On u. f. orb itself, ‘Towers of Dub’ began with a Victor Lewis-Smith phone prank. The posh-voiced comedian calls London Weekend Television and, pretending to be Marcus Garvey, asks if Haile Selassie is waiting in reception: ‘He’s a, erm, black gentleman.’ After the hapless receptionist has shouted out for the long-dead Abyssinian monarch and Rastafarian Messiah, Lewis-Smith asks him to pass on the message that ‘I’ll meet him at Babylon an’ ting.’ Combining and conflating the studio-as-instrument effects of several forms of ‘head’ music – acid rock, dub reggae, ambient – The Orb offered a musiquarium of sound that seemed to have migrated from an alternative pop universe: one where Pink Floyd, Brian Eno and King Tubby got together to form a seventies supergroup bringing ‘cosmic ambient dub’ to the stadium circuit.
By this point, The Orb had built up a formidable reputation as a live band. After ‘Blue Room’, they scored another big hit with ‘Assassin’, an uncharacteristically uptempo onslaught of tribal house rhythms and quicksilver, scimitar-flashing riffs. The best of the five mixes was recorded live at the 1992 Glastonbury Festival. The following year saw Live 93, a double-CD/quadruple-LP that recalled The Grateful Dead in the way that The Orb improvised wildly around a core of pre-recorded sequences. Catching the Orb tour when it reached New York’s Roseland Theater in the autumn of 1993, I did spot straggly-bearded Deadhead types headnodding in the audience alongside the sixteen-year-old ravers. And I was struck by how everything about The Orb – from the cloud-castle immensity of the sound to the ama-a-a-a-zing visuals – was spectacular but impersonal. The band themselves figured as ‘specks on their own landscape’ (as David Stubbs said of the German neo-psychedelic group Faust). Throughout the show, Paterson and Thrash remained shrouded, bobble-hatted figures lurking behind their banks of gear, technicians in the stereo-laboratory as opposed to stars. Like a planetarium or a piece of majestic architecture, The Orb’s music seemed to invite awe rather than involvement. And yet the grandiosity was veined with Monty Pythonesque daftness and post-punk irony, prompting me to wonder: can you really kiss the sky with your tongue-in-cheek?
Lie Down and Be Counted
The immediate effect of The Orb’s success was to spawn a plague of ambient dub, aka digi-dub. While the fad generated a handful of genuinely sublime moments – Higher Intelligence Agency’s ‘Ketamine Entity’, Original Rockers ‘The Underwater World of Jah Cousteau’ – the trouble with the genre was that it was one of those hybrids, like jazz-funk and funk-metal, that only seem like a good idea. Too often, instead of Harold Budd meets Prince Far I, the results were more like Vangelis teaming up with Adrian Sherwood on an off-night: celestial synth-vapour (ambient) + meaninglessly overdone echo FX and stereophonic tomfoolery (dub).
The original roots music of seventies Jamaica had a spiritual halo, a halcyon haze, that the British digi-dub outfits tried and failed to recover; smoking vast quantities of weed wasn’t enough. Partly this was because producers like Tubby, Lee Perry and Keith Hudson used lo-fi technology: self-cobbled effects, four-track recording (which meant that several instrumental parts had to be compressed on to one track, thereby creating classic dub’s blissful blurriness). And partly it was because the Jamaican dubmeisters combined flesh-and-blood musicians with studio wizardry to achieve an uncanny fusion of presence and absence, funky feel and disembodied drift. The high-definition gloss and inelastic, sequenced rhythms of digital dub can’t compare with the earthy-but-otherwordly vibe the Jamaicans got by taking a supple, interactive rhythm section and feeding it through the hall-of-mirrors vortex of the mixing desk. The analogue echo and reverb units cobbled together by the original Jamaican dub producers created a smudgy reverberance that feels closer to real-world acoustics. So instead of roots reggae’s sacrosanct expanse, most ambient dub evoked only the virtual, geometrically plotted space of MIDI hardware: the music smelled sterile, not ambrosial.
The difference between classic dub and digital dub is like that between a stained-glass window and a computer graphic. This ecclesiastical analogy is appropriate in so far as the mystical aura of echo and reverberance is a thread connecting most twentieth-century musics that aspire to Timelessness: psychedelia, dub reggae, ambient, and the New Age sub-genre of ‘resonant music’ (recorded in temples, cathedrals and giant cisterns). As R. Murray Shafer points out in The Soundscape, Gothic and Norman churches were deliberately designed to swaddle the worshipper in ‘a non-localizable sound-bath’ of low-and-medium frequency echoes. And our prehistoric ancestors enacted rites in caves and grottoes chosen for their unusual acoustics.
The question remains: why do echo and reverb evoke the Timeless? I’d argue that, by simulating the way sound-waves behave underwater, the effects in dub and ambient hark back to our personal prehistory in the amniotic sea of the womb. It’s not for nothing that studio engineers talk of a recording being ‘dry’ when it’s devoid of reverb. The foetus can’t hear until the twenty-fourth week of pregnancy, but after that it reacts to external sounds and bonds with the mother’s voice, which must reach its ears blurred and refracted through the fleshly prism of her body. With its submarine sonar FX and numinous reverberance, dub reggae reinvokes the blurry sonic intimacy of womb-time, the lost paradise before individuation and anxiety. This might also account for why dub foregrounds the bass (its frequencies are less localizable, more immersive and engulfing) and why dub reggae runs at tempos – around 70 – 75 b.p.m. – that approximate the baby’s heartbeat in the womb.
Ambient music is like the amnion, the delicate membrane surrounding the foetus in the womb. Even after birth, sound (alongside touch and smell) has primacy over vision, because the infant’s eyesight takes some time to develop. Guy Rosalato writes of how the infant is swaddled in a ‘sonorous envelope’; the mother’s pre-verbal utterances are sonic caresses that constitute a ‘pleasurable milieu which surround, sustains and cherishes’. Music, he argues, ‘finds its roots and its nostalgia in [this] original atmosphere, which might be called a sonorous womb, a murmuring house – or music of the spheres.’ Hence the Gaia/Earth Mother and heavenly imagery that pervades ambient; the music’s angelic harmonies and kindly serenity all reinvoke Julia Kristeva’s ‘archaic . . . englobing mother with no frustation, no separation . . .’
In Civilisation and Its Discontents, Freud wrote of a long-lost selfless self, the phase of primary narcissism in which the infant does not distinguish between itself, the mother and the world. ‘Originally the ego includes everything . . . the ego-feeling we are aware of now is . . . only a shrunken vestige of a far more extensive feeling – a feeling which embraced the universe and expressed an inseparable connection of the ego with the external world.’ Both dub and ambient attempt a magical return to this diffuse but majestic self-without-contours, the ‘royal we’ of the infant/mother symbiosis, or the lost kingdom of the womb. In Rastafarian reggae, though, this lost god-self is identified with Jah, a righteous paternal principle; nostalgia becomes anticipation, the dream of returning to the promised land, Zion. By comparison, ambient music – like its ancestor, psychedelia – tends to be feminine-identified, expressing its homesick longings through imagery of pastoral tranquility, oceanic bliss, childhood, and the celestial. Where roots reggae is spiritually militant, ambient music is an aural pacifier.
This is why the ambient boom of 1992 – 3 was regarded by many outside the dance scene as a cop out. Equating contemplation with complacency, nouveau punks like Manic Street Preachers and These Animal Men lambasted ambient-heads as nouveau hippies. For their part, the ambient producers were disarmingly frank about the apolitical nature of their bohemia. Alex Paterson declared: ‘Our music doesn’t reflect the times, it ignores them . . . Society today is so suppressed, you can only make music that is escapist.’ And Mixmaster Morris – like Paterson, a thirtysomething ex-punk – campaigned for the ambient cause under the slogan ‘It’s Time To Lie Down and Be Counted’.
Morris’s 1992 debut as The Irresistible Force, Flying High, starts with samples from a meditation
training album: a kindly, calming male voice advises you to relax your muscles so that they become your cushion, listen to all the sounds that surround you, and concentrate solely on the one that you find most pleasant. The album runs the gamut of ambient’s sonic and metaphorical tropes: wispy curlicues of crybaby guitar, simulated and sampled bird-tweets, tremolo synth-ripples, wooshing ascents, spangly texture-swathes and one-note, single-phoneme pulses à la Laurie Anderson’s ‘O Superman’. On ‘Sky High’, what sounds like a scuba-diving barbershop quartet implores ‘let’s touch the sky’; ‘Symphony In E’ samples fifties comic actress Joyce Grenfell in schoolmistress mode, her strawberries-and-cream voice instructing her dance class of little girls to do free-expression.
One of the first and best albums produced during the second-wave of nineties chill-out culture, Flying High reminds me less of the Eno/ Harold Budd/Laraji tradition of ambient minimalism, than of Spacemen 3’s 1989 classic Playing With Fire, the album on which the band abandoned Stooges/Velvet Underground mantra-rock for an Elysian tranquillity redolent of early Kraftwerk. Like Spacemen 3’s music, Flying High is based around heavily processed verging on denatured sounds, mesmerizing loop-patterns, stereophonic effects, and drones. The similarity is less surprising when you consider that Spacemen 3 and The Irresistible Force share influences in Kraftwerk, Suicide and Laurie Anderson, while Morris would doubtless concur with the Spacemen’s slogan ‘taking drugs to make music to take drugs to’.
As part of his crusade for floaty soft-core, Mixmaster Morris DJ-ed at the first Telepathic Fish, an ‘ambient tea party’ organized by DJ/ design collective Open Mind. Kevin Foakes, Chantal Passamonte, David Vallade and Mario Tracey-Ageura formed Open Mind in the summer of 1992, after becoming disillusioned with rave culture’s ‘harder, faster’ ethos. The first Telepathic Fish took place in the foursome’s South East London house (Morris spun in the kitchen), but was such an unexpected success – five hundred people, queues round the block – that Open Mind had to locate subsequent tea parties in squatted venues, which they decorated and filled with mattresses. ‘Basically, what we’re trying to create at our events is a massive bedroom,’ Foakes told me in 1993. ‘After raves we used to chill out in each others’ bedrooms. Now we’ve turned the bedroom into a party.’
Ravers had been chilling out informally since the early days of rave, inventing their own rituals to enhance the post-E afterglow and cushion the come-down. ‘People are doing this at home all round the country,’ said Passamonte. ‘But we decided to do it for several hundred people, not just ten.’ After a year of serious raving, the friends ‘realized that what we really enjoyed was that thing of everyone coming back after the party. That’s when you could really talk to people, and play mellower music. It’s chatty, there’s loads of people coming down from drugs, you get to hang out more and meet people.’ And so they decided to dispense with the sweaty, expensive part of the night out and go straight to the ‘good bit’. The same bright idea had occurred to other outfits across the country: Sonora in Glasgow, Oscillate in Birmingham, Zero Gravity in London. Together, they constitued the Second Coming of Chill Out.
In October 1993, the fifth Telepathic Fish took place at Cooltan, an art-space/gallery/dancehall set up by squatters in an abandoned unemployment benefit office on Brixton’s Coldharbour Lane, where Prime Minister John Major had once signed on. (The name Cooltan came from the original location, a disused suntan lotion factory fifty yards down the street from where I lived in Brixton.) Mentally creased and physically crumpled after a night’s raving, my friends and I found Telepathic Fish Number 5 the perfect place for ‘getting your head together’. In stark contrast to the stress-makingly staccato (strobes, cut-up beats) assault of your average ’ardkore rave, Telepathic Fish was a wombadelic sound-and-light bath. The DJs massaged our ears with a seamless mix of mostly beat-and-vocal free atmospherics (ranging from the latest CDs from ambient techno labels like Fax and Recycle Or Die, to Gothic art-rock like Dead Can Dance and Main’s experimental dronescapes), which they maintained at just the right volume for conversation. The lights, oil projections, and ‘deep-sea decor’ soothed eyes sore from the previous night’s brain-blitz. There were tea and cakes and wholesome refreshments available at reasonable prices. Nothing really happened – a few punters did a bit of floaty dancing, most just got recumbent on the grubby mattresses and spliffed up – but it was a lovely way to spend a Sunday.
‘Traditional clubs just don’t work for us,’ Chantal Passamonte had told me a few weeks earlier. ‘Most promoters are interested in people getting overheated so they buy overpriced drinks.’ Eventually, it got too hard to find venues that would accept the concept of cheap admission and low takings at the bar, and Open Mind chose the path of least resistance: doing mini-Fishes as chill-out side-rooms at one-off raves and regular events like Megatripolis. Eventually the tea-party concept was ‘borrowed’ by The Big Chill, whose Sunday ambient-extravaganzas initially took place in a North London church. By 1995, chill-out culture had evolved into what some called ‘freestyle’ or ‘eclectro’. The headnodding, pot-smoking anti-dance stance endured, but the soundtrack was more beats-oriented: you were more likely to hear trip hop, weird electronica, nouveau electro, mellow jungle, even E-Z listening and soundtrack music, than you were ambient.
Underlying the ’ardkore/ambient split is a perennial class-based divide in British pop culture. It recalls the difference between the sixties mods (insomniac speedfreak urbanites who worked 9 – 5 jobs all week then danced all weekend) and the hippies (with their cult of indolence, marijuana and sleep). Where ’ardkore’s buzzphrases often mimic the language of graft and toil (‘get busy’, ‘work it up’, ‘ ’ardkore pressure’), the ambient scene staged a quiet revolt against the ‘work hard, play harder’ mentality, where you’re a slave to the rush hour then rush your nut off at the weekend. ‘People who can afford to pay fifteen quid for a rave have all this aggression to get out of their systems from working all week,’ Kevin Foakes said. ‘The crowd that comes to our tea parties is more laid-back and bohemian.’
Chill-out zones and ambient parties resemble R. Murray Shafer’s pipe-dream of ‘the soniferous garden’: acoustically designed bowers where the city-dwellers can go to have their ears cleansed of ‘noise pollution’, where you can get your soul’s pH balance restored. ‘Our parties are as close to getting it together in the country as you can get in London,’ said Passamonte. With its samples of bird-song and trickling water, ambient techno is a digital update of nineteenth-century programme music – the pastoral symphony that imitates Nature, as with the aqua-mysticism and forest idylls of Claude Debussy works like La mer, Jardins sous la pluie and Prelude a l’après-midi d’un faune.
Perhaps the first and best stab at that seeming contradiction-in-terms, pastoral techno, was Ultramarine’s Every Man and Woman is a Star, first released in 1991. The album is loosely conceptual, offering a soundtrack to an imaginary canoe journey across America; the duo, Ian Cooper and Paul Hammond, went so far as to thank Birkenstock Sandals and Perception Kayaks in the sleeve notes. There’s also a fictitious anecdote about enjoying the hog-roast and moonshine hospitality of Dewey and Cassie, original back-to-Nature hippies still living off the land in Sweetleaf Country, Arkansas. Dewey waxes philosophical, telling them: ‘There is music for the body and there is music for the mind. Music for the body picks you off the floor and hurls you into physical activity. Music for the mind floats you gently downstream, through pleasurable twists and turns, ups and downs, rapids and calm waters . . . And sometimes there is music for the body and for the mind.’ In a 1993 interview, though, Ultramarine seemed to align themselves with the mind: Hammond told me, ‘We don’t go clubbing. We like techno because of the minimalism and the starkness of its structure. The fact that you can dance to it is irrelevant to us.’
On Every Man and Woman, Ultramarine seamlessly mesh acoustic instruments (cascades of twelve-string guitar, dolorous violin), real-world samples (owl-hoots, babbling brooks) and synt
hetic sounds like Roland 303 basslines and programmed beats. The results are like acid house suffused with the folky-jazzy ambience of Roy Harper, John Martyn and the Canterbury scene (The Soft Machine, Robert Wyatt, Kevin Ayers). ‘Weird Gear’ is actually based around an Ayers lyric, while ‘Lights In My Brain’ samples a strung-out, unhinged Wyatt incantation and weaves it into an eerie acieed-jazz groovescape. (On 1993’s United Kingdoms, the duo went one better and actually got Wyatt to sing the traditional folk-songs ‘Happy Land’ and ‘Song of The Lower Classes’, and to blow scat-bubbles over the bucolic whimsy of ‘The Badger’ and ‘Dizzy Fox’).
Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture Page 25