Every Man is all sun-ripened, meandering lassitude and undulant dub-sway tempos. ‘Honey’ captures a halcyon ‘moment in love’ and loops it for eternity; long-lost AOR singer Judy Tzuke murmurs ‘need you tonight’ (sampled from her 1979 one-hit wonder ‘Stay With Me Til Dawn’), a flute flickers and darts like a kingfisher and a violin tugs at the heart-strings. My affection for this gorgeous song was only slightly diminished when I discovered that the wistful acoustic-guitar and bass riff that constitutes the groove is actually sampled from ‘Muskrat Love’ by dismal soft-rock band America – yet more evidence of Ultramarine’s seventies rehabilitation project, which extended to The Eagles, Joni Mitchell and Mike Oldfield’s Hergest Ridge.
‘Skyclad’ is another Every Man highpoint: over jazz-funk slap bass, synth-blips reel and twinkle like a clear night-sky, inducing a sublime sensation of ‘intimate immensity’, of being swathed in the Milky Way. ‘We are a bit mystical,’ Ian Cooper admitted, ‘but not in a way we could define. It’s more like we’re into the heights that can be attained through simple pleasures, such as listening to music or looking at a particular landscape that means something to you.’ Every Man is littered with samples testifying to this creed of mystical materialism and spiritual hedonism. ‘Weird Gear’ has Kevin Ayers declaring ‘everyone is high until something makes them blue’, while ‘Stella’ pivots around a woman explaining how dance helped her to shed cumbersome mental baggage and live in the fullness of the here-and-now by finding ‘that emptiness where I can begin again’.
Like the early nineties positivity bands, the new chill-out music often verged on New Age affirmation therapy. (In fact, the samples in ‘Stella’ come from a Channel Four programme on New Age culture.) One of the most popular and prolific providers for chill-out DJs, Pete Namlook, had actually started out in the New Age band Romantic Warrior. Through his Frankfurt label Fax, Namlook churned out CDs – solo and in collaboration with the likes of Mixmaster Morris, Dr Atmo and Richie Hawtin – at the rate of two a week. All lambent horizons of celestial synth, psalmic melodies and wordless seraphim-on-high harmonies, 1993 albums like Silence and Air transformed your living room into a sacro-sanctuary of sensuously spiritual sound. At his best, Namlook’s project resembled a digital update of ‘chamber jazz’ label ECM and their quest for ‘the most beautiful sound next to silence’. But after a while the hushed solemnity of tracks like ‘Spiritual Invocation’ and ‘Sweet Angels’ starts to feel as piously protracted as a church service, and the ‘welcome to the temple of sound, please take off your dancing shoes’ vibe gives you itchy feet. And just as New Age labels like Windham Hill imitated ECM’s distinctive cathedral-high production and cover images of barren tundra, desolate seascapes et al, similarly après Namlook came le deluge of pseudo-spiritual sopors passing themselves off as ambient techno.
Ambient Fear
Just as chill-out music was getting too flotation-tank comfy, Aphex Twin returned to the fray in early 1994 and took the concept of ambient techno on a sharp bend to the sinister. Breaking with the then dominant notion of the ambient album as a capsule of pastoral tranquillity, Selected Ambient Works Volume II returned to Brian Eno’s original neutral definition in the sleevenotes of On Land, where he envisioned ambience simply as ‘environmental music’.
Probably the best of Eno’s ambient series, certainly the most uncanny, On Land involved aural recreations of childhood memories of specific places. Richard James turned to dreamscapes for inspiration. Around 70 per cent of Selected Ambient Works Volume II (a triple LP/ double CD which James originally planned as a quintuple album) was created using self-taught ‘lucid dreaming’ techniques. ‘I’ve been able to control my dreams since I was a kid,’ James boasted. ‘Just before I started work on the album I tried experimenting with the idea of dreaming about recording tracks. The main problem is remembering what I’ve dreamt about. Melodies are easy, but the actual sounds can be a little more difficult. Sometimes I sleep in the studio so that I can start work as soon as I wake up and there’s less of chance of forgetting anything.’
James’s haunting forays into dreamspace bore little resemblance to the hackneyed halcyon imagery purveyed by most ambient techno. Instead of songs, Volume II confronted the listener with apparitions, miasmas of ear-confounding ectoplasm that wove an appalling enchantment. Instead of titles, tracks were identified by pictograms: photographs of fabrics, metal surfaces, detritus, and so forth. The music itself was just as cryptic in its material-ist focus on timbre and texture. Track no. 1/Disc no. 1 is a trompe l’oreille lattice of glassy chimes and single phonemes of female vocal, which are looped, echoed and braided. The effect is as disorientating as it is graceful, like an acrobat gyrating in a zero-gravity hall-of-mirrors. Instead of ambient techno’s fatuous gestures at the cosmic, James seems to focus on the microcosmos: Volume II is full of compositions that instil an odd mixture of awe and dread, as though you’re peering through a microscope at the impossibly alien yet horribly intimate processes – cell-division, the DNA helix – that constitute our biological reality.
With dance beats rarer than hen’s teeth, Volume II makes it predecessor seem almost boppy. James foregoes techno’s kinetic imperatives for a petrified and petrifying beauty: a good subtitle for the album would be ‘The Secret Life of Minerals’. Melody is mostly shunned in favour of percussive/harmonic chimes and amorphous drones. On Track no. 4/Disc no. 1, a featureless edifice of dread gradually takes shape amidst a pall of mist; Track no. 10/Disc no. 1 has the deadly opalescent allure of the glow-worm’s web, down whose hollow filaments the luminous larvae glide towards their fatal trysts with trapped insects. There are only a handful of lapses into straight-forward beauty. Track no. 3/Disc no. 1 recalls the devotional music of minimalist neo-classical composers like Arvo Part: its restrained grandeur creates a paradoxical effect, a sort of thunderous hush. Track no. 7/Disc no. 1 makes me think of Holst’s ‘Neptune, the Mystic’ from The Planets, evoking the same image of a skater gliding over a lake of frozen methane. And Track no. 8/Disc no. 2 is like ‘tomorrow’s nostalgia today’, a Hovis Ad for the mid-twenty-first century: ‘Eee, it were grand back in t’1990s.’
Most of Volume II has more in common with the techniques of late twentieth-century avant-classical composers like Ligeti, Berio, Xenakis and Stockhausen. James talked of devising his own tunings and scales, of exploring the ‘infinite number of notes between C and C sharp’ and getting down ‘to ultra-pure frequencies and sine waves’. Needless to say, many of his fans were alienated by these subdued and sombre sound-paintings. As audacious and magnificent as the album is, it simply isn’t as hospitable a record as its predecessor. Selected Ambient Works 85 – 92 infuses everyday life with a perpetual first flush of spring; I for one had listened to that album twice a day for several months.
But Aphex Twin’s shift towards ambient noir did win him admirers in the hermetic realm of isolationist music, a loose confederation of experimental outfits like Thomas Koner and :zoviet*france, and lapsed rockers like Main, who’d abandoned riffs and rhythm in favour of drones and dirgescapes. Echoing Main’s Robert Hampson, Richard James enthused to The Face about hanging out in power stations: ‘If you just stand in the middle of a really massive one, you get a really weird presence and you’ve got that hum . . . That’s totally dreamlike for me . . . just like a right strange dimension.’
Texturology
Selected Ambient Works Volume II represented a particularly focused and uncompromising investigation of an area that had rapidly become the defining obsession of electronic listening music: sound-in-itself. Sometimes these were ‘found sounds’ from the environment, or drastically processed samples from records, TV and other media. And sometimes they were timbres immanent within antiquated analogue synthesizers. Synaesthesia – the confusion of the senses – was a common aesthetic goal, with producers striving to generate timbres and textures so tantalizing you want to touch or taste them. Hence Beaumont Hannant’s series of ‘Tastes and Textures’ EPs and album Texturology.
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bsp; Some of the best of the new breed of texturologists were Aphex Twin associates: Mike Paradinas of μ-Ziq released his early records through Richard James’s label Rephlex, Luke Vibert of Wagon Christ was a friend from Cornwall, and Tom Middleton of Global Communications /Reload had once been the other Twin, having worked on the Analogue Bubblebath EP. For the Reload album A Collection of Short Stories, he and partner Mark Pritchard visited factories with a DAT recorder in hand, sampling real-world sonorities and then transforming them into percussion. Middleton told The Wire: ‘It’s all about science . . . the science of manipulating eclectic sounds, recycling sounds and bringing them up to date, or taking them into the future.’
Where the Reload material has the industrial-tinge of Aphex Twin’s harsher side, Global Communication is more about ‘soul-nutrifying sounds’. In the sleeve-notes of the debut Global album 76:14, the duo invites listeners to send in ‘paintings, photographs, poetry, sculpture, recipes and aromas’, while in Urb magazine Middleton urged: ‘You have five senses – don’t forget them. The world out there is a wealth of colors, sounds, things to eat, things to smell.’ In addition to this interest in the synaesthetic and the sensuous, Middleton and Pritchard set great store in sensitivity. 76 :14 is suffused with a dewey-eyed idealism and emotionalism that at times verges on the frankly moist. But this impulse to tug at the heart-strings did produce one all-time ambient techno classic in the nearly fifteen minute long ‘Ob-Selon MiNos’. The track is based around a tick-tocking grandfather clock, heartquakes of slow-mo bass, angelic sighs, and a plangent chime-melody as idyllic and iridescent as dewdrops on a cobweb. The soundscape is so smudged with reverb it’s like you’re hearing it through ears blurry with tears. Which is possibly how the track was recorded: inspired by Middleton’s first funeral, ‘Ob-Selon’ was a learning exercise in grief. ‘I’d never been to a funeral, and I didn’t know how to react, so I held back emotion,’ he told Alternative Press. ‘This [track] was an outlet of what I was feeling.’
Texturology alone does not make for music (or at least music that appeals to more than a handful of stern vanguardists). What is required is a mode of organizing disparate textures and timbres into an attractive or compelling arrangement. One model of the textured groovescape was seventies fusion: players like Joe Zawinul and Herbie Hancock had been early synthesizer pioneers. Global Communication named one EP ‘Maiden Voyage’ in tribute to Hancock, while the best tracks on Bandulu’s Guidance sounded like jazz-techno, as if Zawinul had somehow ended up band-leader of Tangerine Dream instead of Weather Report. The supple rhythms and musky, aromatic synth-swirls of ‘Tribal Reign’ open up your senses like a night in a rainforest; the cloud-nebula whorls and fractal eddies of tone-colour are like Time-Lapse photography of the Milky Way, with each of the sixteen frames per second capturing a millennium.
Minimalist and systems-music composers like Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Philip Glass and Michael Nyman offered another prototype for electronica: the ‘cellular’ construction of complex tapestries of sound by the repetition and interweaving of simple melodic units. On Orbital’s second, eponymous album, ‘Halcyon + On + On’ takes the wordless, ‘la di da la di dee’ vocal hook from Opus III’s New Age House anthem ‘It’s A Fine Day’, and modulates it on the sampling keyboard – reversing and chopping it up, then resequencing it into a series of overlapping and intertwined loops. Singer Kirsty Hawkshaw’s tremulous euphoria is swollen into the full-blown mystic bliss of Saint Theresa; her gasps and exhalations interlace to form a nine-minute locked groove of almost unendurable rapture. The sound of a cup of joy overflowing, ‘Halcyon + On + On’ would seem to be an obvious Ecstasy anthem, but in fact it was inspired by the Valium-like chemical Halcion, and was far from a celebration. The Hartnolls’ mother had taken the tranquillizer for several years, and suffered from its manifold side-effects.
In ‘Halcyon’, it’s the combination of texture (the breathy ‘grain’ and seraphic glow of Kirsty’s voice) and textile (the intricate warp-and-weft of melody and harmony Orbital achieve by multitracking fragments of the original Opus III chorus) that’s so breathtaking. Without patterning-skills or a gift for groove, though, texturology is just as capable as any musical methodology of propelling its practioners on a voyage to the innermost reaches of their own arseholes. If any proof is needed, just listen to the work, and words, of The Future Sound Of London.
From their immodest moniker to their fervent anti-dance stance, FSOL represent the unsightly flowering of ‘the new progressive rock’ always latent within the concept of electronic listening music. Okay, credit where credit’s due: in their early incarnation as Humanoid, Brian Dougans and Gary Cobain created a propulsive slice of UK acieed-tekno with 1989’s ‘Stakker Humanoid’. And their other chart smash, FSOL’s ‘Papua New Guinea’ was a sumptuous, gorgeously emotional rave anthem; it sampled the sublime aria-like tones of mystic-diva Lisa Gerrard from Dead Can Dance, and even used a breakbeat. But when they turned their backs on the dancefloor (‘I see the term “dance” as really restrictive for us,’ sniffed Dougans) and dedicated themselves to concept albums, FSOL’s pop instincts withered.
In 1994, they released their second album, Lifeforms, a double-CD magnum opus. It’s a Daliesque frightmare of liquifacient forms, a pseudo-organic sample-scape congested with scrofulous sound-tendrils and slithery slime-shapes. Lifeforms is texturology run rife: holed up in their studio, venturing out only to forage for found sounds, Dougans and Cobain bring out all the masturbatory connotations of that techno stereotype ‘the knob-twiddler’. Each sampled source is treated, tinted and morphed until every last drop of ‘vibe’ or ‘aura’ is wrung out of it; the duo appear to have forgotten that the real art of sound-painting is knowing when to stop adding another layer or nuance. Like the computer-manipulated photo-montages on the sleeve and the globular shapes in FSOL videos, the music on Lifeforms combines the glossy garishness of hyper-realist painting with the varicose convolutions of Rococo.
With it vague conceptual nature and over-ornamented monumentalism, Lifeforms is digital progressive rock. Robert Fripp contributed ‘guitar textures’ for ‘Flak’; in an alarming echo of ELP and Deep Purple recording with symphony orchestras, Dougans and Cobain even attempted to do a classically scored version of ‘Eggshell’. FSOL had merely translated the prog ethos of ostentatious virtuosity into sampladelic terms: their great bugbear was recognizability in sampling. When The Wire played the duo ‘mystery tracks’ as a spur to aesthetic debate, FSOL poured scorn on a 1992 ’ardkore anthem by Sonz of A Loop Da Loop Era. ‘Deplorable era and a blind time,’ declared Cobain. ‘Anyone who managed to keep their head in that era and not do that sort of thing has benefited. I’m coming round to the [idea] that being obvious can be really beautiful if you do it well. But that’s a kind of obviousness I hate.’ Strangely, while Sonz tracks are fondly regarded as rave classics and producer Danny Breaks is a highly respected drum and bass auteur, nobody – not even the reviewers who hailed FSOL as sound-sculptors non-pareil – has much to say about Lifeforms these days. It’s ELP and King Crimson all over again.
Metronomic Underground
One evening in mid-1992, I checked out Knowledge, a ‘proper techno’ night run by DJs Colin Faver and Colin Dale at London’s SW1 club. I was immediately struck by the ascetic decor and the curiously sober frenzy of the mostly white-male audience (many sporting the shaven-haired ‘Slaphead’ look of the classic techno purist). Of course, nary a breakbeat was heard all night. (Lycra? Forget it.) Speaking to iD, Colin Dale explained the anti-hardcore agenda: ‘That’s why we started Knowledge – to show there was better music than the breakbeat stuff around.’
At Knowledge and similar clubs like Eurobeat 2000, Lost, Final Frontier, The Orbit, Pure and Deep Space the sounds you heard – purist techno, nouveau acid and hard trance from labels like Canada’s +8, Holland’s Djax-Up, Germany’s Tresor and Labworks – were dancefloor-oriented, body-coercive cousins of armchair techno. Despite its fierce physicality, these styles shared th
e same cerebral cast: the boy’s own aura of anal-retentive expertise, the vague, ill-defined conviction that something radical was at stake in this music. This was rave music purged of cheesy ravey-ness (the breakbeat, the sample, the riff-stab, the anthemic chorus, the E’d up sentimentality) and retooled for a student sensibility, that perennial class base for the ‘progressive’ since the late sixties.
Although the new purists paid lipservice to techno’s Black American origins, their sound was starkly European, stripped of Detroit’s jazzy inflections and Chicago’s gay disco sensuality. Instead the whitest, most Kraftwerk-derived aspects of Detroit techno were layered on top of the least funky element in Chicago house, the four-to-the-floor kick-drum. By the end of 1992, this whiter-than-white sound had evolved into Teutonic trance, a hybrid of Tangerine Dream’s cosmic rock and Giorgio Moroder’s Eurodisco, as purveyed by labels like MFS and Harthouse, artists like The Source, Hardfloor, Oliver Lieb, Age of Love, Cosmic Baby and Speedy J.
Where ambient techno is soundscape painting for immobile contemplation, trance is cinematic and kinetic; producers often describe their music in terms of ‘taking the listener on a journey’. Trance is trippy, in both the LSD and motorik senses of the word, evoking the frictionless trajectories of video-games, virtual reality or the ‘console cowboys’ hurtling through cyberspace in Neuromancer. Along with its cyberdelic futurism, trance also has a mystical streak, expressed in hippy-dippy titles like Paul Van Dyk’s ‘Visions Of Shiva’ and Trance Induction’s ‘New Age Heartcore’. ‘Trance’ evokes whirling dervishes, voodoo dancers, and other ritualized techniques for reaching altered states via hyperventilation, dizziness and exhaustion.
Harking back to the ‘purity’ of the pre-rave era, trance revived the acid house sound of 1987 – 8. Presaged by late 1991 tracks like Mundo Muzique’s ‘Acid Pandemonium’, the Roland 303 resurgence really exploded a year later with Hardfloor’s ‘Hardtrance Acperience’, which sold 30,000 in Britain alone. Where the original Chicago acid was ultra-minimalist, the new acieeed was maximalist: ‘Hardtrance’ assembles itself according to an additive logic, gradually layering up at least three 303 bass-pulses (writhing like sex-crazed pythons), Moroder-style Doppler effects, sequencer-riffs, and tier upon tier of percussion. A terrific tension is built up, but there’s no release, no climax.
Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture Page 26
