Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture

by Simon Reynolds

  ‘I just don’t like other people. I think I’m a sociopath. You get so much shit from people, but instead of burning their houses down, we let all our aggression out on the computer. Instead of killing people, we do it with sound.’

  Nasenbluten’s anti-rave sentiments are shared by England’s DJ Loftgroover. A man on a mission, Lofty believes there’s ‘too much niceness in the rave scene’. Although he started out during the late eighties acid-house explosion, Loftgroover never tried E and never bought into the rave dream of love, peace and unity. ‘Gabba is how I really feel – hard, angry,’ he says. ‘I’ve always had a bleak view of the world.’

  Loftgroover coined a bunch of evocative terms for Nasenbluten-style extreme noise terror: ‘punkcore’, ‘scarecore’ and ‘doomtrooper’. There are pockets of doomtroopers all over the UK, and when he plays at clubs like The Shire Horse in St Ives, Judgement Day in Newcastle, Steam in Rhyl, North Wales, and Death Row Techno in Bristol, Loftgroover is treated like a god. ‘At The Shire Horse, the birds throw their stockings at me and I pull them right over my face like a bank robber. The kids in Cornwall go mad, giving me the finger, shouting “fuck you”, and you have to do it back to them. Kids run up to me and say “Lofty, I fainted the last time you played”.’

  When he DJs, Loftgroover mixes in tracks by death-metal bands like Morbid Angel, Stormtroopers of Death and Slayer, and when asked about gabba’s origins, he claims it’s not even techno but ‘probably something by Anthrax or Sepultura back in 1983 . . . The line between gabba and metal is only that thin, y’know.’

  Bizarrely, given his obsession with the two most Teutonic forms of music on the planet, Loftgroover is black; if you saw a photo of him at the decks, you’d assume he was playing jungle. Clearly ambivalent about the fact that ‘Seventy per cent of the people following this music are skinheads,’ he stresses that he’s never had any trouble even though ‘some of them are giving it all that’ – he mimes a frenzied Nazi salute. ‘Most of the time, the look is just a fashion,’ he insists, adding, ‘gabba’s about controlled violence. You never see people having fisticuffs at a gabba party.’

  In addition to the sonic affinities between thrash and gabba, both musics share a similar audience: white working-class youth whose hopes have been crushed by the decline of heavy industry and who face unemployment or ignominious, no-security/no-future jobs in the service sector. From Rotterdam to Brooklyn, from Glasgow to Milwaukee, gabba expresses the rage and frustration of White Niggaz With Bad Attitude and No Prospects. And like metal, gabba is despised by middle-class critics who simply don’t understand the mentality of those who crave music to go mental to.

  ‘It’s a working-class scene, there’s no pseudo-intellectual element,’ says Technohead’s Michael Wells. ‘People respond on a gut level. The apocalyptic, sci-fi and horror-movie imagery in gabba, it’s all part of the trash culture these kids are into. And it’s very similar to the way heavy metal uses imagery of death, destruction and anti-religion. It’s a reaction against the pressure of modern life.’

  It was almost inevitable that metal and gabba would join forces. Operating as Signs Ov Chaos, Wells recorded the experimental gabba album Frankenscience for English metal label Earache, who also put out a compilation of hardest-core gabba from Lenny Dee’s Industrial Strength label. At the album’s launch party at the Gardening Club in London, the T-shirts are less cuddly than at Rez – ‘I’m Afraid I’m Going To Have To Kill You’, ‘Nightmares Are Reality’, ‘Where’s My Money, Motherfucker?’ – and the music is even harder than Arnhem: Wells and Dee unleash a remorseless onslaught of electro-convulsive riffs, sphincter-bruising bass that scores ten on my Rectal Richter Scale, and satanic synth-tones that get your goosepimples doing the goosestep.

  The audience is a strange mix of shirtless skinheads and crustie types with matted dreadlocks and camouflage trousers. The anarcho-crusties belong to an underground London scene in which gabbas serves as the militant sound of post-Criminal Justice Act anger. A key player in this London scene is an organization called Praxis, who put out records, throw monthly Dead By Dawn parties and publish the magazine Alien Underground. Praxis are part of an international network of ultra severe ‘stormcore’: labels like Napalm, Gangstar Toons Industry, Kotzaak, Juncalor and Fischkopf; artists like DOA, Rage Reset, Temper Tantrum, The Speedfreak, DJ Scud, Lory D and DJ Producer.

  On this circuit, gabba’s perverse identification of libido with the military-industrial complex is taken even further; just check song titles like ‘At War’ by Leathernecks (a band named after the US Marines), Disintegrator’s ‘Locked On Target’, and ‘Wehrmacht’ by Delta 9 (itself the name of a nerve gas!) Fantasies of man-machine interface and cyborg ubermensch abound. The ideology ranges from Underground Resistance style ‘guerrilla warfare on vinyl’ to full-blown techno-mysticism. In one issue of Alien Underground, the record reviews featured ‘samples’ from philosopher Paul Virilio’s writings on speed and the war-machine. One review, wittily attributed to Virilio, raves about ‘instantaneous explosions, the sudden flare of assassinations, the paroxysm of speed . . . an internal war-machine’. Gangstar Toons Industry’s 250 b.p.m. ‘pure Uzi poetry’ is hailed as ‘exercises in the art of disappearing in pure speed to the point of vertigo and standstill’. Everything that for Virilio represents an anti-humanist cultural exter-minism that must be resisted and reviled, is perversely celebrated by these speedfreak techno-junkies.

  Such imagery recalls the aestheticization of war and carnage in the manifestos of the Italian Futurists and the writings of the Freikorps (German veterans who formed right-wing militia to beat down the Communists during the strife that followed the First World War). It also demonstrates the extent to which hardcore techno is the culmination of a feverish strain within the rock imagination. Examples include road-warriors Steppenwolf and their exhortation ‘fire all of your guns at once / explode into space’; Black Sabbath’s cyborg fantasy ‘Iron Man’, a case study in protofascist rigor mortis; Motorhead’s iron-fisted, Hell’s Angels influenced Reich ’n’ roll. Greatest of all these ‘rock ’n’ roll soldiers’ was Iggy Pop and his ‘heart full of napalm’, ballistic death-trip. Reflecting on this era of Stooges, when he fuelled himself with drugs like speed and LSD, Iggy declared: ‘Rather than become a person singing about subjects, I sort of sublimated the person and I became, if you will, a human electronic tool creating this sort of buzzing, throbbing music. . .’ Similarly, PCP’s The Mover told Alien Underground: ‘Well you know I’m a machine, I’m wired up . . . I’m roaming the earth and it’s nice and doomy here.’

  These rock and techno instances of man-machine interface fantasy have a 1957 blueprint in ‘The White Negro’, the essay in which Norman Mailer imagines the building of a new nervous system by the use of intoxicants and by the conscious cultivation of the psychopath within your soul. And all find their culmination in hardcore techno’s kinaesthetics of rush and crash. The rush is when your nervous-system’s circuitry is plugged into the machine, supercharged with artifical energy, turned to speed-flesh; the crash is when the all-too-human body can’t handle the pace any more. Back in 1992, the hardcore rave DJ would sometimes abruptly switch the turntable off: the nauseous, vertiginous sound of the record slowing from 150 b.p.m. to Zero was a hideously voluptuous preview of the drug comedown, the inevitable crash, only a few hours ahead. Then, woosh!, the DJ would flick the Technics’ switch, and the force-field would repossess the dancer’s body.

  For today’s digital-Dionysian, the gabbanaut, release doesn’t take the form of Mailer’s ‘Apocalyptic Orgasm’, but the orgasmic apocalypse, the Wargasm. Hence a band like Ultraviolence, who fuse thrash metal and gabba, and whose Psycho Drama LP is trailed with the promise: ‘10,000 Nagasakis in your head!’ For the modern militarized libido, the equivalent of serene post-coital tristesse is the aftermath: post-apocalyptic wastelands, razed cities, the empty horizon, entropy-as-nirvana. Hence titles like Jack Lucifer’s ‘After All Wars’.

  ‘Imagine su
rveying earth after nuclear destruction and enjoying what you see, that’s how it feels when you listen to it,’ The Mover told Alien Underground. PCP has been exploring such post-rave endzones for years, from The Mover’s ‘Frontal Sickness’/‘Final Sickness’ trilogy to the ‘gloomcore’ output of their sister label Cold Rush (a perfect phrase for the Ecstasy buzz when the empathetic warm glow has burned out). With their glacial, sorrowful synths, down-swooping drones and trudging, cavernously echoed beats, these tekno-dirges – Cypher’s ‘Marching Into Madness’ (on the ‘Doomed Bunkerloops’ EP), Rave Creator’s ‘Thru Eternal Fog’, Reign’s ‘Skeletons March’ (from ‘The Zombie-Leader Is Approaching’ EP), Renegade Legion’s ‘Torsion’ – conjure mind’s eye visions of barren craterscapes or vast ice catacombs carved beneath the Arctic surface. (Cold Rush sleeves bear the legend: ‘created somewhere in the lost zones’.) From burn-baby-burn to burn-out, hardcore rave’s psychic economy fits Bataille’s model of sacrificial violence and expenditure-without-return. The goal is to get wasted.

  Slaves to the Rave

  At Nightmare in Arnhem, I hear a track that seems to sum up gabba’s weird fusion of will-to-power and impotence. Beneath a piteous melody that seems to waver and wilt in mid-air, a robot voice chants a fatigued, fatalistic chorus: ‘We are slaves / to the rave.’ Recorded by The Inferno Bros. for PCP offshoot Dance Ecstasy 2001, this withering piss take of the hardcore rave mentality had evidently become an irony-free anthem of entrapment and zombiehood.

  A few days earlier Loftgroover had told me of going to a gabba club in Paris ‘where they handed out straitjackets to the audience!’ It’s a nice joke, the perfect culmination of gabba’s imagery of bedlam and psychosis, but it has a sinister undercurrent. A gabba rave is an asylum. It’s a haven from an intolerable reality, a world that kids find at once numbingly tedious and worryingly unstable. But it’s also a place of confinement where the nutters rage harmlessly; where kids vent all their anger out of their systems, instead of aiming it against the System.

  TWELVE

  AMERICA THE RAVE

  US RAVE CULTURE,

  1990 – 97

  ‘Techno is the Devil’s Music! Beware the hypnotic voodoo rhythm, a reckless dance down the Devil’s road of sin and self-destruction, leading youth to eternal damnation in the fiery depths of hell!’

  – Drop Bass Network flyer for Even Furthur, May 1996.

  Despite the ritual burning of a wicker man, it’s hard to take Even Furthur seriously as ‘an epic pagan gathering of the tribes of Evil’. The vibe is closer to a Scout retreat (which is actually what the site, Eagle Cave in rural Wisconsin, is usually hired out for). After sundown, kids sit around bonfires on the hill slope, toasting marshmallows and barbecuing burgers. The atmosphere is a peculiar blend of innocent outdoor fun and hardcore decadence. For if this is a scout camp, it’s one awash with hallucinogens.

  Under a disco glitterball suspended from a tree, a gaggle of amateur dealers trade illegal substances. ‘Are you buying more acid, Craig?’ asks one kid, incredulous at his buddy’s intake. The vendor is offering five doses for $20. ‘Weird Pyramids ain’t nuthin’ compared to these,’ he boasts, then extemporizes to the tune of Johnny Nash’s soul smash: ‘I can see Furthur now the rain has gone / I can see all the mud and freaks at play.’ Conversation turns to bad trip casualties, like the guy who went berserk, smashed in several windscreens with a log, and was carted off by the local sheriff. The LSD dealer rants about ‘rich kid crybabies’ who can’t handle their drugs. He’s also offering some G (the steroid-like GHB) and ‘Sweet Tart’ XTC. ‘They’re mushy,’ he hard-sells, ‘but there’s a speed buzz, they won’t smack you out – there’s no heroin in them.’ Later, we hear rumours of kids injecting Ecstasy – not for its putative heroin content, but ’cos of sheer impatience to feel the rush.

  The scary thing is how young these kids are – hardened drug veterans before they’re legally able to drink at age twenty-one. I overhear another boy enthusing about how great it is to ‘hear the old music, like Donna Summer,’ and I realize with a shock that ‘I Feel Love’ came out before this kid was even born. In Even Furthur’s main tent, Chicago DJ Boo Williams is playing a set of voluptuous, curvaceous house informed by this golden era of disco, tracks like Gusto’s ‘Disco’s Revenge’.

  Then San Francisco legend Scott Hardkiss pumps out feathery, floaty soft-core (including his awesomely eerie remix of Elton John’s ‘Rocket Man’) sending silvery rivulets of rapture rippling down every raver’s flesh. My wife points out a boy who’s dancing with a folding deck chair strapped to his back, a sort of portable chill-out zone. A space-cadet girl sits cross-legged beside the DJ booth, eyes closed, rocking and writhing in X-T-C. Earlier she’d been handing out leaflets about aliens called ‘the Greys’, who she claims are from Zeta Riticuli in the constellation Orion and are in league with US military intelligence. Abduction stories and UFO sightings are common at American raves, doubtless because of the prodigious consumption of hallucinogens. Loads of kids wear T-shirts featuring slant-eyed ET-type humanoids.

  Wisconsin belongs to America’s conservative heartland. There’s a certain folksy charm to its small town ways: when we tell a curious storekeeper we’re in town for ‘a music festival’, she quaintly replies ‘Cool beans!’ (meaning ‘Good for you!’). But there’s also the unnerving underside of traditionalism, like the grotesque graveyard of tiny crosses by the roadside – a memorial to aborted foetuses put up by Pro-Life evangelists. All in all, this agrarian backwater is the last place you’d expect to find a psychedelic freak-out. But the wilds of Wisconsin is where the Furthur series of three-day raves have taken place since 1994. On the rave’s flyers, the trippy typography harks back to the posters for acid rock bands in Haight-Ashbury, while the misspelled ‘Furthur’ originates in the destination posted on the front of the bus driven by the Merry Pranksters, Ken Kesey’s troupe of acid evangelists.

  During the first Furthur ‘techno campout’ – at Hixton, Wisconsin, 29 April – 1 May 1994 – one of the promoters (David J. Prince, editor of Chicago rave-zine Reactor) got so blissed he danced naked on a speaker stack. On the final Sunday, several organizers were arrested by the local sheriff. At the third annual rave, there’s no trouble from the law. But Even Furthur is a lawless zone. Although you have to pay for admission, the atmosphere is closer to England’s illegal free parties than to a commercial rave. In fact, Even Furthur reminds me most of Castlemorton, the huge ‘teknival’ catalysed by Spiral Tribe in 1992, which coincidentally occurred almost four years ago to the day.

  The Even Furthur kids aren’t crusty-traveller types, though – they’re much more fashion-conscious and middle class, as American ravers tend to be. The guys sport sock hats and B-boyish silver chains that dangle in a loop from the waist to the knee. Girls have the Bjork-meets-Princess Leia space-pixie look of futuristic innocence; their shiny synthetic fabrics, bright kindergarten colours, bunched pigtails, cutesy backpacks and cuddly toys make them look even younger than they really are (mostly sixteen to twenty-two). Everyone wears absurdly baggy jeans (the hallmark of the US raver), the flared bottoms soaked in mud because continual downpour has transformed the camp site into a swamp.

  Like Castlemorton, Even Furthur is a chaotic sprawl of cars, RV caravans, trailers and tents. There’s no security and no lighting; you have to stumble through the mud by the fitful illumination of other people’s flashlights and the glint of bonfires dotting the hill slope. All this gets to be a gas, although it’s slightly perturbing that there’s no on-site paramedics to deal with acid freak-outs, like the shoeless, shirtless, mud-spattered boy who keeps howling single words over and over – ‘Friends! Friends!’, ‘Worms! Worms! Worms!’, ‘Dead!’ – while other kids try to restrain him from fleeing into the woods. In England, the main reason to have paramedics is to help Ecstasy over-indulgers. But at Even Furthur, boiling alive in your own blood is not really a hazard. It’s cold and wet, and over-exertion is difficult, because dancing is a struggle
: the second tent is a puddle-strewn marsh (take a wrong step and you’ll slide into a sinkhole), while the main tent’s floor is slippery and sloping.

  Over three days, some hundred DJs and bands perform, spanning a broad spectrum of rave music. There’s a surprising amount of jungle on offer: Mixmaster Morris spins crisp ’n’ mellow drum and bass in a small hillside tent, while Phantom 45 rinses out tearin’ hardstep in the big marquee. Not everybody’s happy about the jungle influx, though: sitting outside on a car bonnet, a gabba fan whines ‘Why do breakbeats make me puke?’ What really fires the pleasure centres of this mostly Mid-Western, Minneapolis/Chicago/Milwaukee crowd is the stomping four-to-the-floor kick drums of hard acid, as purveyed by Brooklyn’s Frankie Bones and Minnesota’s Woody McBride (whose Communiqué label co-promoted Furthur in tandem with Drop Bass Network and David Prince). Saturday’s big hit, though, is French duo Daft Punk and their sinuous, sine-wavey brand of raw-but-kitschadelic house.

  Unlike your regular commercial rave, Even Furthur has hardly any concessions selling food or drink. In search of liquid, we trek up the treacherously moist slope out of the camp towards the site owner’s hut, where there are toilets and a soft drinks machine. It’s pitch black as we trudge up the dirt road, but every so often we pass a tiny bonfire; clutches of burned-out kids huddled together on muddy ledges carved into the hillside, chatting and smoking weed. When we return down the hill, the pale roseate dawn is peeking through the trees, caressing our sore eyes. But as we get closer, our sore ears are assaulted by a 200 b.p.m. jackhammer pummel: the DJs aren’t chilling-out the night’s survivors but blasting ten thousand volts of gabba. At 7 a.m., gabba-phobe Mixmaster Morris retaliates with an impromptu ambient set in the second tent. At the start, he’s playing quite happily to an audience of exactly zero. ‘I’ve been here since Wednesday,’ Morris tells me. ‘That’s why I smell so bad!’ He plays on in that tent for six hours.