hybrid musics of the next millennium: the Hispanic-Polynesian dance crazes of the Pacific Rim, or music for discotheques and wine bars in Chiba City and The Sprawl (the megalopolises in William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Count Zero). While some of the Dog’s later work – on albums like Bytes, Parallel, The Temple of Transparent Balls and Spanners – crosses the thin line between mood-music and muzak, it’s still marked by a rhythmic inventiveness that’s unusual in the electronic listening field. With its percussive density and discombobulated time signatures, The Black Dog’s music often feels like it’s designed for the asymmetrical dancing of creatures with an odd number of limbs – not bipeds, but quintupeds or nonopeds.

  Surfing on Sinewaves

  If anyone substantiated Warp’s concept of electronic listening music, it was Richard James, aka Aphex Twin. On Artificial Intelligence, he appeared as The Dice Man, just one of a bewildering plethora of pseudonyms – AFX, Caustic Window, Soit P. P., Bluecalx, Polygon Window and Powerpill. Despite this penchant for alter-egos and a professed indifference to publicity, Richard James has been by far the most successful of the new breed of ‘armchair techno’ auteurs at cultivating a cult of personality. He’s fostered this by painting a picture of an extremely abnormal childhood in the remote coastal county of Cornwall.

  James’s avant-garde impulses emerged almost as soon as he was potty-trained. As a small child he messed about on the family piano, exploring different tuning scales and hitting the strings inside instead of the keys. ‘I used to play with the piano, rather than play tunes on the keyboard,’ he told me. These infantile experiments uncannily parallel the ‘prepared piano’ techniques devised by John Cage and other twentieth-century composers. Many years later his infamous DJ performances – he’d place the stylus on sandpapers instead of vinyl and modulate the hellaciously abrasive din using a graphics equalizer – echoed Cage’s ‘Cartridge Music’ piece, in which the turntable’s stylus cartridge was rubbed against inappropriate objects and surfaces.

  Like Cage and other avant-classical composers, James’s interest has always been sound-in-itself, or as he puts it with characteristic down-to-earthiness: ‘I’ve always been into banging things and making weird noises.’ Musique concrète style tape manipulation was swiftly followed by teenage forays into Stockhausen-esque electro-acoustic experiments. ‘I bought a synth when I was twelve, thought it was a load of shit, took it apart and started pissing about with it. I learned about electronics in school until I was quite competent and could build my own circuits from scratch. I started modifying analogue synths and junk that I’d bought, and got addicted to making noises.’ This obsession with generating a repertoire of unique timbres eventually led James to study electronics at Kingston University.

  The geographical/cultural remoteness of Cornwall is another crucial element in the mythos of Aphex as isolated child prodigy. James claims that when he first heard acid and techno, he was astounded because he’d quite independently been making similar sounds for years. James immediately threw himself into purchasing every techno record he could lay his hands on, and he started DJ-ing at clubs and beach-raves. Finally his mates persuaded him to put out his own tracks, which he’d been giving them on cassette for years.

  James immediately won acclaim with the cosmic-jacuzzi swirl of ‘Analogue Bubblebath’, the title track of his 1991 debut EP. With its fluttery, diaphanous riff-pattern and hazy-yet-crystalline production, ‘Bubblebath’ announced a new softcore direction in techno – meditational, melodically-intricate and ambient-tinged. But the EP also revealed that James was no slouch when it came to industrial-strength hardcore. The chemical-formula title and astringent sound of ‘Isopro-phlex’ suggests a nasty corrosive fluid, the kind whose container carries warnings like ‘avoid inhalation’ and ‘irrigate the eye area immediately, then seek medical help’. James’s next track, ‘Didgeridoo’, impacted the hardcore dancefloor in a big way. Inspired by hearing traveller-minstrels playing the didgeridoo at festival-raves in Cornwall, the track is by far the best of a 1992 techno mini-genre based around the strange similarity between the Australian aboriginal pipe and the acieed bass-squelch of the Roland 303. But it doesn’t actually feature a didgeridoo; eschewing samples, James laboured for three days to concoct an electronic simulacrum of the primordial drone.

  ‘Analogue Bubblebath’ and ‘Didgeridoo’ mark out the poles of the Aphex sound-spectrum: synth-siphoned balm for the soul versus clangorously percussive noise. James’s debut album, Selected Ambient Works, 85 – 92 is tilted towards softcore. The opening track ‘Xtal’ is a shimmer of tremulously translucent synths, hissy hi-hat and muffled bass; a girl softly intones a daydreamy, ‘la-la-la’ melody, her slightly off-key voice seemingly diffracted by the gossamer haze of sound. The nine minutes long mood-piece ‘Tha’ is twilight-after-rain melancholia worthy of the Eno-produced instrumentals on Bowie’s Low. Over a pensive bassline and water-drip percussion, a mist of susurrating sound drifts like the chinese-whispery hubbub of a railway station concourse or an abbey’s cloisters. The voices are so reverb-atomized you catch only the outline of words before they crumble like chalk-dust and disperse.

  Fusing narcosis and speed-rush, ‘Pulsewidth’ is ambient techno, literally; everything’s soft-focus, the aural equivalent of vaseline-on-the-lens, yet the fluorescent bass-pulse is irresistibly dynamic, propelling you towards a breathtaking breakdown before surging off again. The sensation is like ‘swimming through cotton wool’ (Graham Greene’s description of a botched suicide attempt when he took deadly nightshade and tried to drown himself in the school pool). ‘Heliosphan’ is impossibly stirring and stately, its cupola-high synth-cadence and wistful melody offset by impish twirls of nonchantly jazzy keyboards. Imagine the theme music for a fifties government film about Britain’s new garden cities: serene, symmetrical, euphonious, evoking the socially engineered perfection of a post-war New Order.

  Selected Ambient Works climaxes with ‘We Are the Music Makers’. The track makes you wait and wait through long stretches of just beats and bass-fuzz, teasing you with intermittent flickers of twinkly synth in the cornermost crevice of the soundscape. Then there’s a one-note dapple of reverb-hazy piano, like green-tinted sunlight peeking through a woodland canopy and caressing your half-closed eyelids, before the melody finally blossoms in full spangly-tingly glory.

  Almost as striking as the music on Selected was the second half of the title: 85 – 92. This was Richard James highlighting the fact that most of the record was culled from the backlogged output of his teenage years. In interviews, he talked about how he’d amassed a personal archive of around a thousand tracks, enough for a hundred albums. In truth, James had no real notion of how much music he’d made in the previous eight years; he had lost track of his tracks. ‘Every time I go back to Cornwall,’ he told me, ‘my friends play me tapes of tunes I gave ’em, stuff I haven’t heard for years. In their cars I’ll find cassettes of material that I haven’t even got copies of. Lots of them sound like the tape is just about to wear out, like it’ll break if you play it one more time . . . See, once it’s recorded, I lose all interest in it.’

  More tantalizing glimpses into James’s trove of unreleased material came with
the two albums that followed swiftly on the heels of Selected: Polygon Window’s Surfing On Sine Waves and AFX’s Analogue Bubblebath 3. If tracks like ‘If It Really Is Me’ verged on a sort of astral muzak, most of Surfing was harder and darker than its ambient predecessor. The stand-out track, ‘Quoth’ features no melody, no synths, no bass even, just frenzied metallic percussion. It makes me think of Alfred Bester’s science fiction classic Tiger, Tiger, where the anti-hero Gulliver Foyle encounters a Lord of the Flies community of asteroid-belt castaways, who’ve built themselves a planetoid out of space junk; ‘Quoth’ could be the savage pounding of tribal rhythms against the hulls of shipwrecked spacecraft.

  Clad only in bubblewrap and devoid of track information, Analogue Bubblebath 3 also cleaved to the industrial end of the Aphex sound-spectrum. Most of the thirteen tracks are undanceably angular anti-grooves, adorned with blurts of noise and interlaced with the occasional ribbon of minimal melody. One track sounds like a gamelan symphony for glass and rubber percussion; another begins with the sound of a vacuum cleaner, before letting rip with an out-of-tune pianola-like oscillator-riff, conjuring the image of a rave in a cavern beneath the crater-pocked lunar surface of Ganymede. Like the hair-raisingly forbidding ‘Hedphelym’ on Selected Ambient Works, track eleven is like stumbling upon a pagan shrine on an alien world. But there’s two lapses back into the outright beauty of Selected Ambient Works. Track four has a forlorn, Satiesque melody floating at quarter-tempo over an incongruously strident, unrelenting beat. And track eight is kosmik kinder-muzik, a sublime confection of music-box melody and thunderous dub that always makes me think of an ice-cream van doing the rounds on The Clangers’ planet.

  Fostering his crackpot genius image, Richard James claimed he could survive on a mere two or three hours of sleep a night. ‘When I was little I decided sleep was a waste of your life. If you lived to a hundred but you didn’t sleep, it’d be like living to two hundred. Originally, it wasn’t for more time to make music, I just thought sleep was a bit of a con. I’d always been able get away with four hours a night, but I tried to narrow it down to two. It gets very strange when I don’t sleep for a long while, ’cos it’s not that I’m actually that good at staying awake. I can only do it if I’m making music. But it’s fucking excellent, not sleeping, it’s sort of nice and not-nice at the same time. Your minds starts getting scatty, like you’re senile. You do unpredictable things, like making tea but pouring it in a cereal bowl instead of a cup.’

  I reckon sleep-deprivation has a lot to do with the eerie, spaced-out aura of James’s music. Some neurologists believe humans have an innate need to dream. Which is why you feel ‘unreal’ when you’ve stayed up all night or are jetlagged: the brain is trying to dream while you’re still conscious. Aphex Twin music appears to be created in a mind-state that’s constantly flitting between ‘hypnagogic’ and ‘hypnopompic’. Hypnagogic is the half-awake phase just before you drop off in bed at night, when the mind’s eye fills with hyper-real imagery (but not the surreal visions you get in the classic R.E.M. dream-state). Hypnapompic is that early morning sensation of dis-reality gestured at in My Bloody Valentine’s lyric ‘when you’re awake you’re still in a dream’. James often makes tunes in a somnambulistic trance. ‘When I’m in the studio my eyes get tired from looking at monitors and sometimes I’ll finish a track with my eyes shut. I know where all the dials are, and so I can do a track by touch.’

  Turn On, Tune In, Drop Off

  Released at the end of 1992, Selected Ambient Works coincided not just with the electronic listening boom but with a resurgence of interest in ‘chill-out’ music as a supplement or sequel to the rave. The idea had been first mooted in 1989 in the form of a short-lived fad for ‘ambient house’. At Land of Oz, Paul Oakenfold’s acid house night at Heaven, there was a VIP area called The White Room. Here Dr. Alex Paterson – soon to be the mainman in The Orb – provided soul-soothing succour for the acieed-frazzled by spinning records by Brian Eno, Pink Floyd, The Eagles, War, 10cc and Mike Oldfield, all at very low volume and accompanied by multi-screen video projections. Hippy-rock guru Steve Hillage is said to have dropped by one night, only to hear Paterson playing Rainbow Dome Musick, an album Hillage had composed for the New Age-y Festival for Mind-Body-Spirit in 1979.

  In 1989 – 90, the Spacetime parties were also taking place at Cable Street in the East End of London. Specifically designed to encourage people to talk rather than dance, the events were organized by Jonah Sharp and featured live music by Mixmaster Morris. Meanwhile, in his magazine Evolution (originally Encyclopaedia Psychedelica), counterculture vet Fraser Clark was evangelizing his vision of rave as the expression of a new Gaia-worshipping eco-consciousness. Clark coined the term ‘zippie’ to describe a new kind of hippy who rejected sixties’ Luddite pastoralism and embraced the cyberdelic, mind-expanding potential of technology.

  There was music too, dubbed New Age house or ambient house: Sueno Latino’s ‘Sueno Latino’ (a dance version of acid-rocker Manuel Gottsching’s proto-techno masterpiece E2 – E4), 808 State’s ‘Pacific State’, The Grid’s ‘Floatation’, Quadrophenia’s ‘Paradise’, Audio One’s ‘Journeys Into Rhythm’, Innocence’s ‘Natural Thing’ (featuring a sample from Pink Floyd’s ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’). Most of this stuff was pretty tepid: slow-mo house grooves overlaid with bird-song samples, serendipitous piano chords, mawkish woodwind solos, plangent acoustic guitars, and breathy female vocals whispering New Age positivity poesy. Two records stood out from the dross: The KLF’s Chill Out album and The Orb’s ‘A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From the Centre of the Ultraworld’.

  Although it initially seemed like it was going to be just another cheap joke from prankster duo Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, The KLF’s Chill Out turned out to be an atmospheric trans-American travelogue woven out of samples from sound effects records and MOR songs like Elvis Presley’s ‘In The Ghetto’, Acker Bilk’s ‘Stranger On The Shore’ and Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Albatross’. The sleeve spoofed Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother (with grazing sheep replacing the Floyd’s ruminating cow), and a sticker on the front hinted ‘File Under Ambient’. The Orb’s ‘A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain’ came emblazoned with the slogan ‘Ambient House For The E Generation’. Twenty-four minutes long, the track is a shimmerscape of sound effects (crowing roosters, church bells, splashing pebbles), angelic close harmony singing, the helium-high croon of Minnie Ripperton’s ‘Loving You’, and a synth-pulse as radiant as a nimbus (the luminous vapour that surrounds God). The net effect is sheer nirvana or near-death experience, like your cerebral cortex is being flooded with pain-and-doubt killing endorphins.

  Like The KLF, The Orb consisted of punk rock veterans: Alex Paterson had been a roadie and drum technician for Killing Joke, and sometimes sang Sex Pistols encores when the band toured. Through the Killing Joke connection, he got an A & R job at their label E. G., home to ambient pioneers Brian Eno and Harold Budd. After appearing uncredited on The KLF’s Chill Out and Space albums, Paterson collaborated with Jimmy Cauty on ‘A Huge Ever Growing Brain’. Teaming up with engineer Kris Weston, aka Thrash, Paterson then transformed The Orb into a real band.

  ‘A Huge Ever Growing Brain’ was released in December 1989. When The Orb’s debut album Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld finally materialized in the spring of 1991, it seemed monumentally tardy: the magnum (and I mean whopping – it was a 110 minute long dubble-elpee) opus of a clubland fad long past its sell-by date. In fact, Adventures was the harbinger of an imminent deluge of dub-flavoured ambient techno. Following Chill Out’s Pink Floyd homage, the sleeve depicted Battersea Power Station, previously seen on the cover of Animals; inside, there was a track entitled ‘Back Side Of The Moon’. These nudge-nudge wink-wink acknowledgements of the Floyd connection seemed designed to pre-empt the carping complaints of punk veterans: THIS is what Sid Vicious died for?

  But for all the protective irony and the contemporary house beats, there was no mistaking the fact that Adv
entures was the unabashed return of cosmic rock. Titles like ‘Earth (Gaia)’ and ‘Little Fluffy Clouds’ (with its samples of Rickie Lee Jones’s blissful reveries of the Arizona skyline of her childhood) harked back to the cosmic pastoralism and nostalgia for lost innocence that characterized late sixties outfits like The Incredible String Band. The quirked-out humour and daft sound effects recalled seventies space-rockers Hawkwind and Gong; Steve Hillage, a Gong veteran, actually shared production duties on ‘Supernova At The End Of The Universe’ and ‘Back Side Of The Moon’. On ‘Supernova’, braided wisps of evanescent sound – distant cloudbreak, radio murmurings, cascades of stardust, silvered shivers of harp – were draped incongruously over a kickin’ beat. ‘Back Side’ featured crackly samples of astronauts talking about Tranquility Base, the landing site on the Moon’s Sea of Tranquility. With its beatific, beat-free lassitude and zero-gravity suspension, Adventures was like a cut-price aural surrogate for the flotation tank, then in vogue with stressed out yuppies. The Orb’s music lowered your metabolic rate to the level of a particularly well-adjusted and ‘centred’ sea anemone.

  ‘I’ve been waiting for music like this all my life’, ran a sample in ‘Back Side’. Immodest, maybe, but it was no idle boast: thousands apparently had been waiting, and next summer, the band’s follow-up, u. f. orb, went straight into the British Album Charts at Number One. It was preceded by a single, ‘Blue Room’, which got to Number Eight in the hit parade, despite being just under forty minutes long and featuring only one real hook: ‘ah wah wah a wah wah’, the wordless siren-song of reggae vocalist Aisha, the protégé of UK dub wizard the Mad Professor. Paterson and Thrash appeared on Top of the Pops, but instead of miming with instruments, they played a Star Trek-style 3D chess-set in front of back-projected film of aquabatic dolphins. Named after the room at the Wright Patterson airforce base where the remains of crash-landed aliens are allegedly kept by the US government, ‘Blue Room’ alternates between ambience (synth-motes like spangly space debris) and aquafunk (an undulant, slow-mo groove that feels like skanking underwater). With Steve Hillage’s cirrus-streaks of heavily sustained guitar offset by Jah Wobble’s thunderquake bass, ‘Blue Room’ was an astonishing reconciliation of hippy and post-punk; imagine Public Image Limited if Johnny Rotten had never famously scrawled ‘I Hate’ in felt-pen over his Pink Floyd T-shirt.