Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture

by Simon Reynolds

  NINETEEN

  TRANCE MISSION

  THE LATE-NINETIES

  RESURGENCE OF

  TRANCE

  A girl daubs her face and arms with fluorescent paint, then turns to admire her handiwork in the luminescent beams of an ultraviolet lamp. Her boyfriend, dancing nearby, has a samurai-style topknot, a shaved skull dotted with phosphorescent green spots, and a satanist’s beard. Behind the couple’s heads, on the cliffs that loom above the grassy dance floor, you can see what looks like two gigantic fireflies doing a mating dance. Squint through the darkness, and the courtship choreography resolves into the semaphore-like movements of a pair of green extra-large glow-sticks, waved by a long-haired hippie lurking in the jungle canopy.

  The location is a remote farm deep in the densely forested hills of Puerto Rico, and the event is El Cuco, a three-day festival for psychedelic trance music organized by New York promoter Tsunami. Psy-trance represents the hardcore underground end of trance’s vast spectrum. From the next-generation ravers packing superclubs like Gatecrasher in Sheffield, to the full-moon raves in the deserts of Southern California, trance resurged in the last few years of the nineties to reign supreme as the world’s most popular and pervasive form of electronic dance music. In Germany, trance soundtracked Berlin’s annual Love Parade, a million-strong street carnival so accepted by the mainstream that leading politicians turned a blind eye to the blatant Ecstasy use and competed to associate themselves with the event. In Israel, trance was even bigger but inspired the opposite response – a media panic about a counterculture of youth too druggy and decadent to defend the country against its hostile neighbours. Many Israeli tranceheads were kids who freaked out after three years’ compulsory military service, grew their hair long, and went to Goa, the mother lode for psy-trance culture. Some of these AWOL youth never came back, inspiring an Israeli mothers’ movement concerned about the music’s corrupting effect.

  If you remapped the globe to reflect the influence and prestige of nations when it comes to electronic dance music in general, Britain would swell to the size of the Pacific Ocean, Germany would absorb all of Eurasia, the USA would equal North and South America combined, and France would be Australasia. But if you adjusted the atlas in ratio to the global distribution of trance, especially the underground form of psy-trance, the globe would actually resemble how the world really looks. See, there’re scenes for psy-trance in countries you never hear from when it comes to the other, hipper sorts of techno: Macedonia, Colombia, Poland, Switzerland, Bolivia, Croatia, Portugal. In August 1999, the Solipse festival in Ozora, Hungary, drew 30,000 nomadic hippie ravers from across the world to celebrate the solar eclipse and dance to a line-up of bands and DJs that was non-stop psy-trance. In Russia, there’s an annual trance festival called Orbita, while the Ukraine boasts massive trance raves on the beaches of the Black Sea, Finland has a thriving scene of forest raves, and there are Japanese trance parties in Mount Fuji national park. Even within the Big Four nations, psy-trance thrives in cities that don’t have the lustre of perceived cool, such as Hamburg, Germany, where the annual Voov Experience festival takes place.

  Psy-trance is an ‘equal opportunity’ genre when it comes to making the music too: there are leading exponents of psychedelic trance operating in Israel, Australia, Sweden, Greece, Denmark. It’s a truly pan-global style, with no real origin or primary location. Despite being initially associated with the techno traveller’s dance-and-drug paradise Goa, it draws nothing from the environment or local culture. Really, it’s a sonic virus that hatched in the early nineties amongst the nomadic bohemians who gather every winter during Goa’s party season, and was then brought back to European clubs. Apart from the music itself, the defining Goa trait was the deployment of ‘black light’ (aka ultraviolet) in tandem with fluorescent clothes, body paint and decor (the latter typically involving brightly coloured tapestries hand painted in luminous ink and using fantastical imagery that blends Hindu goddesses and cosmic science fiction). Goa’s ‘fluoro’ tradition started because ultraviolet lamps were more portable in the jungle environment than other rave staples like lasers and strobes.

  After a couple of years of faddish popularity in the early nineties, Goa trance returned underground, changed its name (to psychedelic trance) and continued its virulent transglobal diffusion. Goa itself became increasingly despoiled, inspiring a quest for ‘the next Goa’, an exotic place not yet overrun with tourists or ruined by a police crackdown on drugs. A circuit of alternative destinations opened up for ‘trancepackers’, trance-loving backpackers. Thailand became a prime location for full-moon ‘frenzies’ at Koh Phangan and Haad Rin village, but that country soon became too popular, so the serious ‘heads’ moved further afield, to Bali and to Nepal’s mountains and lakes. With its prime season occurring at the same time as Goa’s (January/February), Australia emerged as the next serious contender. Thousands of trancepackers descended upon the long established hippie resort of Byron Bay, the easternmost point on Australia’s coast. Here, and elsewhere in Australia, there were huge raves in the bush, like the Rainbow Serpent Festival and the Summer Dreaming. Then came South Africa, with its Rustlers Valley raves, followed by Venezuela, Mexico, Brazil, Madagascar, Morocco . . .

  If you heard Goa trance in 1994 and dismissed its frilly curlicues of arpeggiated synth and mandala-Mandelbrot texture-swirls as comically kosmik hippie shit, you might be surprised by the way it subsequently mutated. True, the early Goa sounds of Juno Reactor and Green Nuns of the Revolution was maximalist to a fault, writhing with polytendril-led patterns. But in the late nineties, psy-trance plunged into a dark phase of minimalism and abstraction. Hamburg-based psy-trance gods X-Dream pioneered this harsh new psy-sound. Squatting on a grubby mattress at the abandoned orphanage that serves as living quarters for El Cuco’s DJs and bands, X-Dream’s Markus Maichel explains how he shifted from using his synthesizer keyboard ‘as a musical instrument that plays notes’ to a ‘controller that triggers noises and drum loops’. Psy-trance is still a busy, event-full music, but instead of Goa’s fractal density of melody-lines, you get a bedlam of mad effects and sonic surprises ambushing your ears – jabbering bionic parakeets, scuttling bursts of ricocheting drums, single guitar riffs that leap out of the mix to smack you round the chops, verminously wriggling noises like soundworms infesting your brain. Denmark’s Kox Box and UK producer Hallucinogen (real name Simon Posford, he’s widely regarded as the best in the genre) are especially inventive, favouring grotesquely distorted and distended snippets of voice that sound like a human being literally being stretched on a rack, harsh delay effects that create the aural equivalent of the drunk man seeing double or triple images, and moments when it sounds like the groove’s clockwork mechanism has exploded and is scattering coils and cogs every which way.

  ‘Twisted’ is one of the scene’s buzz terms. ‘Psy-trance is all about tweaking the sounds,’ says Opher Yisraeli, an Israeli-American who DJs as India Drop. ‘A house producer will use sounds that are more “flat” – that is, like real acoustic instruments, without any effects on top. But a psy-trance producer will “twist” the sounds using every effect and filter available – the crazier, the better!’ Psy-trance’s abstraction means that the style of music it has most in common with is, bizarrely, drum and bass. Rhythmically, they couldn’t be further apart: psy-trance’s textured freak-out is layered on top of a pounding four-to-the-floor kick and implacably chugging Moroder bass. But psy-trance and drum and bass are all about sound-engineering as a way of transforming your obsessive-compulsive disorder into an aesthetic and a career. Like drum-and-bass producers, psy-trance artists are obsessed with stereo-spatial trickery: they love to make sounds leap and veer across the speakers.

  The other thing shared with drum and bass is a fetish for the darkside, signposted with unnerving samples like ‘I’m sure there’s gonna be more than one unpleasant surprise before we’re done’ or ‘LSD hints that there is an area of the mind that could be labelled unsane �
� not insane but not sane’. X-Dream’s Jan Mueller explains that the psy-trance raves are actually structured to include a ‘dark music’ phase, before shifting to uplifting ‘morning music’ at sunrise. ‘A crucial part of the party is when the heavy sound is played in the middle of the night, so that the people can freak.’ Just as drum and bass’s warped sounds dovetail with the skunkanoiac effects of super-strong weed, psy-trance plays off the aural hallucinations triggered by LSD and psilocybin mushrooms. Explains Kara Walker from Philadelphia psy-trance party organizers Gaian Mind, ‘some of the sounds used from synths like the Roland 303 and the Juno 6 are connected to that constant buzz or hum in the back of your brain when you’re on magic mushrooms. And those crazily echoed samples, with intense delays and heavy filters creating a sort of after-image effect, that goes well with psilocybin and DMT, because those drugs can cause a weird delay effect in your hearing.’

  Heard at its best over a big, crisp sound system, psy-trance is fierce, aggressive music, full of shredding and ripping sounds. Sometimes, the music seems to sizzle, making real the American anti-drug advert that shows an egg in a frying pan and the slogan ‘this is your brain on drugs’. There’s the same ultra-clinical digital precision you get in melodic trance, but it’s a kind of abrasive cleanliness – sounds so squeaky and rubbery they make your ears itch. That crisp attack of sound has a lot to do with the fact that DJs mostly play DATS (Digital Audio Tape) rather than vinyl. The tradition started in Goa because vinyl is heavier to transport into remote areas. DATs have helped the music to propagate far and wide like an exotic disease. Mingling on the international party circuit, DJs swap DATs of their own tunes with each other – similar to the dubplate system in drum and bass, except that DATs are easily copied, which means a track can proliferate across the world in a few weeks.

  Paralleling the global reach of psy-trance are ‘progressive’ and ‘Euro’, two more mainstream styles of trance. Progressive is a sort of tasteful adult form of trance, slow-burning and subtle, as purveyed by globetrotting DJ superstars like Sasha, John Digweed and Seb Fontaine, and created by producers like Breeder and Hybrid. Progressive’s roots go back to the English ‘progressive house’ sound of 1992 – 3, as pioneered by Leftfield and Spooky (whose Charlie May now collaborates with Sasha in the recording studio) and pushed by labels like Guerrilla, Hard Hands and Cowboy. Trance without the cheesy E-motionalism, house purged of its gay disco roots, techno stripped of black feel or jazzy tinges – progressive seems mostly defined by its inhibitions and checked tendencies. So what makes it ‘progressive’, precisely? Perhaps because, unlike deep house, none of the sounds used in the style really resemble ‘real’ acoustic instruments. The music seldom ‘moves’ like a conventional instrument does (the basslines, for instance, couldn’t really be imagined as played on a bass guitar). With its abstract whooshing sounds, blurry pulses and stereo-panning effects, progressive has evolved into the ultimate ‘big room’ music, the sheer spectacular size of its sound perfect for the main dance floor at superclubs.

  In addition to size, progressive is into length: long tracks, long sets, the long mix. DJs like Sasha and Digweed deliberately select characterless tracks rather than orgasmic anthems because those ‘run of the mix’ sort of tracks can sit together for a protracted period. You can’t really tell when the transition between records starts or is completed. The result is a level, peak-less experience (Sasha and Digweed ration out three climaxes per nine-hour set). Progressive’s sonic featurelessness carries over to the DJs (an endless roll call of Nicks, Johns, Daves), and the blankness of the track titles (‘Force 51’, ‘Overactive’, ‘Emotion Surfer’, ‘Rhythm Reigns’, ‘Gyromancer’, ‘Supertransonic’) which avoid conjuring up images or outside-world evocations in favour of a vague spirituality/futurity. Purging all the aspects of rave that harked back to earlier youth movements like hippie and punk (or for that matter, disco or hip hop or reggae), progressive has achieved a perfect non-referential purity.

  Even more popular than progressive is the more melodic Eurotrance style as purveyed by Paul Van Dyk, Ferry Corsten, Tiesto, Energy 52, Three Drives On a Vinyl, et al. This style is packed with precisely the cheesy elements that the Sasha-type progressives shun: anthemic choruses, crescendos, drum-rolling builds and beat-free breakdowns, heart-tugging refrains. Imagine the enchanted flutter of a lobotomized Philip Glass, or the cuddly-and-cosmic feeling you’d get if you tripped with the Teletubbies. Listening to the kind of music called ‘trance’ in the late nineties, it was a jolt to recall that the original 1993 wave of trance from Frankfurt and Berlin was hard, cold music. That phase of trance was massively cool for a good few years, then got eclipsed by drum and bass as the hipster’s favourite. Yet trance secretly remained the people’s choice on many rave floors across the world. In 1998 it began to resurge dramatically, dominating clubland again thanks partly to a massive increase in Ecstasy use caused by the return of high-quality E in the form of the famous ‘Mitsubishi’ brand of pills. You could see the vibe change in clubs – scenes of blissed-out abandon the like of which had not been witnessed since the 1988 – 92 golden age: people caressing their own necks and chests, stroking each other’s faces and arms, swept up in a gentle frenzy of touchy-feely tenderness, orgiastic yet chaste.

  This renewed enthusiasm for Ecstasy, after years in which its reputation had suffered because of its unreliability, coincided with a dearth of music congenial to taking E. Trance rushed back in to fill the vacuum. Compared with the emotional dryness of late-nineties techno and drum and bass, trance was accessible – highly melodious, euphoric, with emotions that corresponded to ‘normal’ human feelings (longing, poignancy, tenderness, etc.). Where techno and drum and bass producers titled their tracks using terminology from astrophysics or biogenetics, Van Dyk’s most famous anthem ‘For An Angel’ was inspired by meeting his girlfriend! Sensuous and uplifting like house, but with the banging rave energy that house lacks, trance rode the Mitsubishi wave and by 1999 it had achieved an almost tyrannical popularity.

  The Esperanto of electronic dance, trance became the world’s most beloved form of techno. But it was also the most hated and despised – connoisseurs dismiss it as cheesy trash, not serious or ‘deep’ like minimal techno and drum and bass. People with an emotional and intellectual investment in concepts like ‘subculture’, ‘underground’, ‘hardcore’ etc. typically characterize trance’s spirit as meek and mild, lacking in edge. And there’s certainly some element of truth to the stereotype of the trance fan as white, middle class and apolitical, unwillingly to deal with the ‘urban’ (code for ‘black’) elements of dance culture. Consciously or not, trance producers had refined out both the black gay disco elements of house and the hip-hop/reggae-derived ruffage of hardcore.

  This musical blanding out seemed to parallel the corporatisation of dance culture. The chaos of the early nineties rave scene, which was anarcho-capitalist and borderline criminal, had been gradually replaced by a professionalized and hugely profitable clubbing industry. Going to raves in 1988 – 92 was often edgy, equally likely to result in unforeseen adventures or some kind of disaster. But the UK superclubs like Cream and Gatecrasher where progressive and trance held sway were efficient and well-organized spaces designed for dependable enjoyment. The result was that you got what you paid for – but nothing more. The ‘surplus value’ that came from participating in the rave underground disappeared. What’s weird is that for the new generation of clubbers, the ‘quality night out’ consumerist ethos of the superclubs inspired huge loyalty. They identified with these mini-corporations so intensely that they marked their bodies with brand-name logos – tattoos of Cream’s symbol or Gatecrasher’s heraldic British lion logo.

  Based in Sheffield, Gatecrasher became the symbol of the new trance culture in all its ambivalence. The club’s slogan ‘Market Leaders In Having-It-Right-Off Leisure Ware’ played up their corporate image. ‘Having it’ means full-on, pill-gobbling, getting-messy-on-the-dance-floor hedonism; the ‘Having
-It-Right-Off Leisure Ware’ slogan, while a cute joke, showed how an underground drug culture had been transformed into an almost legitimate mainstream leisure industry. Yet some commentators hailed the new generation of crazily dressed ravers filling Gatecrasher and similar trance-oriented UK nightclubs like Sundissential and God’s Kitchen as a massive rejuvenation for British dance culture, even a ‘revolution’. Dance journalist Bethan Cole visited Gatecrasher as a sceptic but was blown away by the fervour and madcap creativity of the crowd, who called themselves ‘the Gatecrasher kidz’, ‘mentalists’ or ‘nutbags’, and developed their own look blending elements of rave, eighties New Romanticism, cyberpunk and Ibiza’s carnivalesque fancy-dress vibe. Gatecrasher kids are into hi-tech gadgets, flashing Cyberdog T-shirts, toy robots, Teletubbies – anything that’s futuristic, shiny and pleasing to the tripping eye. ‘Lots of the kids paint their faces bright blue or orange in this really primitive childlike way,’ recalled Cole. ‘Boys spike their hair up in blue and green. And the kids are very interactive with the DJs, holding up gigantic banners or writing notes.’ Walking through the club, she added, ‘there’s this eerie sense of things moving around you – kids with glove puppets and glow-sticks, light guns and those laser pens that write stuff in the air. There’s an eerie intensity about the whole place – childlike and innocent but also very druggy. You could smell that suburban odour of Pantene hair conditioner mingled with the chemical tang of drugs being sweated through the skin.’

  The Gatecrasher name is also synonymous with the Mitsubishi pill. With high-MDMA-content pills in plentiful supply again, Crasher kids and others at similar clubs across Europe seized the chance to gorge themselves on quality E. ‘A lot of these Crasher kids were really fucked up,’ Cole observed. Indeed common slogans on banners held by the kids are ‘Fucked Again!’ and ‘Never Too Many!’ Some nutbags shave the Mitsubishi logo onto the back of their heads, daub it on their bodies in body paint, even get it as a tattoo. Others spell out the word ‘Mitzis’ with kindergarten-style brightly coloured plastic letters attached to their scalps!