Some theorists of addiction argue that for certain borderline individuals, neurotic or emotionally damaged, taking drugs is a form of self-medication. This idea of ‘healing toxins’ is another theme running through hardcore, from Doc Scott’s ‘Surgery’ and ‘NHS’ EPs, through Praga Khan’s ‘Injected With A Poison’, to the Prodigy’s ‘Poison’, with its chant ‘I’ve got the poison / I’ve got the remedy’. Renegade physicians raiding the pharmacopoeia, hardcore ravers embarked upon a massive, uncontrolled psycho-social experiment, whose unconscious goal was perhaps to heal themselves, damaged products of a sick society. Grasping greedily for utopia right here, right now, they hurtled instead into a dystopian future.
Drowning in Love
In the utterly blissed hardcore of early 1992, you can hear darkness shadowing the swoony delirium. Take one of the scene’s most successful labels, Production House. There’s an aura of dangerously overwhelming bliss to tracks like Acen’s ‘Trip To the Moon Part One’, with its fizzy electronics and portentous orchestral fanfares (sampled from John Barry’s ‘Space March’ from the soundtrack to You Only Live Twice). What sounds like a classic E-rush exultation – ‘I can’t believe these feelings!!!’ – could easily be an expression of distrust, a distraught intimation of unreality.
Lurking within the effervescent ‘hyper-ness’ of Production House tracks like DMS’s ‘Love Overdose’ and ‘Mindwreck’ is a kind of death-wish. Appropriately enough, Acen’s other big smash of 1992, ‘Close Your Eyes’, samples Jim Morrison, the original death-obsessed Dionysian rock star. Mystic incantations from The Doors’ epic ‘Celebration of the Lizard’ – ‘forget your name . . . go insane’ – are sped up into a hilarious but eerie Munchkin squeak. ‘The Darkside’ remix of ‘Close Your Eyes’ adds the line ‘forget the world, forget the people’, fed through a hall-of-mirrors echo effect to conjure a bedlam of Morrison-ghosts. Two other samples – ‘I think I’m gonna’ and ‘OVERDOSE!’ – are concatenated to spell out the flirting-with-the-void vibe.
Even Baby D’s ‘Let Me Be Your Fantasy’ – Production House’s biggest smash, eventually making Number One in the Pop Charts when rereleased in 1994 – is veined with ambivalence. With its grand piano trills and bittersweet tenderness, ‘Fantasy’ is that seemingly impossible entity, a rave ballad. Its creator, Dyce, has described the track as a love song to the hardcore scene, to the spirit of loved-up-ness itself. Listen to the lyrics, and it becomes clear that the siren-like figure is actually Ecstasy ‘herself’ serenading the listener: ‘I’ll take you up to the highest high . . . Come and feel my energy . . . Come take a trip to my wonderland . . . I’ve got what it takes to make you mine.’
‘Fantasy”s manoeuvre – personifying MDMA as the seductive chanteuse Baby D – was a singular masterstroke. More common was the hardcore track that took the needy beseeching of the sampled soul-diva and separated it from its original flesh-and-blood referent, in order to create a love song to the drug. Foul Play’s ‘Finest Illusion’, a near-symphonic rush of pizzicato riffs and swoony cascades, is a classic example: if ‘you’re the finest I’ve ever known’ doesn’t refer to a particularly pure batch of MDMA, why else did the band title the track ‘Finest Illusion’?
Recording as 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Foul Play took this idea all the way into the twilight-zone with ‘Drowning In Her’. The track has all the languishing langour and desolate dejection of a torch song; its tremulous textures and dolorous, dislocated feel conjure a mood of paralysis and enervation. Blurry with reverb, the sampled vocal hook sounds like ‘drowning in love’ but is actually ‘drowning in her’: jouissance is associated with an alluring but ultimately asphyxiating femininity. Mid-track, there’s a sample of a single word, the horror-struck cry ‘how??!?’ This is taken from the spoken-word intro of 4 Hero’s 1990 classic ‘Mr Kirk’s Nightmare’ – itself sampled from Think’s 1971 hit ‘Once You Understand’, a cautionary tale about the generation gap – in which a policeman comes to a father’s house to tell him that his seventeen-year-old son Robert is dead. ‘Dead!!?! How??!?’ whimpers the aghast Mr Kirk, ‘He died of an overdose,’ says the officer. A classic example of rave music intertextuality, the sampled ‘how’ in ‘Drowning In Her’ triggers memories of ‘Mr Kirk’s Nighmare’, of all the rumours and scare stories surrounding Ecstasy. It reminds the raver that each time they take a tablet of dubious origin they are dicing with death; that to dance with Ecstasy is to embrace a femme fatale.
You Got Me Burnin’ Up
If anyone can claim to have invented dark-core, it’s 4 Hero. Two years after ‘Mr Kirk’s Nightmare’, the band returned to the subject of Ecstasy fatalities with 1992’s sick-joke concept EP, ‘Where’s The Boy’. The funereal-black sleeve depicts a coffin with a question mark on it: the tomb of the unknown raver. The four tracks on ‘Where’s The Boy’ trace out the theme of death by heatstroke, which in 1992 was first entering public consciousness as the explanation for a spate of E-related deaths. ‘Burning’ and ‘Cooking Up Yah Brain’ sound literally delirious. The sample-textures seem to ripple like a heat-haze of vapourized sweat, making me think of the Guardian’s description of one particular Ecstasy fatality caused by dehydration and overheating: after taking three E’s, a teenager ‘boiled alive in his own blood’. ‘Time To Get Ill’ samples the Beastie Boys to make a deadly pun that conflates ‘ill’ in the hip hop sense with the internal bleeding and major organ failure associated with severe heatstroke. The track sounds literally nauseous, all vomitous gurglings and migraine-like squeals. Finally, ‘Where’s The Boy (Trial By Ecstasy)’ reinvokes ‘Mr Kirk’s Nightmare’, with its dialogue between a policeman (‘You killed the boy, you didn’t just dream it?’) and a middle-aged man (‘yes!’)
4 Hero and other artists on their label, Reinforced – Rufige Cru, Doc Scott, Nebula II – pioneered the sound of darkness too: metallic beats, murky modulated-bass, hideously warped vocals, ectoplasmic smears of sample-texture.
Holed up in Reinforced’s HQ – studio, a claustrophobic loft in Dollis Hill, 4 Hero and Rufige’s Cru’s Goldie embarked on marathons of sampladelic research. ‘I remember one session . . . which lasted over three days,’ Goldie told The Mix’s Tim Barr in 1996. ‘We’d come up with mad ideas and then try to create them . . . We were sampling from ourselves, and then resampling, twisting sounds around and pushing them into all sorts of places.’ The resulting audio-grotesquerie, collected on fifteen DAT cassettes, offered a vast palette of sinister textures and mindbending effects for Reinforced artists to draw upon. As Goldie put it, ‘we kind of wrote the manual over those three days’.
Perhaps the most crucial component of Reinforced’s sonic arsenal was their mutant versions of the searing, snaking terror-riffs originally invented by Joey ‘Mentasm’ Beltram and the Belgians. The Beltram/ Belgian sound, says 4 Hero’s Dego McFarlane, ‘was like the punk rock of techno . . . Back in ’92, at clubs like AWOL, it was near enough slam-dancing and shit, people got very rowdy in those days.’ Reinforced’s roster took the ‘mentasm stab’ to new intensities of death-ray malignancy. On Nasty Habits’ ‘Here Comes The Drumz’, the riff morphs like the ‘liquid metal’ plasma-flesh of the robo-assassin in Terminator 2.
The sound of dark-core is febrile, but it’s a cold fever. Take Rufige Cru tracks like ‘Darkrider’ and ‘Jim Skreech’: the staccato string-stabs, scuttling breaks and shivery textures always make me think of ‘crank bugs’, the speedfreak delusion that insects are crawling under your skin. These tracks are so riddled, so infested with fidgety nuance and frenetic detail, there’s never any point of repose or release: during the breakdown in ‘Darkrider’, midget-riffs keep revving away, like they’re straining at the leash, impatient for the beat to kick in again. So much unrest is programmed into dark era Reinforced tracks, you can’t just trance out, as with house or techno; you’re always on edge.
After the ‘Darkrider’ EP, Rufige Cru’s Goldie adopted the Metalheads moniker and released ‘Terminator’, a track whose anti-naturalistic rhyt
hms constituted a landmark in the evolution of breakbeat hardcore into a rhythmic psychedelia. Using pitch-shifting so that at the breakdowns the pitch of the drums veers vertiginously upwards, Goldie created a jagged time-lapse effect: the drums seem to speed up yet simultaneously stay in tempo. ‘Terminator’ sounds as predatorial and remorseless as its movie namesake, the killing man-machine played by Arnold Schwarzenegger. Sent back through time as the ambassador of the sentient War-Machine of the future, the Terminator is the incarnation of will-to-death. In a similarly dystopian cyberpunk vein, Nebula II breakbeat-techno classics ‘Peacemaker’ and ‘X-Plore H-Core’ sound as a coldhearted, inorganic and implacable as a Robocop-style cyborg suppressing some twenty-first century inner-city insurrection; synths sting like tear-gas, riffs jab and jolt like electric cattle-prods, android vocals admonish and castigate.
Journey from the Light
Nasty Habits’ ‘Here Comes The Drumz’ is the sound of inner-city turmoil; the track samples a snatch of Public Enemy rabble-rousing, with Chuck D declaiming the title phrase stagefront and Flavor Flav barging in to blurt ‘Confusion!!’ Produced by Doc Scott and released by Reinforced in late 1992, ‘Drumz’ is widely regarded as the dark track, the death-knell for happy-rave. What’s striking about ‘Drumz’ is how murky and muddy it sounds. It’s like all the treble frequencies have been stripped away, leaving just low-end turbulence: roiling drums, bass-pressure and ominous industrial drones.
Dance music theorist Will Straw argues that high-end sounds (strings, pianos, female voices) are coded as ‘feminine’, while low-end frequencies (drums and bass) are coded as ‘masculine’. Purging hardcore’s sped-up, Minnie Mouse vocals and melodramatic strings (the feminine/gay, pop/disco elements that made hardcore full of jouissance), darkside producers like Scott created masculinist/minimalist drum and bass, the stark sound of compulsion for compulsion’s sake. This was a connoisseur’s sound: ‘It was mostly DJs who were into dark,’ remembers Slipmatt, a populist DJ associated with the happier kind of hardcore, ‘all I heard from [the punters] was moans.’ Dark-core’s creators were motivated by a conscious drive to take hardcore back underground, by removing all the uplifting elements of commercial crossover rave. Disgusted by 1992’s chart-topping spate of squeaky-voiced, ‘toytown techno’, the scene’s inner circle decided to alienate all the ‘lightweights’ and see who was really down with the programme.
That, says Dego McFarlane, was the meaning behind 4 Hero’s ‘Journey From the Light’ EP; time to move out of the commercial limelight, away from ‘all the happy stuff’. On this EP, all the effects formerly used to create a heavenly aura in hardcore are subtly tweaked, bent to the sinister. On ‘The Elements’, an angel-choir of varispeeded divas shriek in agony, like they’re been demoted or downsized to hell; a door opens with an ominous creak, then slams; there’s a sample from Don McLean’s ‘American Pie’ – ‘this’ll be the day that I die’ – sped up to sound horribly fey and enfeebled. ‘The Power’ teems with ghost-shivers and maggoty, squirmy sounds. ‘In the Shadow (Sundown)’ features mentasmic riffs so astringent and abrasive, you feel like your cranium is being scoured out, every last sentient speck of grey matter expunged.
Later in 1993, 4 Hero’s ‘Golden Age’ EP and its attendant ‘Golden Age Remixes’ cloaked darker-than-thou themes with a new soft-core sensuality, at once mellow and morbid. ‘Better Place Becomes Reality’ jibes against rave’s pleasuredome of illusions (amazingly, 4 Hero are all straight-edge non-drug users), with its soundbite of a girl complaining ‘we need some reality reality, not this artificial reality’. A worm-holey miasma of stereo-panning and disorientating backwards sounds, ‘Students of the Future (Nostradamus: The Revelation – Rufige Cru Mix)’ pivots around the sample: ‘Nostradamus tells us the world will finally come to an end’. The Nostradamus obsession is part of 4 Hero’s interest in prophecy, futurology, science fiction and the loopier end of speculative science writing (books like Wrinkles In Time and Fingerprints of the Gods). Hip hop and rave culture (4 Hero are children of both) are rife with millenarianism, a feeling that history is accelerating towards some kind of culmination, whether it’s a consummation devoutly to be anticipated or conflagration desperately to be dreaded. ‘A lot of things point to it,’ says McFarlane. ‘If you’ve got any common sense, you look through history: the Dinosaurs came and went . . . How long is it until something like that happens? I’m not saying the world will just blow up like that, but something will happen. The whole human race will die.’
Voodoo Magic
‘In delusional insanity . . . we may have a diabolical mysticism, a sort of religious mysticism turned upside down. The same sense of ineffable importance in the smallest events, the same texts and words coming with new meanings, the same voices and visions and leadings and missions, the same controlling by extraneous powers; only this time the emotion is pessimistic: instead of consolations we have desolations; the meanings are dreadful; and the powers are enemies to life’
– William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
Drugs loosen the tyrannical grip of the ego, but they also let loose all the predatorial phantoms and noxious paranoia of the id. So in darkside, there was a strong vein of superstition, surfacing in titles like Doc Scott’s ‘Dark Angel’, Nebula II’s ‘Seance’, Rufige Cru’s ‘Ghosts of My Life’ and Megadrive’s ‘Demon’ (with its ‘fury of a demon possessed me’ sample). Sometimes the imagery was directly drawn from horror-movies, sometimes it was inspired by the residues of a Christian upbringing or by amateur forays into cosmology, angelology and mysticism. But often the pagan, animist imagery simply seems to have seeped up from the collective unconscious, the Dark Ages that we all carry around in our souls.
Boogie Times Tribe’s ‘The Dark Stranger’ is a classic example of the Hollywood horror-movie influence on darkside. Samples from a documentary on the making of the Francis Ford Coppola film Bram Stoker’s Dracula – Anthony Hopkins pontificating about ‘the dark side of all human nature’, Gary Oldman muttering about the shadowy intruder ‘who comes for you in the night’ – are juxtaposed with the acid-house era wail ‘girl, I’m starting to lose it’. Where the original version of ‘The Dark Stranger’ verges on corn with its over-use of these soundbites and its hammy-horror soundtrack motifs, the Q-Bass Remix makes the music itself carry the full burden of dread. The remix starts with a hideously voluptuous slow-mo intro of slimy, shuddery sounds, like a chill running up a spine. Then the baleful bass and off-kilter beat kick in: the bass oozing and quaking like death-knell dub, the rhythm dominated by a deeply unsettling, hyper-syncopated hi-hat, like a heart skipping a beat then pounding triple time. Such cardiac arrythmia is a symptom of amphetamine overdose.
The parallels between sampladelia and magic have not been lost on its exponents. With his contraptions and arcane, self-invented terminology, the hardcore producer lies somewhere between the mad scientist and the sorcerer with his potions, alembics and spells. Goldie has said that ‘rufige’ was his term for pop-cultural detritus (‘I was using fourth or fifth generation samples, just trash sound’), sonic scum that could nonetheless undergo alchemical transformation in the sampladelic crucible. The DJ too is often regarded as a shaman or dark magus. Rufige Cru’s ‘Darkrider’ is a tribute to Grooverider, worshipped to this day as a ‘god’ for his playing at the legendary dark-core club Rage. Consciously or not, the metaphor of the DJ as ‘rider’ echoes the voodoo notion that the trance-dancer is being ‘ridden’ by the gods, the loa. Grooverider’s role is equivalent to the hungan or high priest, whose drumming propels the voodoo acolytes into a frenzied state of oblivion. If this seems far-fetched, consider that in Haitian voudun, possession by the spirits occurs during the cassée, or dissonant percussive break. Dark-core is composed entirely of continuously looped breakbeats; in a sense, the whole music consists of cassées.
Darkside’s voodoo-imagery – 4 Hero’s ‘Make Yah See Spiders On The Wall (Voodoo Beats)’, Hyper-On Experience’s ‘Lords Of The Null Lines�
�� with its ‘fucking voodoo magic’ sample from Predator 2 – was just the latest efflorescence of a metaphor with a long history in house music, from A Guy Called Gerald’s ‘Voodoo Ray’ to D.H.S.’s ‘Holo-Voodoo’. This trope of being bewitched, turned into a zombi, pervaded acid house and jack tracks – from Phuture’s ‘Your Only Friend’ (which personified Cocaine as a robot-voiced slave-master) to Sleezy D’s ‘I’ve Lost Control’, on which a dehumanized vocal ascends through panic (‘I’m losing it’) to fatalism (‘I’ve lost it’).
In the mid-nineties, Chicago house returned to the anti-melodic minimalism and slave-to-the-rhythm metaphors of the acieed era. Green Velvet released a series of brilliant ‘dark’ house tracks with Sleezy D-style spoken-voice monologues, ‘I Want To Leave My Body’, ‘Conniption’, ‘Help Me’, ‘The Stalker (I’m Losing My Mind)’ and ‘Flash’. The latter pivots around a hilarious scenario that touched a nerve with rave kids in 1995. The voiceover escorts a gaggle of concerned parents through clubland, showing them what the ‘naughty little kiddies’ do for fun, like smoking joints or inhaling from big balloons of nitrous oxide (‘laughing gas, but this is no laughing matter’). The ‘Flash’ of the chorus is the parents’ cameras taking pictures of the miscreants in the murky club, but it sounds more like a drug ‘flash’: when the track lets rip a double-time battery of martial snares, it’s like a heart going into spasm after too much amyl.
Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture Page 28
