This two-pronged campaign – rabble-rousing agit-pop versus hermetic experimentalism – reflects an interestingly jumbled background. On one hand, Empire studied music theory and, unusually for a ‘techno artist’, uses notation when composing his own music. On the other hand, he was a breakdancer at the age of ten and playing in a punk band by the time he was twelve. At the end of the eighties, Empire got swept up in Berlin’s underground rave scene – clubs like UFO, illegal warehouse parties. Despite being a non-druggy type himself, Empire embraced acieed’s cult of oblivion. ‘Acid was a political movement for me, it was like stopping being a part of society . . . For a lot of people, it was about escaping from reality. At the time it made sense, politics seemed futile, with the Left dead, and even the autonomists seeming like silly kids rioting for fun.’ The German scene quickly turned dark and nihilistic: ‘People got into heroin and speed, there were parties in East Berlin with this very hard industrial acid sound, Underground Resistance and +8, 150 b.p.m.’
Empire dug the way this aggressive sound reflected the kids’ frustration, and, influenced by UR’s abstract militancy, he formed the agit-tekno band Atari Teenage Riot. Atari signed to a major label, but were dropped before they released an album. Wrecking a recording studio’s amplifier and running up huge cab bills by stopping off at record stores, they were just too much trouble. By this point – the end of 1993 – Alec had already released around fifteen EPs of solo material on Force Inc and other labels, including ‘Hunt Down The Nazis’ and ‘SuEcide’, an ironic/nihilistic ‘hymn to self-destruction through Ecstasy’. Meanwhile, he was experimenting with a Germanic jungle sound for Riot Beats, drawing on the influence of UK darkside tracks by Bizzy B and the Reinforced crews. Dark-core remains an influence on Digital Hardcore, which is both a scene and a label. ‘Our beats are fast and distorted, but the programming is not as complex as the UK producers.’
Breakbeat appealed as an antidote to Germanic techno’s Aryan funklessness, and as a multicultural statement. ‘I did “Hunt Down The Nazis” at a time when skinheads were attacking immigrants. Then you’d discover, talking about the attacks to people on the rave scene, that a lot of people were quite racist. At the Omen Club, Turkish kids were turned away for no reason. There was quite a nationalistic aura to German techno, “now we are back on the map”. Mark Spoon from Jam and Spoon made a comment on MTV, about how white people had techno and black people had hip hop, and that’s the way it should stay. One neo-Nazi magazine even hailed trance techno as proper German music.’
Ironically, Empire now reckons that UK jungle has gotten too funky. ‘The energy is missing. A whole night of jungle is just too flat. The idea of mixing, of fading tracks into each other smoothly, is over-rated. Pirate radio was better before the DJs learned to mix properly. DJ technique is just like a guitarist who knows how to make a really complicated guitar solo. A Stooges riff can mean much more, with just three notes. If the energy’s not there, what’s the point?’
With its speedfreak tempos and brutalist noise aesthetic, Digital Hardcore has less in common with jungle than it does with that other descendant of the original 1991 pan-European hardcore: the terror-gabba and speedcore sounds of labels like PCP, Kotzaak, Fischkopf, Cross Fade Entertainment, Praxis and Gangstar Toons Industry. Digital Hardcore Recordings’ own acts, like EC80R, Moonraker, Shizuo and Sonic Subjunkies, mash up skittery 200 b.p.m. breakbeats, ultra-gabba riffs, thrash-metal guitar, Riot Grrrl shouting, and loads of midfre-quency NOISE. ‘In techno, in jungle, the middle frequencies are taken out, it’s all bass and treble. But the middle frequencies are the rock guitar frequencies, it’s where the aggression comes from.’
As well as ‘boost the mid-range, cut the bass’, Digital Hardcore’s other key precepts are ‘tempo changes keep it exciting’ and ‘faceless techno PAs are boring’. At their parties, DJs favour a crush-collision mess-thetic of mixed up styles and b.p.m.’s, and there are always bands playing. Instead of hypnotizing the listener into a headnodding stupor, Digital Hardcore is meant to be a wake-up call. If rave is heavy metal (rowdy, stupefying, a safety valve for adolescent aggression) and electronica is progressive rock (pseudo-spiritual, contemplative), Digital Hardcore is punk rock: angry, speedy, ‘noise-annoys’-y.
In many ways, Digital Hardcore is the lo-fi underground counterpart to pop groups like The Prodigy and The Chemical Brothers, who mash together hip hop’s boombastic breakbeats and techno’s insurgent riffs to create a twenty-first century equivalent of rock aggression, and who’ve both built up a reputation as kick-ass live bands. There’s a crucial difference, though. Where Prodigy’s ‘Firestarter’ and The Chemicals’ ‘Loops Of Fury’ are gloriously adolescent tantrums in the plastic punk tradition of The Sweet, Gary Glitter and Alice Cooper, Digital Hardcore’s aural insurrection is targeted; Empire and his comrades really believe that noise can bring down the establishment’s walls. Nonetheless, all this music feels like rock, rather than rave.
‘You know, there’s this foundation of musicians – German Rock Musicians Against Techno – who used to play at parties and have now been put out of business by DJs,’ Alec laughs. ‘We want to join it!’ He adds, ‘Just to take the piss,’ but I think he means it, maaaan.
You Make Me Feel Mighty Unreal
It’s a few days before New Year’s Eve 1995, and downtown Manhattan’s ‘illbient’ salon The Soundlab is paying host to Alec Empire versus DJ Spooky: an evenly matched turntable duel between the doyen of digital hardcore and local DJ-theorist Spooky. Alternating in ten minute sequences at first, then going head-to-head, the pair cut up the beats wildstyle, Spooky rockin’ out in his dreads and B-boy gear, Empire impassive in an incongruously bureaucratic grey suit.
If DJ Spooky tha’ Subliminal Kid – aka tha’ Tactical Apparition, tha’ Ontological Assassin, tha’ Renegade Chronomancer, tha’ Semiol-ogical Terrorist – hadn’t existed, it would have been necessary to invent him. There was a gap just waiting to be filled by a figure who’s not just hip to the postmodern implications of cut ’n’ mix culture, but who goes out of his way to exacerbate them. That’s Spooky: the DJ-as-philosopher, someone who can happily flit between the sub-cult underground of hip-hop jams, raves, ambient parties, and the highbrow overground of Artforum, ICA conferences, Semiotexte.
This young African-American – real name, Paul D. Miller – isn’t shy of bringing the full might of his college education to bear on the humble art of spinning vinyl. And so he calls the mix-tape an ‘electromagnetic canvas’, celebrates ambient music as ‘electroneiric other-space’, exalts the DJ as a ‘mood-sculptor’ and lists his occupation as ‘spatial engineer of the invisible city’. The way Spooky describes it, when he’s mixing he’s pulling down ‘ill shit’ from the vast data-cloud of modern mediaculture; when he makes tracks, his approach is ‘recombinant’, a splicing and dicing of music’s genetic code.
‘My two big things,’ Spooky pronounces, ‘are “cultural entropy” and “post-rational art”.’ By cultural entropy, he means that in the age of sampladelia, cultural signifiers are becoming deracinated and etherealized, eventually resulting in a state in which all difference has been erased. As for ‘post-rational’, that’s art which isn’t about narrative or meaning, but a flux of sensations, ‘art that’s immersive’. The supreme example of both syndromes is digitalized dance music, particularly Spooky’s faves, ambient, trip hop and jungle. In ‘illbient’ – the sound and scene that Spooky and a gaggle of downtown New York allies have conjured – the membranes between these genres have become porous. The result, depending on your allegiances, is either an exhilarating stylistic free-for-all, or a deracinated, diluted mish-mash.
In just a few years, Spooky has become both a celebrated and a highly controversial figure. For some he’s a cult, a tightrope walker on the cutting edge; for others, he’s a dark magus of auto-hype. Counter-culture veteran rockcrits and Marxist academics find Spooky’s Baudrillard-meets-B-boy spiel thoroughly decadent, an elaborate pomo rationalization of political di
sengagement and surrender to the seductions of late capitalist hyper-reality; Spooky slogans like ‘seize the modes of perception’ just rub salt in the wounds of these mourners for the death of History and political agency. But the fundamental difference between these sixties nostalgics and ‘a child of the digital night’ like Spooky is temperamental or even psychological; like many of his generation, the Subliminal Kid seems to have a more tenuous but less oppressive sense of super-ego than people who grew up before the age of McLuhan and the TV-as-glass-nipple.
In a piece in the Village Voice entitled ‘Yet Do I Wonder’ – part of a series in which African-American writers pondered questions of identity and community – Spooky declared that ‘every patriarchal “family value” that I have ever thought of begins to crack and fall to dust when I think about the stuff of which my everyday life is made: DJ-ing, living under almost squatlike conditions, writing.’ The death of his black radical lawyer father when he was three is both biographical fact and a crucial element of the Spooky myth. Spooky knows his post-Lacanian theory: specifically, that it’s the intrusion of the father that smashes the cosy mother/infant symbiosis and enforces the child’s admission to the regime of language, selfhood and lack. If you don’t go through this Oedipal crisis, and abandon the infant’s cosmic narcissism, you don’t become fully human.
The disappearance of his father from the primal scene is all part of the mythos of Spooky as anti-Oedipal prophet of the post-human aeon, wherein the self is just a ‘mindscreen’ for all the switching centres of influence; Spooky as polymorphously perverse psychonaut surging through and merging with the digital cosmos; Spooky adrift in the womb-like cocoon of ‘bloodmusic’ and liquifacient information. Or as he himself put it in the Village Voice piece: ‘I, the Ghostface, the Ripple in the Flux, am a kid who has gotten the picture but lost the frame, and life for me is one big video-game.’
Spooky’s career began in the late eighties with a college radio show called Dr Seuss’s Eclectic Jungle. ‘I was playing really mutated dance music – four turntables all going at the same time, turntable feedback, four CD players, two tape decks.’ Then came a club called Club Retaliation, based in his hometown Washington, DC. Here Spooky enjoyed an acid revelation while DJ-ing: ‘I took a ridiculous amount of liquid LSD and it radically ruptured my sense of the turntable. Most people dwell on the surface of their records, but with acid and more tactile drugs you feel like you’re actually inside a moving text, the music becomes like fluid architecture . . . I started to feel very unstable, I was feeling the bass in a way I’d never done before. The immersive quality of music on acid was a revelation.’
In New York, Spooky gradually found aesthetic kinsmen in DJs and bands like Olive, Byzar, SubDub, We and Circuit Bible. Soon he had a career on his hands, playing at spaces like Chiaroscuro, Jupiter, Abstrakt and The Soundlab. Unlike the UK’s marijuana-infused ambient culture, New York’s ‘illbient’ scene is less about wombing soundbaths and vegetative bliss, more about creating audio-sculptures and environmental soundscapes. As such it harks back to a downtown bohemian tradition of multimedia events and Zen-Dada-LSD inspired happenings: Fluxus, Phil Niblock, John Cage, La Monte Young’s Theater of Eternal Music, David Tudor. Illbient’s reference points extend even further back (the Italian Futurists’ Art of Noises, Erik Satie’s ‘furniture music’) and further afield (Spooky cites Javanese gamelan and ‘West African thumb-piano played at ceremonies’).
Despite this gamut of illustrious ancestors, ‘illbient’ is mostly defined by its contemporary coordinates: it’s a uneasy merger of post-rave ambience and abstract hip hop (freed of the figurative role of the rapper). The ‘ill’ indicates an allegiance to B-boy culture (it’s basically a vernacular and more flava-full synonym for ‘avant-garde’), but the music’s non-verbal atmospherics (the ‘bient) involves cutting loose from the hip hop street and all its struggles, drifting off into ‘space’. The opposite of ‘space’ is ‘compression’, Spooky’s great bugbear. He rails against the ‘spiritual compression’ of hardcore rap, which he attributes to the gangsta cult of ‘realness’ and psychic armature. Like the British trip hoppers and nouveau electro outfits, Spooky locates his B-boy roots in the ‘old skool’ era, when hip hop was oriented around the DJ-and-turntable rather than the producer-and-studio. Like Mo’ Wax’s DJ Shadow and Ninja Tune’s DJ Vadim, Spooky belongs to a tradition of mostly instrumental collage (Steinski, Davy DMX, The 45 King, Mantronix) that disappeared when rhyming skills, storytelling and the rapper’s charismatic persona took over hip hop. But whereas the old skool nostalgia of Mo’ Wax and Ninja Tune is a product of British B-boys geographical and cultural distance from rap’s sociocultural context, Spooky’s alienation from hardcore rap is class-based: he’s black but from an upper-middle-class, highbrow background. ‘Illbient’ is a bohemian initiative to liberate hip hop from the thrall of the ‘real’.
This explains why Spooky’s own music – tracks like ‘Journey (Paraspace Mix)’ and ‘Heterotopian Trace’ on the compilation Necropolis: The Dialogic Project, ‘Nasty Data Burst (Why Ask Why)’ on the Bill Laswell organized anthology Valis 1: Destruction of Syntax – sound less like contemporary hip hop, more like the neo-Dada collages of British experimental units such as :zoviet*france and Nurse With Wound. ‘Nasty Data Burst’, for instance, is an aleatory haze of deteriorated sound-sources, featuring some eighty overlapping beats set up, says Spooky, ‘to be deliberately randomized and clashing’. His debut solo album Songs of A Dead Dreamer is marginally more groove-oriented (trip hop with no return ticket?) but it’s still hard to imagine any American B-boy recognizing this music.
Spooky’s warped and warping relationship with hip hop stems from the core attitude that he shares with the rest of the international art-tekno fraternity: cultural nomadism, a reluctance to be shackled by roots, a commitment to not being committed. ‘I pass through so many different scenes, each with their different uniforms and dialects. One night I’ll be at a dub party, the next in an academic environment. I think people need to be comfortable with difference. Hip hop isn’t, it says “You gotta be down with us,” be like us.’ One of Spooky’s most frequent complaints is ‘I’m stretched real thin at the moment’. This is partly the over-worked lament of a fin de millennium Renaissance man whose non-musical fronts of activity include critical journalism, science fiction, making paintings and sculptures, and participating in academic conferences. But it’s also a side effect of his interest in ‘schizophrenia, the idea of inhabiting all these different personae.’ Stretching his self to the point of snapping, Spooky is a renegade against identity politics, an (un)real Everywhere-and-Nowhere Man.
My Funk Is Useless
The central tenets of the post-everything vanguard are: severing ties to a particular scene or community creates the freedom to drift; fusion opens up ‘infinite possibilities’, whereas purism is blinkered tunnel-vision. Although some remarkable music has been created under the border-crossing banner, it’s also important to understand the limitations of this approach: namely, that the dissolution of the boundaries between genres tends to erode precisely what makes them distinct and distinctive, and that it disables the very functionalist elements that makes specific styles work for specific audiences. In that respect, Alec Empire’s humorously (and accurately) titled ‘My Funk Is Useless’ on Hypermodern Jazz could serve as an art for art’s sake motto for everyone from Squarepusher to Spooky.
In purist or ‘hardcore’ dance genres – jungle, hip hop, house, ragga, gabba, swingbeat – sparks fly from the productive friction between innovation and conservatism, between the auteur’s impulse to explore and the dancefloor’s requirements. These genres evolve through the pressure of the audience’s apparently contradictory demands: tracks must be ‘fresh’, but they must also reinforce and sustain tradition. To an outsider, the soundtrack at hardcore dance events often seems ‘samey’. But this predictability isn’t caused by cowardice so much as a desire to create a vibe: a meaningful and feeling-full mood that m
aterially embodies a certain kind of worldview and life-stance. As you get deeper inside a scene, the apparent homogeneity gradually reveals itself as Amiri Baraka’s ‘changing same’; you begin to appreciate the subtle play of sameness and difference, thrill to the small but significant permutations and divagations of the genre.
Freestyle or ‘eclectro’ events, by comparison, are usually devoid of vibe. Partly this is because of the absence of the drug-and-class energy that makes hardcore scenes so charged (the electricity can also be race or sexual-preference fuelled, as with the gay house scene). Partly, it’s because the style-hopping freestyle menu attracts a rather uncommitted consumer: the chin-scratching connoisseur who’s more likely to stand at the back headnodding than dance, who’d rather pride himself on being an ‘individual’ than merge with the crowd.
While hardcore underground scenes like jungle, gabba and East Coast rap are ‘populist’, in a global sense they seldom achieve more than ‘semi-popular’ status. If these subcultures constitute the classic ‘margins around a collapsed centre’, this makes the post-everything artists marginal even to the margins. Imagine the pop mainstream as a planet around which orbit a number of moons (the hardcore undergrounds). The post-everything perimeter is like one of Saturn’s Rings: a band of pop-cultural detritus which touches the hardcore satellites but has little impact upon them. Furthermore, the perimeter-zone itself is constituted, in a very real sense, out of the dust and debris scattered by larger and ultimately more significant bodies in the musical firmament.
In this respect, the post-everything boffins belong to a time-honoured tradition. Artists like Brian Eno and Miles Davis borrowed ideas from populist genres like dub and funk, which tend to be driven by a vital blend of mercenary and spiritual motives. Sometimes, it works the other way round: Byrne and Eno’s My Life In The Bush of Ghosts was a big influence on Public Enemy producer Hank Shocklee, for instance. But mostly the cross-town traffic is one-way. ‘Parasitic’ is the right word to describe this downwardly mobile dependence on ‘street sounds’ for stylistic rejuvenation; for instance, it’s highly unlikely that the idea of accelerating and chopping up breakbeats would ever have independently occurred to Plug/Squarepusher/AFX without jungle’s prior example.
Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture Page 52