Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture

by Simon Reynolds

  The machinic, trance-inducing side of house exemplified by ‘Washing Machine’ took another turn in 1987, when jack tracks evolved into ‘acid tracks’: a style defined by a mindwarping bass sound that originated from a specific piece of equipment, the Roland TB 303 Bassline. The Roland 303 was originally put on the market in 1983 as a bass-line synthesizer designed to partner the Roland 606 drum machine, and targeted at guitarists who wanted basslines to jam off. It was singularly unsuited for this purpose, and by 1985 Roland ceased manufacturing the machine. But a few Italian disco producers discovered the 303’s potential for weird Moroder-esque sounds: Alexander Robotnik’s ‘Les Problemes D’Amour’, released in 1983, was a huge ‘progressive’ hit in Chicago, selling around twelve thousand import copies. A few years later, house producers, already enamoured of Roland drum machines and synths, started messing around with the 303, discovering applications that the manufacturers had never imagined.

  The 303 is a slim silver box with a one-octave keyboard (but four octave range), plus six knobs which control parameters like ‘decay’, ‘accent’, ‘resonance’, ‘tuning’, ‘envelope modulation’, and ‘cut off frequency’. Having programmed a bass-riff on the keyboard, you tweak the knobs to modulate the pitch, accent, and other parameters of each individual note in the bassline. The result is bass patterns that are as complex and trippy as a computer fractal, riddled with wriggly nuances and glissandi, curlicues and whorls.

  In early 1988, Farley ‘Jackmaster’ Funk told me the 303 was ‘an obsolete, old-fashioned piece of technology that no one had ever thought of using that way before’. At the time, this reminded me of the then indie-rock vogue for the cheesily overstated effects of late sixties and early seventies guitar pedals. As Dinosaur Jr’s J. Mascis put it, these quaint effects units appealed because they provided ‘harsh-eties rather than subleties’. Similarly, the 303 and similar analogue synthesizers were rediscovered by house artists because their gauchely moderne sounds, once laughable, suddenly seemed otherworldly and futuristic again. They were also cheap, as musicians and recording studios sold them to make space for the new digital synths and samplers.

  The first Chicago 303 track, Phuture’s ‘Acid Tracks’, was released in 1987 but recorded a couple of years earlier. DJ Pierre, Spanky and Herb Jackson were messing around with a 303, hoping to get a conventional bassline for a Spanky rhythm track. ‘The acid squiggle was there to start with,’ Pierre has said. ‘The machine already had that crazy acid sound in it that you were supposed to erase and put your own in, because it was just some MIDI gerbil. But we liked it.’ Marshall Jefferson, who produced the track, confirmed the accidental origins of this revolutionary house genre, telling David Toop: ‘“Acid Tracks” wasn’t pre-programmed, man . . . DJ Pierre, he was over and he was just messing with this thing and he came up with that pattern, man . . . So we were listening to it, getting drunk man. “Hey, this is kinda hot, man. This is a great mood, man. Let’s put it out. What the fuck?”’

  Eleven minutes and seventeen seconds long, ‘Acid Tracks’ is just a drum track and endless variations on that bass-sound: somewhere between a faecal squelch and a neurotic whinny, between the bubbling of volcanic mud and the primordial low-end drone of a didgeridoo. The 303 bassline is a paradox: it’s an amnesiac hook, totally compelling as you listen, but hard to memorize or reproduce after the event, either as pattern or timbre. Its effect is mental dislocation; after the mania for acid tunes went into overdrive, Marshall Jefferson complained that artists weren’t using the 303 to create moods but for ‘disrupting thought patterns’.

  Having recorded the session, Pierre, Jefferson and Co gave a tape to Ron Hardy. The track became such a sensation at The Music Box that it was known as Ron Hardy’s Acid Trax, a reference to the rumour that the club’s intense, flipped out vibe was caused by the promoters’ putting LSD in the water supply. Subsequently, acid producers have striven to distance the music from hallucinogenics. In early 1988, Tyree told me, ‘It has nothing to do with drugs, it’s just a name that fits because the music’s crazy, it’s weird and wired. But it affects you like a drug, it takes you over. People go into a trance, they just lose it! It makes everything seem so fast, it’s like an upper.’ Another story circulating by mid-1988, and probably intended as a whitewash, was that ‘acid’ came from ‘acid burn’, Chicago slang for ripping somebody off, and specifically, for sampling somebody else’s sound. But since sampling didn’t play a major role in acid house, this was never really plausible.

  Wary of seeming to condone drug use, Phuture liked to point to the anti-cocaine song on the flipside of ‘Acid Tracks’. In some ways even more eerily brilliant than ‘Acid Tracks’, ‘Your Only Friend’ personifies the drug as a robot-voiced Slavemaster, who introduces himself at the start with the words – ‘This is Cocaine speaking’ – then proceeds to relate just how far he’ll debase you: ‘I’ll make you lie for me / I’ll make you die for me / In the end, I’ll be your only friend.’ In the background, ectoplasmic wisps of hideously fey, enfeebled falsetto moan and whimper wordlessly, representing the addict languishing in the throes of withdrawal.

  ‘Your Only Friend’ is one of a number of tracks of this era that have the disorientation and sinister, fixated quality of acid house, without actually employing a Roland 303. The It’s ‘Donnie’, a collaboration between Larry Heard and vocalist Harry Dennis, is the fever-dream of a love-junkie; Dennis’s stuttering vocals sound like he’s wracked by spasms and deep-body shudders. The lyrics present a fantastically melodramatic scenario of abandonment and betrayal, a girl called Donnie having run off with another man despite all the diamond rings, furs and Cadillacs he showered upon her; ‘I can’t quite understand’, gibbers the singer, disorientated by his dejection. By the end, Dennis is commiserating with a double-tracked doppelganger of himself, who’s even more aggrieved: ‘She ain’t even given me a chance to give her what I wanted to give her.’ Then there was Sleezy D’s ‘I’ve Lost Control’, whose creator Marshall Jefferson has said he was trying to achieve a mood similar to old Black Sabbath or Led Zeppelin records. Consisting of nothing but simmering percussion, stray smears of flanged sound, and deranged screams, groans and madman’s laughter from the reverberant recesses of the mix-scape, ‘I’ve Lost Control’ does indeed sound a bit like the famous ‘ambient’ mid-section of ‘Whole Lotta Love’, where Robert Plant writhes in orgasmic agony. And the metallic, man-machine vocal, impassively intoning ‘I’m losing it . . . I’ve lost it’, also recalls Sabbath’s ‘Iron Man’. The Sleezy D persona sounds like his subjectivity is literally disintegrating in the acid maelstrom.

  ‘I’ve Lost Control’ and ‘Donnie’ got carried along by the après Phuture deluge of 303-based acid tracks: Laurent X’s ‘Machines’, Armando’s ‘Land of Confusion’, Mike Dunn’s ‘Magic Feet’, Bam Bam’s ‘Where’s Your Child?’, Fast Eddie’s ‘Acid Thunder’, and scores more. Adonis and The Endless Poker’s ‘Poke It’ features a series of terse injunctions – ‘poke it’, ‘house you’, ‘work’ – so distorted they sound like a dog barking, which are offset by real canine woofs.

  Ironically, it was the genre’s pioneer, DJ Pierre who – after recording a few more acid anthems like Pierre’s Pfantasy Club’s ‘Dream Girl’ and ‘Fantasy Girl’ – was one of the first to abandon the sound. Explaining his shift away from ‘tracks’ to songs, he said ‘It’s kinda soul-less . . . There’s no emotion that goes with it apart from jumping up and down and making you want to dance.’ In fact there is an emotion to acid house, it’s just that it’s one that seems to stem from some infra-human domain – the passion of sub-atomic particles, the siren-song of entropy, an ‘Om’ emanating from the belly of Mother Earth.

  Although the acid fad petered out by 1989, the Roland 303 has endured, securing a permanent place in the arsenal of house and techno producers, and enjoying periodic revivals. In some ways, it’s like the wah-wah guitar: instantly recognizable, yet capable of infinite variations and adaptations, and forever drifting in and out
of fashion.

  Paradise Lost

  By 1988, house music was having a massive impact in Britain and Europe, but Chicago itself was in decline. The previous year, the authorities had begun to crack down on the house scene, with the police banning after-hours parties and witholding late-night licences from clubs. WBMX went off the air in 1988, and sales of house records slowed, eventually dwindling down to an average of 1500 copies, a mere tenth of sales at Chicago’s peak. Many of the scene’s prime movers became inactive, disillusioned by bad deals. Others spent most of their time in Europe, where financial prospects were better. Some left town for good. Frankie Knuckles moved back to New York. And DJ Pierre moved to New Jersey in 1990, and became a major exponent of New York’s song-oriented deep house sound, ‘garage’.

  Garage’s roots go back to New York’s early seventies disco underground. Mostly gay black and gay Hispanic, this scene characterized by a bacchanalian fervour was fuelled by acid, amphetamine and the Ecstasy-like downer Quaalude. It was in this milieu – clubs like The Gallery, Salvation, Sanctuary, The Loft, The Ginza, and DJs like Francis Grosso, David Rodriguez, Steve D’Aquisto, Michael Cappello, David Mancuso – that Frankie Knuckles and his colleague Larry Levan learned the art of mixing. Garage is named in homage to the DJ-ing sensibility and sensurround ambience Levan developed at his legendary club The Paradise Garage, but as a style, it only really took shape after the club shut its doors in late 1987.

  The Paradise Garage opened in January 1977, and was named after its location: an indoor parking lot in SoHo. Like Chicago’s Warehouse, the Saturday night clientele was gay (the club’s Friday night was mixed straight and gay). Philly and Salsoul were the soundtrack, with the songs gospel-derived exhortations to freedom and fraternity creating a sort of pleasure-principled religious atmosphere. John Iozia described the Garage as both pagan (‘an anthropologist’s wet dream . . . tribal and totally anti-Western’) and ecclesiastical (the dancefloor was a fervent congregation of ‘space-age Baptists’). Just as regulars used to call The Gallery ‘Saturday Mass’, and Salvation was styled as a cathedral, so Garage veterans regarded the club as ‘their church’. The young Larry had in fact been an altar boy at an Episcopalian Church, while the Bozak DJ-mixer he used at the Garage was modelled on an audio-mixer that the manufacturer had originally developed for church sound-systems.

  Levan was one of the very first examples of the DJ-as-shaman, a techno-mystic who developed a science of total sound in order to create spiritual experiences for his followers. Working in tandem with engineer Richard Long, he custom-built the Garage’s sound-system, developing his own speakers and a special low-end intensive subwoofer known as Larry’s Horn. Later, during his all-night DJ-ing stints he would progressively upgrade the cartridges on his three turntables, so that the sensory experience would peak around 5 a.m. And during the week, he would spend hours adjusting the positioning of speakers and making sure the sensurround sound was physically overwhelming yet crystal clear. Garage veterans testify that the sheer sonic impact of the system seemed to wreak sub-molecular changes in your body.

  Alongside pioneering the DJ-as-shaman’s ‘technologies of ectsasy’, Levan was also an early DJ – producer. He remixed classics like Taana Gardner’s ‘Heartbeat’ and Class Action’s ‘Weekend’, and co-founded The Peech Boys with synth-player Michael deBenedictus and singer Bernard Fowler. The band’s ambient-tinged post-disco epics like ‘Don’t Make Me Wait’ and ‘Life Is Something Special’ are notable for their cavernous reverberance and dub-deep bass. Peech Boys were on the cutting edge of the early eighties New York electro-funk sound, alongside acts like D-Train, Vicky D, Rocker’s Revenge, Frances Joli and Sharon Redd, labels like West End and Prelude, and producers such as Arthur Baker, John Robie, Francois Kevorkian, and John ‘Jellybean’ Benitez.

  Another figure who played a key role in building a bridge between electro-funk and garage was Arthur Russell. An avant-garde composer and cellist who once drummed for Laurie Anderson and nearly became a member of Talking Heads, Russell experienced an epiphany at Siano’s Gallery, where he was struck by the parallels between disco repetition and the New York downtown minimalism of Philip Glass et al, and was overwhelmed by the immersive quality of music transmitted over a gigantic sound-system. Thereafter his career straddled two sides of New York’s downtown: avant-garde minimalism and disco-funk. Russell’s 1980 Loose Joints track ‘Is It All Over My Face’ was a Paradise Garage favourite. In 1982, he co-founded the Sleeping Bag label with Will Socolov, and released the surrealistic and dub-spacious ‘Go Bang #5’ as Dinosaur L. Infatuated with the ocean (he sometimes used the tag Killer Whale as a writing credit, and as Indian Ocean, he released brilliant proto-house tracks like ‘Schoolbells’ and ‘Treehouse’), Russell was obsessed with echo. His major complaint about most dancefloor fodder was its ‘dryness’ (its lack of reverb), and he recorded an album of cello-and-slurred-vocal ballads called The World of Echo. But his all-time masterpiece of oceanic mysticism was the polyrhythmically perverse ‘Let’s Go Swimming’.

  If one word could sum up the garage aesthetic, it’s ‘deep’; hence tracks like Hardrive’s ‘Deep Inside’, and band names like Deep Dish. ‘Deep’ captures the most progressive aspect of garage (its immersive, dub-inflected production) but also its traditionalism (its fetish for songs and classy diva vocals, its allegiance to soul and R & B, its aura of adult-oriented maturity). Of all the post-house, post-techno styles, garage places the most premium on conventional notions of musicality. Garage has little truck with the rhetoric of futurism; samplers and synthesizers are used for economic reasons, as a way of emulating the opulent production values and sumptuous orchestral arrangements of Philly, Salsoul and classic disco.

  After the Garage’s demise in late 1987 and Larry Levan’s decline into drug abuse and ill-health, the spirit of garage was preserved at clubs like The Sound Factory, Better Days and Zanzibar, by DJs like Junior Vasquez, Bruce Forrest, Tee Scott, and Tony Humphries. In the nineties, DJ – producers like Vasquez, Masters At Work, Roger Sanchez, David Morales, Benji Candelario, Danny Tenaglia, Erick Morillo and Armand Van Helden kept the flame alive. In Britain, garage thrived as a kind of back-to-basics scene for sophisticates who’d either outgrown rave or had always recoiled aghast from its juvenile rowdyism. In South London, the Ministry of Sound modelled itself on the Paradise Garage, creating an ambience of upwardly mobile exclusivity and priding itself on having the best sound-system in the world (a claim that has not gone undisputed).

  In the late eighties, the two labels that did most to define the nascent garage sound were Nu Groove and Strictly Rhythm. Started in August 1988 by Frank and Karen Mendez (respectively an ex-DJ and a music researcher on radio station Hot 103), Nu Groove’s slinky, jazz-inflected house was infused with a subtle artiness and an absurdist sense of humour, reflected in the band names and song titles: NY Housin’ Authority’s ‘The Projects’ and its sequel ‘The Apartments’, Lake Eerie’s ‘Sex 4 Daze’. Many important New York house producers recorded for Nu Groove: Lenny Dee and Victor Simonelli (as Critical Rhythm), Joey Beltram (as Code 6 and Lost Entity), Ronnie and Rheji Burrell, Kenny Gonzalez.

  Strictly Rhythm was where DJ Pierre ended up working as an A & R director and developed his ‘fractal’ Wild Pitch production style – based around tweaking EQ levels, using filtering effects and constantly adjusting levels in the mix – as heard on classics like Photon Inc’s ‘Generate Power’ and Phuture’s ‘Rise From Your Grave’. With its sultry percussion, skipping, syncopated snares and surging, butt-coercive basslines, the Strictly Rhythm sound – as shaped by producers like Roger Sanchez and Kenny ‘Dope’ Gonzalez & ‘Little’ Louie Vega – was more hard driving and feverish than Nu Groove’s (whose tracks were often so refined sounding they verged on pent-house muzak). Early Strictly Rhythm is also notable for the brimming, aqueous production on tracks like House 2 House’s ‘Hypnotize Me (Trance Mix)’, all gulf-stream currents of blood-temperature synth and bubble trails of mermaid-diva vo
cal. The atmosphere on ‘Hypnotize Me’ and similar tracks like After Hours’ ‘Waterfalls (3 a.m. Mix)’ is condensation-stippled post-coital languor, a balmy plateau of serene sensuality. Combined with the humidity of a club environment, the effect is subaquatic or intra-uterine.

  Working together as Masters At Work and Sole Fusion, and separately under a plethora of pseudonyms, Kenny ‘Dope’ Gonzalez and ‘Little’ Louie Vega went on to become probably the most famous of the New York house production teams. The Masters of Work name was a gift from Todd Terry, who’d used it for his early tracks ‘Alright Alright’ and ‘Dum Dum Cry’. Terry is most famous for developing a strain of New York ‘hard house’ that was far tougher and rawer than garage. Instead of symphonic disco, this sound was rooted in electro, old skool hip hop and the brash, crashing electro-funk style known as Latin Freestyle.

  Alongside Terry, the pioneers of this New York hardcore house style were Nitro Deluxe. Their 1987 track ‘This Brutal House’ had a huge impact in Britain, and eventually made the Top Thirty in early 1988 as a remix, ‘Let’s Get Brutal’. Glassy and glacial, ‘This Brutal House’ is the missing link between the mid-eighties New York electro of Man Parrish and the early nineties British rave style ‘bleep-and-bass’. The track is a vast drumscape of seething Latin percussion and distant snare-crashes on the horizon of the mix, underpinned by sub-bass that has the floor juddering impact of dub reggae. The only element that connects ‘This Brutal House’ to the sounds coming out of Chicago is the eerie vocal effects: a human cry is played on the sampling keyboard like a jittery trumpet ostinato, then arpeggiated into what sounds like Tweety Bird singing scat. Nitro Deluxe’s follow-up ‘On A Mission’ is even more despotic in its vivisection of the human voice. The ‘Say Your Love’ mix puts the word ‘say’ through a digital mangler, shattering it into a pandemonium of pitch-bent whimpers, hiccups, bleats and oinks; the ‘Closet Mission’ mix multitracks and varispeeds the syllable into a cyclonic swirl of phoneme-particles that sounds like an aviary on fire, then rapid-fires a stream of 94 r.p.m. micro-syllables like electrons from a cathode ray tube.