Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture

by Simon Reynolds

  You knew things were ailing in America’s post-rave dance culture when DJs started emigrating to Europe. In the USA (and in the UK too), smaller crowds and the decreasing number of clubs meant fewer gig opportunities and smaller fees. The superstar jocks clung onto their position at the top (albeit often having to journey much further afield, to territories that were only just entering their dance culture boom-phase, like Latin America). It was the mid-level DJs, the ones who had been making a solid living or were on the verge of going full-time professional, who really felt the crunch. Noticing that the vibe was still alive in Europe, DJs started moving to cities like Barcelona and Berlin because the work prospects were better, the cost of living cheaper and the cultural climate more supportive. The most high-profile émigré was Richie Hawtin. His move to Berlin in 2003 confirmed that Germany was now the spiritual homeland for electronic culture.

  Germany was setting the tone musically too. Most of the decade’s leading record labels – Kompakt, B-Pitch Control, Perlon, Playhouse, Get Physical – are based there. And for the greater part of the noughties, the connoisseur consensus sound has been a German invention, microhouse – nowadays an unsatisfactory umbrella term for an increasingly diverging array of sub-styles, but originally a useful and era-defining concept coined by techno writer Philip Sherburne in 2001. As the term suggests, microhouse basically entails the transposition of the minimal techno aesthetic onto the warmer sound-palette and more relaxed, inviting tempo of house.

  The groundwork for the genre’s emergence had been laid down in the mid to late nineties by the cluster of producers surrounding Berlin’s twinned labels Basic Channel and Chain Reaction, artists like Porter Ricks, Various Artists, Monolake and Vainqueur. Drawing on dub’s spatiality and subtractive aesthetic, they distilled house down to its barest essence – no songs, no vocals, barely any melodies, sometimes not even a drum track. The result was a music made entirely of texture, pulse-rhythm and space. Initially monotonous, Basic Channel/Chain Reaction’s often ten-minute-long tracks gradually revealed themselves to be endlessly inflected, fractal mosaics of flicker-riffs and shimmer-pulses. The musician/critic Kevin Martin coined the term ‘heroin house’ to describe the amniotic/narcotic aura of this sound, as warmly cocooning and spongy as the womb’s velvety lining. The BC/CR minimalist impulse involved seeing just how reduced – in terms of notes – you could make a pulse without it becoming purely percussive, just another beat. On tracks like Maurizio’s ‘M6’ and Resilient’s ‘1.2’, riffs were miniaturized to the point where they became two-note sub-vamps, texture-ripples and tectonic sound-shudders so contourless they were at the lowest threshold of memorability. Yet for all the sound’s abstraction, the BC/CR heart-pulse connected back to Chicago and its primordial ‘jack’ rhythm.

  Another key figure who paved the way for microhouse was producer Wolfgang Voigt aka Mike Ink, who, like Basic Channel, gathered around him a coterie of like-minded musicians to record for his labels Profan and Studio 1. Voigt made some ‘heroin house’ himself under the appropriately amorphous moniker Gas, most notably 1998’s awesome Konigsforst. Here he sampled refrains and sonorities from German classical music, weaving them into a subtly shifting tapestry over a muffled, changeless four-to-the-floor beat, the reverberance and majesty of the original orchestral recordings creating an atmosphere of airy vastness and altitude that felt positively alpine. In terms of being a midwife to microhouse, though, Voigt’s crucial contribution was founding the record label Kompakt. Just as Basic Channel/Chain Reaction was based around the Berlin techno store Hard Wax, Kompakt took its name from Voigt’s record shop in Cologne, where he worked alongside his partner Michael Mayer, soon to become the most renowned and popular DJ in the microhouse genre.

  There’s a subtle but crucial semantic difference between ‘minimal’ and ‘micro’. Minimal evokes modernist austerity and severity – stark lines, clarity of form, absence of ornament. ‘Micro’ suggests the miniaturization of detail. Where minimal techno records were so reduced they were almost empty, just pure body-battering percussive insistence, microhouse could often be relatively busy, teeming with tiny sonic events. This aesthetic drifted into dance music from the post-Oval realm of glitchtronica, music made out of the hums, tics and crackles generated by vandalized CDs, traumatized hardware and daydreaming machinery. Initially known as ‘clickhouse’ before Sherburne’s neologism caught on, the genre’s brain-tickling intricacy was also influenced by the latest developments in computer software – sequencing and virtual studio programmes like Reason and Fruity Loops, digital signal processing and plug-ins, and Ableton Live. A quantum leap in home studio production, these ‘digital audio workstations’ altered the entire aesthetic of dance music from the late nineties onward. Their dramatic expansion of artists’ ability to fine-tune and fiddle encouraged producers to make tracks full of densely layered detail and to programme rhythms where changes occurred in every single bar. The result was an aesthetic of ‘audio trickle’, as critic Matthew Ingram terms it – music that kept the listening ear diverted with its constant peripheral fluctuations but which often lacked a strong central core.

  Mille Plateaux’s Clicks & Cuts compilations of 2000 and 2001 corralled a bunch of left-field electronica figures like Curd Duca and Kit Clayton but also a number of key figures who would take the ‘sound dust’ aesthetic onto the dance floor: Jan Jelinek (aka Farben), Vladislav Delay, Thomas Brinkmann, Hakan Libdo, Geez ’n’ Gosh. At this emergent point, microhouse had an eerie but compelling blend of ascetism and sensuality. Listening to artists like Pantytec and Isolee, it was as though house’s song-flesh had been stripped to reveal the music’s inner organs, the grotesque gurgles and base bubblings generated by its gastro-intestinal plumbing. Grooves were constructed out of musique-concrete-like timbres, an onomatopoeic cornucopia of ploots, crickles, schlaaps, grunks. But even at their most tic-riddled and Tourettic these were definitely grooves, with an unmistakable wiggle to their walk. Although the rhythmic feel was house, micro’s sensibility still bore the hefty imprint of minimal techno and IDM. But Vladislav Delay made a key shift that pushed the emerging genre closer to deep house. Under the name Luomo, he introduced elements of songfulness and the human voice on the album Vocal City. For the sequel, The Present Lover, he pushed even further, creating an eighties-tinged quasi-pop even more prominently daubed with female air-freshener vocals, music that had all the dazzling gloss and prissy delicacy of Prefab Sprout and Scritti Politti but little of the melodic memorability.

  A curious but productive tension bubbled inside microhouse, a conflicted relationship to the Black American traditions it drew on. On the face of it, this was house music distanced from its black and gay roots, a European abstraction and distillation that felt ethereal and disembodied even as it worked your body in the club. Yet there was also a pronounced vein of homage to the traditions of blues, gospel and soul that nourished disco and house, from the Playhouse label-affiliated club called Robert Johnson, to artist names like Losoul, to Thomas Brinkmann’s Soul Center records (woven from snippets of raspy R & B vocal and snatches of call-and-response) and Geez ’n’ Gosh’s gospel-sampling albums My Life With Jesus and Nobody Knows. At the same time there was an equally strong impulse towards Germanic identity. Wolfgang Voigt talked presciently in the late nineties of his fervent desire to create ‘something like a “genuinely German pop music” and throw off the influence of Anglo-American pop (largely based on black American music). This interest in nationality (as opposed to nationalism) led him to investigate Wagner, schlager, Alban Berg, volksmusik, brass bands playing polkas, marches and so forth, all in the quest to locate some kind of German audio-cultural DNA. Hence the Gas records: attempts ‘to ‘bring the German forest to the disco’ that were informed by childhood memories of Voigt family expeditions to the Konigsforst near Cologne and to the Alps.

  This push-and-pull between Afro-America and Mittel Europa reflected German youth’s mixed feelings about its own culture and history. In a weird way, the Germ
an techno community’s obsession with Detroit (Tresor’s talk of a Berlin-Detroit alliance, the 313 phone code T-shirts on sale in Hardwax) was a form of displaced patriotism. Worshipping Detroit became a way back to embracing their own Germanness, which could be comfortably affirmed because Kraftwerk and Moroder were mediated through black people (Detroit’s own Germanophilia). As microhouse evolved, though, the Euro aspect came into the ascendant. Listening to the genre’s leading figures in 2002 – 3, DJs like Michael Mayer and Superpitcher, you started to hear more elements of a strictly nineties and Nordic provenance: sounds that flashed back to Jam & Spoon circa ‘Stella’ and ‘Age of Love’, tunes that bordered on fluffy trance, even tracks that were like a midtempo and tasteful version of gabba. In 2003, Mayer talked of the Kompakt sound as ‘a German sound . . . which is not rooted in black music, but maybe German folk music and polka.’

  But instead of tapping into the kind of cultural legacy Wolfgang Voigt had sought to reclaim, microhouse was much more a reflection of contemporary Germany, the modern, forward-looking centre of a unified Europe. The pounding, punishing techno that ruled E-Werk and Tresor in the early nineties had fit the old clichés of Prussian discipline and severity; microhouse, in contrast, was far more sensual, representing a hedonism tempered by taste. Again, the contrast between ‘minimal’ and ‘micro’ was telling. ‘Micro’ has none of ‘minimal’s intimations of renunciation and ascetic spirituality. Micro is suggestive more of exquisitely finessed design features that only the connoisseur appreciates, or even notices. Microhouse is music for the generation that grew up with mobile phones and iPods and the gamut of chic portable pleasure-tech (the label name Kompakt is perfectly attuned to this sensibility). You could see this minimal-to-micro shift in men’s hairstyles: the slaphead look of the early nineties techno soldier was replaced by short-but-not-severe hairstyles suggestive of a kind of restrained dandyism, often with a Neu Romantique ironic-retro eighties quality.

  Metrohaus, I call it: DJs like Superpitcher and Mayer are well groomed, willowy, epicene types, and the places they play tend to be designer bars with glitzy-but-arty decor. Microhouse appeals to European middle-class youth, kids who are bohemian in their drug taking and sexual freedom but bourgeois in their love of designer commodities and careerism (typically working in media, the arts, design, computing). The music found a similarly urban but ninety-nine per cent white (and Europhile) audience in America.

  Microhouse is a post-rave sound: you can get fucked up to it, drugs definitely enhance the rich detail in the sound, but it’s not essential, because the energy level of the house tempo doesn’t demand cranking up your nervous system artificially. The music appeals to the mind and the body in equal measure, works as well at home as in the club. Personally, I found it the default option for when you had people round for dinner, perfect audio decor (how metrosexual is that!) Artists like Isolee and Koze hit just the right median point between stimulating and unobtrusive: the music wasn’t bland, but it didn’t impose itself either.

  Because the model was house rather than rave, though, the slow builds and the plateau-like chug-chug-chug of it all make for a bit of a level experience in the club. And the detail-oriented aesthetic, with its minute, occasionally verging-on-imperceptible fluctuations of texture resulted in an oddly centreless music that left people who’d been through the rave heyday like myself crying out for some full throttle, for-the-jugular energy. Avoiding the ‘rude ’n’ cheesy’ side of rave, microhouse is a connoisseur sound, made by and for people who’ve been immersed in the culture for some while and who simply don’t want crass riffs and anthemic hooks. Earlier I mentioned the concept of the Zone of Fruitless Intensification, the numbing death trap that every style of music seems to drive itself into eventually. In micro’s case, that was reached circa 2003 – 4 when the music got too nouvelle-cuisiney.

  Perhaps that explains why there was a sudden self-generated shift within Eurodance towards the MONSTER RIFF. The biggest European dance-floor anthem of 2004 was ‘Rocker’ by German techno veterans Alter Ego, its crude chugging rhythm and squealing riff blatantly modelled on heavy metal. Rising producers like Black Strobe, Tiefschwarz and Kiki released tracks steeped in the influence of industrial and Goth. Kiki even parodied Andrew Eldritch’s hollow-chested doom-drone baritone on ‘The End Of The World’. Then came a post-Daft Punk wave of French rifftronica spearheaded by the distortion-obsessed duo Justine and the former thrash-metal fans behind the label Ed Banger.

  The most peculiar aspect of Eurotronica’s sudden penchant for rocking out was the fad for schaffel. In its simplest form, this meant replacing house’s evenly emphasized four-to-the-floor beat with a 6/8 time signature. If that doesn’t conjure any associations, think ‘Spirit In The Sky’ by Norman Greenbaum. The swing and stomp of early seventies glam rock and glitterbeat was the main inspiration, but another source, authentic to Mittel Europa, was the polka. Wolfgang Voigt can claim to have pioneered the idea of schaffel back in the mid-nineties with his T. Rex sampling Love Inc. track ‘Hot Love’. And it was Kompakt that really pushed the fad in 2004 with schaffel tracks galore and the compilation series Schaffelfieber (which translates as Shuffle Fever). Titillating as the craze was, schaffel seemed a sure sign that dance had lost its way and had entered a midlife crisis of aesthetic rudderlessness. Through its own evolutionary path, techno had often hit upon rock-like riff structures and blaring noises. But this was something altogether different and really rather lame: the wholesale importation of a rhythmic structure from a thirty-year-old rock fad.

  Constant innovation had been a central aspect of rave music’s self-conception from the start. But by the mid-noughties, the movement seemed to be going through the uncomfortable process of shedding that part of its identity and coming to terms with the idea that its own future would no longer involve futurism. If you look at the historical arc of dance music, there’s a striking resemblance with rock’s evolution, except that instead of moving forward in decade phases, the metabolically accelerated rave scene proceeded through five-year units. Dance’s equivalent to the sixties would be 1988 – 92: the era of the first raves, when the music glowed with the starry-eyed euphoria of a culture’s extreme youth and the flow of immortal anthems seemed endless. Next came the seventies, the half-decade from 1993 – 7: a darker, more troubled, but still incomparably rich period of genre fragmentation, drug-malaise-induced darkness, increasing musical complexity (concept albums!) countered by punk-like strategies of renewal-through-reduction. From 1998 – 2002, dance moved into a self-referential and auto-cannibalizing phase akin to the rock eighties: revivalisms galore, fads for electro and synthpop, acid house and early jungle.

  How to characterize the muddled period from 2002 – 7? I would argue that this actually resembles the nineties in rock, a post-postmodernist phase, rich in invention but lacking a clear direction forward. Grunge, for instance, didn’t dramatically expand the boundaries of the rock form, but neither was it a straightforward revival or retro-eclectic pastiche. Likewise, in recent years the sharpest operators in dance music – Tiefschwarz, LCD Soundsystem, Recloose, Maurice Fulton, Booka Shade – are roughly equivalent to PJ Harvey or Pavement, artists working within an established form but finding new possibilities. Today’s producers have a scholarly knowledge of the history of dance music. They are skilled at getting period-evocative sounds and take delight in hunting down little crevices of obscure, out-of-the-way music (like the early eighties disco-meets-Krautrock-based Cosmic scene in northernmost Italy, inspiration for the ‘space disco’ sound pioneered by Lindstrom). But although the source material they work with is totally precedented and sometimes predates rave itself, these producers cleverly weld disparate elements into composites that feel fresh. It’s the distinction between innovation and originality. We rarely get the shock of the new that the acid-house bass or mentasm noise or jungle breakbeats offered. Instead we get the milder thrills of the subtle twist or artful permutation. Oh, there are still a handful of artists pushing the
music into unknown spaces, like the brilliant Chilean-exiled-to-Berlin DJ-producer Ricardo Villalobos, creator of mindbending tracks like ‘Dexter’, whose pendulously gloopy textures make it feel like Time itself is slowing down, or ‘Fizheuer Zieheuer’, a 37-minute-long, emaciated dub-house groove whose sole melodic content consists of horn refrains sampled from a Serbian brass band. But overall, dance music today is recombinant, the soundtrack of an era of consolidation.

  And what about the legacy of hardcore rave, the burning heartcore of Energy Flash? Anyone who actually experienced that nineties surge is going to be spiritually scarred for life. The folk memory of that moment – when future-fucking innovation was massively popular rather than confined to the academic ghetto – has also affected many who came afterwards and didn’t witness it with their own ears. So it’s not surprising that the populist vanguard sounds of hardcore, gabba and jungle still reverberate through the contemporary soundscape. That period serves as the touchstone and prime resource for two of the major genres that emerged in the last ten years, breakcore and dubstep.

  Breakcore could almost be conceived as a riposte to microhouse. The style is patched together from all the rude ’n’ cheesy street sounds that could never be part of the Kompakt universe: jungle, gabba, dancehall, Miami bass, gangstarap, etc. Ironically, the scene started as an offshoot of IDM, aka ‘intelligent dance music’. The connective bridge was the ‘drill ’n’ bass’ sound, the fad for parody-jungle spearheaded by IDM gods Squarepusher, Luke Vibert and Aphex Twin. Although the drill ’n’ bassheads often seemed to be smirking, many actually had genuine affection and admiration for breakbeat hardcore. For some, 1992-and-all-that had been their entry point into electronic music in the first place. One such true fan was Mike Paradinas, aka μ- Ziq. Along with the abstract electronica you’d expect, his Planet Mu label became a home for breakcore whippersnappers like Venetian Snares and Shitmat, as well as new music by real-deal hardcore veterans like Producer, Hellfish and Bizzy B. Planet Mu also released an anthology of archival jungle by Remarc entitled Soundmurderer.