Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture

by Simon Reynolds

  At its coldly compulsive best – Arpeggiators’ ‘Freedom of Expression’, Trope’s ‘Amphetamine’, Commander Tom’s ‘Are Am Eye’ and ‘Dark Eyes’ – trance exhilarates. But for me, it’s the form of techno that’s most thoroughly in thrall to the sequencer’s precision-locked logic; tracks are grids rather than grooves. With its programmed drum machine beats and punctual pulses, trance resembles an orchestra of metronomes, all subordinate to the timekeeping of that tyrannical conductor, the kick-drum. This predictability is what allows the mind to disengage and ‘trance out’.

  Inside every trance producer is a prog-rocker struggling to get out and express himself, worse luck. Take Jam and Spoon. Their brilliant early track ‘Stella’ was part of the R & S label’s flight from Dionysian rave towards Appollonian soft-core. There’s literally no hard core to this track, just a muffled kick-drum, cirrus-swirls of angel’s breath, and a feathery, one-chord pulse-riff that ascends from higher plane to higher plane. ‘Stella’ appeared on a 1992 EP titled ‘Tales From a Danceographic Ocean’ EP – a tongue-in-cheek nod to Yes’s Tales From Topographic Oceans, prog rock’s noodly nadir. Or perhaps it was simple homage, since Jam and Spoon’s debut album was in effect a quadruple: two simultaneously released CDs, Triptomatic Fairy Tales 2001 and 2002, both crammed with kitschadelic sounds and song titles like ‘Zen Flash Zen Bones’ and ‘Who Opened The Door To Nowhere’.

  And then there’s Sven Vath – co-founder of Harthouse and its sister label Eye Q, legendary DJ at the Omen in Frankfurt. In the sleevenotes to 1993’s Accident In Paradise, Vath cites his ancestral spirits as Eno, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Harold Budd and Holger Czukay, but also, more tellingly, Peter Gabriel, Vangelis, Andreas Vollenweider and Mozart. With its didgeridoos, mystic-Orient melodies and DAT-recorded aural snapshots from Nepal and Goa, Accident In Paradise is a deodorized ethno-techno travelogue. But in true prog-rock fashion, the album is really steeped in nineteenth-century Euro-classical music; all arpeggiated synth-wank and piano trills as frou-frou as Enya, while ‘Coda’ features a harpsichord, for fuck’s sake! The critics loved it (at last! a techno album that ‘works as a whole’ and sounds good on your domestic hi-fi), but even they had no stomach for Vath’s next concept album atrocity The Harlequin, The Dancer and The Robot.

  Food For Thought

  ‘More participatory musics are more rhythmically complex (and harmonically simple); more contemplative musics are rhythmically simple (and more harmonically complex).’

  – Simon Frith on the difference between African based and

  European based musics, Performing Rites

  The struggle between intelligent techno and hardcore was a bitter contest, waged across class and generational lines, to decide who ‘owned’ electronic dance music and what direction it should pursue. This was a schism between non-stop ecstatic dancing and sedate(d) contemplation, between the 12-inch and the album, between the demands of the audience and the prerogatives of the auteur. Neither side of this perennial divide had a monopoly on creativity; the electronic listening music initiative produced some beautiful and innovative sounds. But it’s always struck me as odd that so many people involved in dance music seem to regard the physical response as somehow ‘lesser’. The result was a glut of melodious, middlebrow ‘mindfood’ – music hedged on one side by its disdain for the functionalism of ‘rave fodder’, and on the other by its reluctance to really explore the extremities of mindfuck texturology. By 1995, these soi-disant experimentalists could only rescue themselves from the disembodied anaemia of ‘intelligence’ by rediscovering the breakbeat. Irony of ironies, they had to relearn the score from the hardcore.

  SEVEN

  SLIPPING INTO DARKNESS

  THE UK RAVE DREAM

  TURNS TO NIGHTMARE,

  1992 – 93

  There seems to be a moment, intrinsic to any drug culture, when the scene crosses over into ‘the dark side’. It happened in San Francisco in the late sixties, when heroin, methamphetamine and the terrifyingly intense hallucinogen STP killed Haight Ashbury’s love and peace vibe. In Ecstasy subcultures too, there tends to be a point where the MDMA honeymoon phase comes to an abrupt end; again and again, from Manchester in 1990 to Los Angeles in 1993, the descent into darkness occurs.

  What makes British hardcore unique is the way the same shift from utopian to dystopian was reflected in the music. By late 1992, the happy rave tunes of 1990 – 91 were being eclipsed by a style called ‘dark side’ or ‘dark-core’; hardcore became haunted by a collective apprehension that ‘we’ve gone too far’. Thematically and sonically, darkside tracks mirrored the long-terms costs of sustained Ecstasy, marijuana and amphetamine use: side-effects such as depression, paranoia, dissociation, audio-hallucinations and creepy sensations of the uncanny.

  The titles and sampled soundbites of this era immediately indicate that something is awry in the house of hardcore. There was imagery of brain damage (Bizzy B’s ‘Total Amnesia’, 4 Hero’s ‘Mind Loss (A State of Amnesia)’) and disorientation (2 Bad Mice’s ‘Mass Confusion’, Satin Storm’s ‘Think I’m Going Out Of My Head’). There were tracks about death, like Ed Rush’s ‘Bludclot Artattack’, with its ‘you’ve got a ticket to hell’ sample, and Origin Unknown’s ‘Valley Of the Shadows’, which pivoted around an unnerving soundbite from a BBC documentary about near-death experiences: ‘felt that I was in a long dark tunnel’. And then there were self-reflexive dark tracks that enshrouded the dancefloor in twilight-zone malaise, like Metalheads’ ‘Sinister’ and Bay-B-Kane’s ‘Hello Darkness’ (the title phrase came from a cheeky but thoroughly creepy sample from Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘The Sound of Silence’). Another major darkside trope was the idea of drug intensities as a sinister power source, a malign forcefield in which the raver is suspended and entrapped: DJ Crystl’s ‘Warpdrive’, 4 Hero’s ‘The Power’, and DJ Hype’s ‘Weird Energy’.

  Perhaps most perturbing of all was an entire mini-genre of panic-attack songs – Remarc’s ‘Ricky’, Johnny Jungle’s ‘Johnny’, Subnation’s ‘Scottie’ – all of which were based around a sample of someone shouting out a name, as a cry for help or in sheer horror. ‘Scottie’ is the real chiller-killer, both for its superbly rhythmic use of Evil Dead soundbites and for the way it dramatizes a psychic struggle between hysteria and resilience: the track oscillates giddily between the whimpered ‘I don’t wanna die’ and the scared-but-determined ‘we’re not gonna die, we’re gonna get out of here’. With its horror movie dialogue (‘is there a way around the bridge?’) doubling up as a musical reference (‘bridges’ being the percussion-only Jame Brown-style breakdowns out of which the track is entirely composed), ‘Scottie’ is horribly claustrophobic.

  The stark ’n’ severe drum and bass minimalism of ‘Scottie’ was just one of darkside’s sonic strategies. Using effects like timestretching, pitchshifting and reversing, the darkside producers gave their breakbeats a brittle, metallic sound, like scuttling claws; they layered beats to form a dense mesh of convoluted, convulsive polyrhythm, inducing a febrile feel of in-the-pocket funk and out-of-body delirium. ’Ard-kore’s anthemic choruses and sentimental melodies were stripped away, in favour of gloomy, slimy-sounding electronic textures. Vocal samples were sped-up, slowed-down, reversed and ‘ghosted’, resulting in grotesque hall-of-mirrors distortions of ‘the human’. Sounds swooped and receded within the stereo-field, creating a hair-raising atmosphere of apprehension and persecution; sustained drones and background hums induced tension.

  All these sound-warping effects literalize the old ’ardkore imagery of ‘madness’ and ‘going mental’. According to Achim Szepanski, whose Frankfurt label Mille Plateaux attempted a German take on dark-core breakbeat in 1992, these techniques of ‘schizophonia’ (the splitting of sounds from their physical, real-time source) take the listener into the heart of schizophrenic experience. ‘Echo effects allow sound hallucinations to occur . . . forms of perception develop that, strangely, one had previously attributed to lunatics or schizophrenics.’ Hark
ing back to the heavily treated timbres in fifties musique concrète and post-punk industrial music, darkside’s repertoire of noises – ‘screaming, chirping, creaking, hissing’, as Szepanski put it – sound like going insane. Darkside also imitated or sampled the dissonant motifs developed by horror-movie and thriller soundtrack composers to evoke derangement, foreboding and trauma. (Indeed, Hollywood soundtrack and incidental music is one of the few areas in pop culture where the ideas of avant-garde twentieth-century classical music – serialism, electro-acoustic, concrète – have filtered into mass consciousness).

  Exuding bad-trippy dread and twitchy, jittery paranoia, dark-core seemed to reflect a sort of collective come-down after the E-fuelled high of 1991 – 2. Alienated, ravers deserted in droves to the milder climes of happy house and mellow garage. But a substantial segment of the rave audience mobilized between 1990 – 92 followed through hardcore’s drug-tech logic all the way into the unknown, the twilight-zone. Forming a sort of avant-garde within Britain’s recreational drug culture, these were ravers who had perversely come to enjoy bad trips and weird vibes. Why? Perhaps because, rather than readjust to normality, it seemed preferable to stick with rave’s ‘living dream’ even when it had turned to living nightmare. Perhaps because any kind of intensity is better than feeling numb.

  Chaotic Chemistry

  From my double vantage point as fan and critic, participant and observer, darkside was a pivotal and revelatory moment: the life-affirming, celebratory aspects of rave were turned inside out, the smiley-face torn off to reveal the true nihilism of any drug-based culture. Amidst all the positivity and idealism, that nihilism was always lurking, waiting to be hatched. When rave’s ‘desiring machine’ is really crankin’, when you’re one of its cogs (locked into the pirate-radio signal or plugged into the sound-system), there’s no feeling like it. Trouble is, the machine is demanding: it exacts a heavy toll on its human software. Artificial energy is required to bring the nervous system up to speed; the human frame was not built to withstand the attrition of sensations. Rave’s regime of bliss wears out the machine’s flesh-and-blood components, both physically (hot and sweaty, raves are incubators of viruses) and mentally (post-rave comedown, mid-week emotional fragility, and in the long run, burn-out and melancholia). By late 1992, hardcore rave resembled a machine-gone-mad.

  Deleuze and Guattari warn that drug use can turn ‘fascist’ or ‘suicidal’, that the body-without-organs (the Ecstatic body) can become a ‘black hole’, voided and numb. In the beginning, Ecstasy makes you feel angelic; ultimately, it can turn you into a demon. Gradually, the experience of raving itself changes; single-minded fervour turns to tunnel-vision fixation. Getting high degenerates into getting out of it. Suddenly the clubs are full of dead souls, zombie-eyed and prematurely haggard. Instead of outstretched arms and all-embracing extroversion, there’s grimly fixated vacancy, automaton body-moves, autistic self-absorption. What started off as life-affirming fun begins to smack of desperation. The folkloric drug tales get grimmer and grimmer: someone who threw up and then picked the half-digested pills out of the puke and gulped them down again, rumours of kids using syringes to shoot speed in the toilets. One night in 1993 at Labrynth stands out for me as the point at which I realized the scene had turned squalid. Outside, in the Labrynth’s hitherto sacred grove of a garden, two teenage girls hold on to their friend as she retches – too many pills on an empty stomach. Gloating, demonic laughter floats across from a murky corner. Back inside the club’s fluorescent catacombs, a seriously fucked-up guy, sweaty and shaking, cadges a cigarette off me, and says, so earnest it’s scary, ‘You just saved my life, mate.’

  What I remember most of all is the number of ravers whose smiles had been replaced by sour, cheated expressions – they hadn’t come up on their E’s, probably because they’d over-indulged so heavily the past few years that the old buzz just couldn’t be recovered. That moment of disenchantment is captured in Hyper-On Experience’s 1993 anthem ‘Lords of the Null Lines’, a Gothic symphony of hiccuping, skittery rhythms and something-wicked-this-way-comes strings. ‘There’s a void where there should be ecstasy’ laments the sampled diva. The line could refer to the desperation of a raver who suspects he’s swallowed a dud or ‘snidey’ E, but it could equally describe the hollow numbness of veteran ravers whose brains have been emptied of serotonin, the ‘joy-juice’ which Ecstasy releases in a gush-and-rush of euphoria. Having caned E so hard for so long, these ravers find their pleasure-centre synapses are firing blanks.

  Dark-core reflected the complicated pharmacological reality of the rave scene in 1992 and 1993; a chaos of amateur, untutored neurochemistry and unreliable medicine combined to form an unbeatable recipe for psychic malaise. First, ravers experienced a temporary dip in the quality of Ecstasy. With rave peaking commercially in 1992, dealers looked to exploit the influx of gullible, undiscriminating punters, and maximized their profits by cutting MDMA with cheaper drugs: primarily amphetamine and LSD, but also tranquillizers or inert substances. The market was flooded with ‘cocktail’ pills that combined speed and acid in a crude attempt to approximate the Ecstasy feeling. This deterioration in the rave-drug’s purity didn’t last, but it birthed an enduring myth that ‘Ecstasy isn’t as good as it used to be’, which in turn provided ravers with an excuse to take more pills to get the same effect. The unreliability of the drug – the fact that the raver stood a good chance of getting a dud – did not inspire caution or utter disillusionment, as you might expect, but a spirit of recklessness: take more rather than less, take another if the first one doesn’t come on strong and fast enough.

  This headstrong heedlessness was particularly risky given another pharmacological trend at work in this period: the selling of Ecstasy that contained MDA rather than MDMA. MDA is the chemical parent of MDMA and MDEA (‘Eve’). Widely available in 1992 in the form of Snowball and White Caps, and apparently originating from government-controlled factories in Latvia, MDA offers an altogether fiercer, more deranging experience than Ecstasy, devoid of MDMA’s empathic warmth. MDA’s effects are closer to LSD’s hallucinatory disorientation; it lasts much longer than proper Ecstasy, around eight to twelve hours; the comedown is harsher. MDA is also more toxic than MDMA: Snowballs often contained a high concentration of MDA, around 177 mgs, so that three pills would bring the raver within range of a fatal dose. At the very least, it would almost guarantee a psychedelic freak-out or an autistic veg-out. And yet, by 1992, three pills was by no mean an abnormal number to take during a session. While some blamed snowballs for ‘killing the scene’, mistakenly believing them to be cut with heroin, others actively sought out and savoured MDA’s manic sensations.

  The other syndrome at work in the darkside era was simple excess. By 1992, many hardcore ‘veterans’, who’d gotten into raving only a few years earlier and were often still in their teens, had increased their intake to three, four, five, or more pills per session. They were locked into a cycle of going raving once or twice a week, weekend after weekend. It was at this point that Ecstasy’s serotonin-depletion effect came into play. Even if you take pure MDMA each and every time, the drug’s blissful effects fade fast, leaving only a jittery, amphetamine-like rush. In hardcore, this speedfreak effect was made worse as ravers necked more pills in a futile and misguided attempt to recover the long-lost bliss of yore. The physical side-effects – hypertension, racing heart – got worse, and so did the darkside paranoia. Amphetamine and Ecstasy both flood the nervous system with dopamine, and ‘dopamine over-activity’ has been linked to such symptoms of schizophrenia as auditory hallucinations and delusional beliefs.

  All of these syndromes (fake Ecstasy ‘cocktails’, MDA masquerading as MDMA, the diminishing returns of long-term use) were exacerbated because the norm among ravers is ‘polydrug use’. Ecstasy is commonly taken with other illicit substances – amphetamine, LSD, cannabis, ‘poppers’ (legal inhalants like propyl, butyl or isobutyl nitrite), the barbiturate-like sleeping pill Temazepam – each with thei
r own risks, side-effects and nasty adulterants. Recent research shows that nearly 80 per cent of British ravers take amphetamine as a booster to accompany their E; serious nutters chase down their E’s with diverse configurations of speed, LSD and Temazepam. Nearly everybody smokes marijuana, which has its own effects of paranoia and perceptual distortion (especially potent with super-breeds of weed such as ‘skunk’). The results of all this amateur pharmacology range from added fun to greater disorientation, increased toxicity, and more punishing comedowns. MDMA can be the classic gateway to a veritable drug supermarket, in so far as uncertainty of supply can lead punters to experiment with other substances as an alternative route to the high.

  By 1992, the hardcore raver was a veritable connoisseur of poisons, skilled at mix ’n’ matching drugs to modify their own neurochemistry and achieve the precise degree of oblivion desired. This ‘street knowledge’ often expressed itself in the imagery of science: Bizzy B’s ‘Ecstasy Is A Science’, the band Kaotic Chemistry. The latter’s self-titled debut includes tracks like ‘Five In One Night’, ‘Strip Search’ and ‘The Comedown’, while the sleeve mischievously depicts the ingredients for an average night of Dionysian mayhem. On the front, a hand simultaneously holds a spliff and chops out a line of speed with a credit card; on the back, the table is strewn with a dozen or more white pills. Kaotic Chemistry’s ‘LSD’ EP continues the polydrug excess theme with ‘Space Cakes’, ‘LSD’, ‘Drum Trip II’ and ‘Illegal Subs’ (a later remix EP adds ‘Vitamin K’, named after a slang term for ketamine). The title ‘Illegal Subs’ is a nudge-nudge, wink-wink pun, referring both to illicit substances and to sub-bass levels so harmful they should be outlawed. The song itself is a sort of tribute to the ’ardkore nation, sampling a Nation of Islam orator who hails her African-American audience as ‘the people of chemistry . . . of physics . . . of music . . . of civilization . . . of rhythm’.