Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture

by Simon Reynolds

  Although the primary appeal of Serato is to DJs who have come up through spinning vinyl, Ripley reckons it will appeal to first-time DJs too. ‘It is just a really fun interface for playing electronic music, whereas Traktor or other purely digital interactions, you’re sitting there clicking a mouse or poking buttons. There is a learning curve with all of these systems, and if it’s not that physically enjoyable, people won’t persevere.’ Analogue-fetishizing sentimentalists continue to insist that vinyl not only sounds better in terms of its frequency spectrum (especially the sub-bass) but also has a mystical aura, a ‘soul’ or ‘warmth’ that digital lacks. But on most sound systems, the difference between analogue and digital is imperceptible, and it seems likely that the sheer convenience (no more lugging crates, no more apartment space-devouring record collections) and flexibility of Serato and similar programmes will triumph.

  The other format increasingly adopted by DJs, especially those operating in the left-field electronic field of glitchy dance music and experimental ‘sound art’, is Ableton Live. Developed by Robert Henke and Gerhard Behles of the brilliant ‘heroin house’ outfit Monolake and launched commercially in 2001, Ableton is loop-based sequencer software designed for performance and allowing for such intense degrees of improvisation it verges on live composition. The programme enables producers to build an arrangement from an arsenal of beats, patterns, samples, and other components, synch them up rhythmically and then tweak every element using the full studio repertoire of signal processing, panning effects, etc. – all in real time. There’s a caveat, though. As Kameleon puts it, ‘You have to do the work.’ Ripley elaborates, ‘It requires that you preload, set it all up in advance, cut things up and identify them and assign them.’ There’s an awful lot of preparation before you get to the spontaneous part.

  Although Ableton has been heralded as the future of DJing by superstars like Sasha, it seems to lend itself more to producers looking to perform their own electronic music. It’s especially useful for people who want to integrate their own productions with other people’s tracks. ‘There’re people doing hybrid sets, half their own material and half other people’s, all meshed together,’ says Kameleon. ‘And you get people doing re-edits on the fly, taking a track and chopping it up. That can be fun.’ Not limited to live Ableton use, but also released on vinyl, the mid-noughties fad for ‘re-edits’ is basically the neoconservative backlash against remixology imagined earlier in this chapter: a return to the original idea of remixing, where all or most of the original track is retained, but it’s chopped up and rearranged sequentially. It’s an irony that one of the uses of the absolutely latest, super-advanced leap forward in technology is enabling people to get back to how things were done in the eighties.

  TWENTY-TWO

  BACK TO THE FUTURE

  RETRO-ELECTRO, NU-WAVE

  AND THE EIGHTIES

  REVIVAL

  New York: spring, 2002. Go to Berliniamsburg, the Brooklyn club at the epicentre of New York’s eighties-inspired ‘electroclash’ scene, and you feel a peculiar sensation: it’s not exactly like time travel, more like you’ve stepped into a parallel universe, an alternative history scenario where rave never happened. The audience recycle and recombine elements of eighties New Wave and New Romantic fashion: asymmetric haircuts, ruffs, skinny ties worn over collarless T-shirts, punky-looking studded belts and wristbands, little cloth caps. But nobody really looks like they’re from 1981 – in fact, they look much sharper and, on the whole, not nearly as silly. The same applies to the music: for all the analogue synth-tones and one-finger melody refrains, the vocoderized robot-singing and ‘Blue Monday’-like sixteenth-note basslines, the soundtrack isn’t exactly a period-precise revival. There’s a textured intricacy to the rhythm programming and production that testifies to the technical advances of the last fifteen years of digitized dance music, to lessons that can’t be unlearned.

  ‘A season ago, the scene was more overtly eighties retro than it is now,’ says Larry Tee, the promoter and resident DJ behind Berliniamsburg. ‘Starting out, we had to play a lot more original eighties tunes because there weren’t enough contemporary releases. But now there’re almost too many new records to pick from and we don’t need to pad out our DJ sets with old stuff. And the fashion has kind of reflected that shift. A season ago, it was that whole New Wave early-eighties look of skinny ties, stripes, polka dots. Now there’re still eighties flourishes but it’s much more subtle.’

  Maybe the key ‘what if’ in this alternative history scenario is ‘what if Ecstasy had never been invented?’ Bored by the entire gamut of post-rave club music on offer – from filter house to trance and progressive – a new generation of trendy club kids have rejected the ease of release offered by house music’s warm pump ’n’ flow. Essentially, they’ve taken the E out of house, and rolled back history to the cold, stilted, neuro-Euro sounds that originally inspired the guys in Chicago and Detroit.

  This new generation have abandoned the very ethos of Ecstasy culture: the principles of egalitarian unity and ‘only connect’, the notion of submerging your ego in the oceanic hypno-flow of the rhythm and merging with the crowd. The dance floor is reconfigured not as a space of unity but as a stage for poseurs and coke-spiked narcissistic display. Nu-wave electro also breaks with the ‘in the mix’ aesthetic where tracks are anonymous elements for the DJ’s seamless montage. Instead, nu-wave songs compete to stand out, through domineering vocals, larger-than-life singers (as opposed to the depersonalized diva-as-raw-material approach in most modern dance), witty lyrics and extravagant amounts of obscenity and trash talk.

  Berliniamsburg scene-anthem ‘It’s Over’ by Hungry Wives proclaims: ‘The scene is dead . . . Twilo got sold on eBay’ (a reference to the late unlamented Manhattan superclub where tranceheads flocked for Sasha and Digweed). Rave’s once-transgressive ecstasy had become routinized rapture. Having never witnessed rave in its early explosively anarchic form, having only known E-culture as a fixture, predictable and plebeian, these very young nu-wave kids are rejecting the notion of trance-dance itself – as narcotic, lulling, null. Instead, they’re grasping for some kind of edge: a different kind of tension.

  The prototype for Berliniamsburg was Club Badd, a night started by Larry Tee and partner Spencer Product in New York’s East Village, and catering to a disenfranchised audience, ‘people who were bored with the abused dance formats available’ (Tee is referring here to house/techno/trance/drum and bass). Badd drew a crowd of ‘drag queens, disaffected gays, fashion straights, As Fours [a reference to the As Four series of art/fashion loft happenings], alterna-rockers, and electro freaks.’ The club arose in response to a widespread sense of lack, a feeling that New York nightlife was moribund, locked in a stale and interminable groove of filter disco and Eurotrance. At the same time, the traditional NYC enclave for gay dance culture – the deep-house scene centred on Body & Soul – was self-stifled by its own reverence for the lost golden age of disco. As another Berliniamsburg anthem, Hungry Wives’ ‘It’s Over’, puts it: ‘The tranny minions have no place to go/They are homeless . . . It’s the same song, honey/Over and over and over and over/The scene is dead, sweetie.’

  Many of the international (rising) stars of nu-wave performed at Club Badd – Fischerspooner, WIT, Tiga, DJ Hell, Crossover – but the night never really took off. But when Tee and Product shifted their activities to Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighbourhood – the area that took over the bohemian role that Manhattan’s East Village used to have, as a home for struggling artists and rock bands – the fledgling electroclash scene suddenly became the place to be. In terms of media attention and subcultural momentum, the turning point came in the autumn of 2001, when Tee staged the two-day Electroclash festival in Manhattan, featuring acts like Peaches, Adult. and Chicks On Speed. But Electroclash the Festival became marred by controversy, because – until the two sides fell out – it had been originally conceived as a collaboration between Larry Tee and DJ Hell, the founder of German
label International Deejay Gigolos, the leading international force behind the retro-eighties electro sound. What promised to be a potent and all-conquering alliance – a transatlantic axis of nu-wave – rapidly disintegrated for reasons that remain unclear. DJ Hell alleged in Village Voice that Larry Tee ‘stole the whole concept and even the name of the Electroclash festival.’ Tee denied this and attributed the breakdown of relations to Hell demanding ‘total creative control’. But he acknowledged that Hell had been doing nu-wave style music for a good while before he leapt into the scene.

  Then again, the notion that any single person invented and ‘owns’ the concept of eighties-revisionist dance music seems daft. It’s an idea that occurred more or less simultaneously to different people across the globe. It’s also an upshot that had a certain inevitability, given that the entertainment industries, on both the mainstream and underground level, increasingly operate through reworking the massive archive of pop-cult material that’s been amassed over the decades. International Deejay Gigolos and Berliniamsburg are crucial nodes in a global rhizome of neo-electro and nu-wave synthpop, a network with outposts in Canada (Tiga, Solvent), Germany (labels like B-Pitch Control, Lasergun, Muller), Holland (Viewlexx, Legowelt), Britain (Ladytron, DMX Crew, Les Rhythmes Digitales), Chicago (Tommi Sunshine’s club Electro-Sweat, Felix Da Housecatt’s Glamorama project) and Detroit/Ann Arbor (the mighty triumvirate of labels Ersatz Audio, Interdimensional Transmissions and Ghostly International, plus outfits like Dopplereffekt, Ectomorph and Adult.). In New York itself, in addition to Berliniamsburg and Tee’s label Mogul Electro, there’re operators like John Selway, Khan, Daniel Wang and Metro Area.

  Back-to-the-eighties is the trend that’s been coming and coming for the longest time. What originally looked like just the briefest of trend-lets intended to bring a frisson to jaded clubland palates has turned out to be the fad that refuses to fade. Electro? That’s so 1998, surely! Earlier, actually. The original, ahead-of-everybody electro reactivators were Drexciya, an Underground Resistance-affiliated unit of Detroit techno guerrillas who created a potent mystique through their stringent policy of faceless anonymity. Starting in the early nineties, their tracks often had a ‘bumpy’ electro feel that broke with the steady-stomping four-to-the-floor of most techno. One member of Drexciya broke off from the group, briefly collaborated with Ectomorph’s Brendan M. Gillen, then formed Dopplereffekt. The latter’s increasingly dodgy Teutonic-parodic releases – 1995’s Fascist State, 1997’s Sterilization (Racial Hygiene And Selective Breeding) – played a key role in reintroducing electro rhythms into the techno sound-stream.

  A scholar of electronic music history, Ectomorph’s Gillen diagnoses the revival of interest in electro as the return of techno’s repressed: funk, sub-bass, melody, vocals. Electro’s syncopation appealed at a point in the mid-nineties when techno was tied to the thumping metronome of the four-to-the-floor kick. Where jungle producers responded to techno’s increasing stiffness by funking things up with vintage, hand-played breakbeats, the new electro artists programmed their drum machines to create brand new quasi-breakbeats. These were riddled with syncopations but sounded ‘dry’, lacking both the fuzzy warmth of acoustically miked drums and those barely perceptible inconsistencies and micro-accents that give human drumming its ‘feel’. The electro beat can be funky as hell, but listen closely and it’s the acoustic equivalent of pixel-vision.

  Electro’s funk is dependent on the same drum machine that underpinned early hip hop, the Roland 808. Alongside its distinctive snare, hi-hat, clave and rimshot sounds, the 808 is most famous for the sub-bass rumble produced by detuning the kick drum – a smudged, red-zone undertow that still quakes beneath contemporary regional rap styles like Miami Bass and New Orleans Bounce. The nouveau electro artists of the late nineties used the 808 to create stabbing, percussive basslines (BOOM! Bup-bup ba-BOOM!) which syncopated with the intricate drum patterns and made the dancer bump ’n’ grind rather than stomp in strict time, techno-style. These 808 B-lines also connected the new electro with the sleazy underworld of ghetto tech, the booty-shaking soundtrack for dancers at strip bars. Hugely popular with Michigan’s black working class, ghetto tech’s lewd bump ’n’ grind is a world away from the refined atmosphere of Detroit techno and its satellite scenes from Berlin to London. Yet in Detroit itself, the bangin’ porno-electro of ghetto tech like DJ Assault vastly outsells the likes of Stacy Pullen. Where Detroit techno seeks to transcend the earth(l)y plane, ghetto tech prefers base materialism (at degree zero, all the tracks are about the female posterior) to spirituality, profanity to profundity.

  Alongside syncopation and bass, the third aspect to electro’s appeal to fatigued techno-heads was its melodic content. As Gillen puts it, by the mid-nineties techno was more about tones than tunes: minimal techno, especially, was an anorectic style that stripped itself down to ‘just rhythm and texture’. Bored by its austerity, producers started harking back to the pocket-calculator jingles of electro and the aching romanticism of eighties synthpop, with its soaring tunes and ‘intricate interlocking keyboard lines’. The decisive turning point that pointed ahead to the eighties-inspired resurgence of nu-wave, though, was the return of vocals. The first neo-electro had been almost entirely instrumental (give or take the odd terse one- or two-word vocoderized robot chant), and thus still compatible with a minimal techno vibe. The real break with techno came with the blatant pop appeal (and pop ambition) of 1998’s ‘Space Invaders Are Smoking Grass’ by I-f, an artist from Den Haag in Holland. This track featured a vocoderized voice singing an actual honest-to-goodness tune. Ersatz Audio – home base for neo-electro pioneers Le Car and Adult. – signposted this major shift in techno sensibility with their EP ‘Oral-Alio: A History of Tomorrow’. This medley of voice-based, eighties-flavoured synthpop songs was intended as a mini-manifesto, a critique of techno’s ‘language barrier – [its] fear, or reluctance, to incorporate vocals’. But this rediscovery of vocals, melody and lyrics, was actually going on across the dance-culture spectrum, from Green Velvet’s black-humorous monologues to The Horrorist’s folk tales for ravers and 2step’s vocal science.

  What the nu-wave contingent of I-f and Adult. specifically were doing was rolling the history of techno back all the way to its very dawn: its bizarre, still not quite fathomable origins as a Black American imitation of English synthpop. ‘I always get a kick when people say the first “techno” record was Cybotron’s “Alleys Of Your Mind”,’ says Adam Lee Miller of Adult. ‘That 7-inch single was 1981. To me, it was just a New Wave record. It sounds particularly close to “Mr X” by Ultravox. I think people called it techno simply because Juan Atkins was black.’

  This seems a good point at which to ponder: when we listen to something and identify it as ‘eighties’, what exactly are we responding to? What is the ‘eighties’-ness in this music? It’s an aggregate of attributes (coldness and cleanness of synth-sound, squareness and stiffness of groove and rhythm) and absences (obvious example: the absence of R & B influences, jazziness, ‘blackness’ of feel, makes the music sound European). There are specific hallmarks that seem to evoke the early eighties: the arpeggiated sixteenth-note basslines (endemic in eighties music from New Order to Italo-Disco to industrial groups like Nitzer Ebb), the dispassionate sung-spoken monologues on records like Miss Kittin’s ‘Frank Sinatra’, and the android-like vocoderized vocals.

  Vocoder-mania is a curious quirk of today’s electropop vogue: it’s become the privileged signifier of ‘eighties’, but it wasn’t actually that popular in the real eighties, give or take the odd Telex or Kraftwerk record or Giorgio Moroder solo album. In fact, from Divine and Depeche Mode to The Human League and Orchestral Manoeuvres, the hallmark of first-wave synthpop was the deeply human and often distinctly fallible singing on the records – Marc Almond’s torrid, pitch-erratic vocals in Soft Cell being a classic example, not forgetting the slightly unwieldy baritones of Dave Gahan and Phil Oakey, and the gauche ’n’ gawky singing of the girls in The Human
League. It’s also hard to work out what the Miss Kittin-style bored-rich-girl monotone is referencing (Grace Jones circa ‘Warm Leatherette’ and ‘Private Life’? Forgotten electronic ice-queens like Gina X or Regine Fetet of Hardcorps?). Both the deadpan vocal and vocoder trends show the way that retro movements always reinvent and fictionalize the past. Even when they try hard to be meticulously faithful and purist, they inevitably amplify certain aspects and suppress others.

  The keyword crystallizing everything simultaneously appealing and problematic about the nu-wave explosion is ‘retro-futurist’, that seemingly self-contradictory concept. Producers are reaching back to recover that lost sense of electronic music as bracingly new, startling, alien (as opposed to what electronic sounds had become by the late nineties – an omnipresent but barely noticeable thread in pop’s fabric). That lost futurity is signposted by stiff mechanistic rhythms and synth-sounds that are cold (meaning deliberately artificial-sounding, not corresponding to traditional acoustic instruments like horns, strings, piano). This ‘machine-music and proud of it’ stance is a dissident gesture in a context where a lot of temporary electronic producers strive for ‘warmth’ and ‘musicality’, prizing organic textures like the Rhodes electric piano and using digital technology to simulate hands-on human feel and jazzy swing by programming slight rhythmic imprecisions. Renouncing that played-not-programmed feel of suppleness and subtlety, nu-wave electro ‘flaunts its synthetic nature’, as Warren Fischer of Fischerspooner put it.