The truth is that there’s always been a dark side to rave culture; almost from the beginning, the ecstatic experience of dance-and-drugs was shadowed by anxiety. ‘Losing it’ is a blissful release from the prisonhouse of identity, but there comes a point at which the relief of ceding self-consciousness/self-control bleeds into a fear of being controlled (by a demonic Other: the malign logic of the drug/tech interface). Again and again, the moment of endarkenment recurs in rave subcultures; the nihilism latent in its drug-fuelled utopianism is always lurking, waiting to be hatched.
Darkness Lingers
By the autumn of 1993, the pioneers of dark-core were moving on. 4 Hero began their journey back towards the light. Rufige Cru/Metalheads’ Goldie disparaged the horde of Reinforced copyists, explaining: ‘ “Dark” came from the feeling of breakdown in society. It was winter, clubs were closing, the country was in decline. As an artist, I had to reflect it. But now all these kids have turned it into a joke, they think “dark” is about devil worship.’
Darkside paved the way for both the strands of breakbeat music that displaced it: the roisterous, ruffneck menace of jungle, and the densely-textured, ambient-tinged sound of drum and bass. With its premium on headfuck weirdness and disorientating effects, dark-core opened up a vital space for experimentation. In a way, ‘dark’, like the hip-hop term ‘ill’, is a sort of vernacular shorthand for ‘avant-garde’. Many darkside tracks sounded like the improbable return of early eighties avant-funk: PiL’s ‘Death Disco’, 23 Skidoo, Cabaret Voltaire, A Certain Ratio. Dark-core led directly to the artcore explosion of album artists like Goldie. At the same time, darkside’s baleful minimalism was a prequel to jungle’s gangsta militancy. Just like heavy metal kids signing up for Satan’s army, or rappers flirting with psychosis (Cypress Hill’s ‘Insane In The Brain’), aligning yourself with ‘the dark side’ is a way of proclaiming yourself one bad muthafucker.
EIGHT
THE FUTURE SOUND OF DETROIT
UNDERGROUND
RESISTANCE, +8, AND
CARL CRAIG
The first wave of Detroit techno reached its peak in 1988 – 9. The city was pumping, thanks to clubs like The Shelter and the legendary Music Institute, where Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson, Chez Damier and D. Wynn spun. At the same time, the Detroit sound was hugely popular on the European rave scene, where ‘Strings of Life’ achieved anthemic status in 1989 (several years after it was recorded) and Inner City were veritable pop stars.
Then it all went wrong. In early 1990, the Music Institute closed; Techno 2, the patchy sequel to Virgin’s Detroit techno compilation, was badly received; Kevin Saunderson pursued a misguided R & B direction on the second Inner City album. Juan Atkins, frustrated at Network (where the more commercial Inner City had priority), eventually took his album-oriented ambitions for Model 500 to the Belgian label R & S. Disillusioned by bad deals and the theft of keyboards and software by one of his protégés, Derrick May stopped making music altogether. To top it all, DJ-ing opportunities in Europe took the Belleville Three away from their hometown with increasing frequency, leaving something of a vacuum. Without the first-wave mentor figures to guide and push the scene, younger producers had to seize the initiative. In the vanguard of this ‘Future Sound of Detroit’ were two labels, two DJ – producer squads – Underground Resistance and +8.
Combat Dancin’
Where the Belleville Three had grown up on Kraftwerk and Parliament-Funkadelic, the new breed had eighties influences: electro, UK synth-pop, industrial and Euro Body Music. The result was a harsh Detroit hardcore that paralleled the brutalism of rave music in Britain, Belgium, Holland and Germany. The string-swept romanticism of Rythim Is Rythim was displaced in favour of riffs, industrial textures and a dystopian bleakness.
Underground Resistance’s attitude was hardcore in another respect: the music embodied a kind of abstract militancy. Presenting themselves as a sort of techno Public Enemy, Underground Resistance were dedicated to ‘fighting the power’ not just through rhetoric but through fostering their own autonomy. For several months before they released anything, Jeff Mills and Mike Banks planned and theorized their operation. ‘Most of the conversations were structural – whether we should have employees, what type of rules if any the label would run by,’ says Mills. ‘We looked at what other people in Detroit had done and where we thought they’d made mistakes . . . To make sure someone didn’t come in and take advantage of us, we didn’t do an exclusive distribution deal with one company. We contacted all the distributors ourselves, the retailers and DJs. We got engaged with what was really happening, without the middle man situation.’
Although Mills now insists that ‘there was nothing political’ about UR’s anti-corporate DIY stance, Mike Banks would probably beg to disagree. I say probably because ‘Mad Mike’ – a self-described ‘serious brother’, famous for his refusal to be pimped or ‘tap dance’ on cue – declined to be interviewed, arguing that the history of Detroit techno should be written by a Detroit native, and someone black. Just as UR struggled to retain business autonomy, similarly Banks seems determined to keep control of Detroit’s ‘subcultural capital’.
Underground Resistance presented themselves as a paramilitary unit, sonic guerrillas engaged in a war with ‘the programmers’ (the mainstream entertainment industry). According to Mills, this imagery was in large part the result of Banks’ ‘affection for the military . . . I think his brother and his father were career army.’ As well as the obvious parallel with Public Enemy and their Security of the First World militia, Underground Resistance’s ‘bacdafucup’ militancy also resembles the terrorist chic of Front 242, Belgian pioneers of Euro Body Music. According to Mills, in the late eighties, Detroit ‘went through a techno/industrial phase . . . with bands like Nitzer Ebb, Front 242, Meat Beat Manifesto . . .’ The stiff, punish-your-body beats and caustic electronic textures of EBM were also a crucial influence on the Belgian hardcore techno sound of the early nineties, which probably explains why UR’s early efforts sound so similar to those of Benelux acts like Meng Syndicate, 80 Aum and Incubus.
After debuting with a vocal house track featuring chanteuse Yolanda, Underground Resistance released the ‘Sonic EP’. Tracks like ‘Predator’ and ‘Elimination’ resemble target-seeking missiles, remorseless and implacable killing machines. Etched into the vinyl at the record’s centre are the first of a series of UR slogans: ‘to advance sonic is the key’, ‘the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few’. After the malignant-sounding ‘Waveform EP’ and ‘Gamma-Ray’, Underground Resistance upped the ante with a series of insurrectionary 1991 releases. On the label of the ‘Riot EP’, the ‘I’ in ‘RIOT’ is a drawing of a masked and sunglass-wearing UR trooper dressed in black, resembling a PLO hijacker. The music is a kind of sonic pun on the ambiguity of the word ‘riot’ – which can mean both unrestrained revelry or a mob uprising, just as ‘rave’ can mean both wild enthusiasm and maniacal rage. The title track pivots around the looped call-to-arms ‘now is the time’, background uproar that could be party-goers or a political rally, and a red-alert bleep like a B-movie computer set to self-destruct. ‘Panic’ features a Mayday-signal riff based on a pitchbent vocal sample that sounds like a mind-spasm, a twinge of trepidation, plus a rather weak rap that conjures a state of emergency and insurgency. ‘Rage’ is driven by a fuzz-blare riff that’s like Deep Purple’s ‘Smoke On The Water’ run backwards.
Etched into the outer rim of the 12-inch is the mysterious phrase: ‘The Fire In Us All’. What Underground Resistance seem to herald on ‘Riot’ and its sister 12-inch ‘Fuel For The Fire’ is a kind of Dionysian politics, a cult of orgiastic, unconstructive anger. If this was techno’s punk-rock, the parallels were less with the rabble-rousing but ultimately goodhearted Clash, and closer to the appetite-for-destruction throbbing inside Sex Pistols’ songs like ‘Anarchy In The UK’, or indeed songs by Detroit’s own proto-punk outfit, The Stooges, such as ‘Search and Destroy’ and ‘Raw Power’. Para
lleling Iggy Pop’s obsessions with electricity and amplification, his dream of becoming the conduit for anti-social/inhuman energies that override all the system’s circuit breakers, the label of ‘Riot’ declares: ‘all energy arranged, produced and mixed by Underground Resistance’.
After ‘Fuel For The Fire’ (a 12-inch which formed a double-pack with ‘Riot’) UR released ‘Sonic Destroyer’ under the alter-ego X-101. The flipside, ‘G-Force’, saw UR exploring the non-musical possibilities of vinyl as a medium. The tracks’ grooves are strangely patterned, bunched together normally then separating out into spirals, so that the stylus moves across the record in alarming fast-slow lunges that parallel the jagged time-lapse effect of ‘G-Force’ (which sounds like tremendous pressures buckling and distorting the human frame). ‘We thought that if we could physically alter how the record works, it kind of sends out a signal that things aren’t always the way they’re supposed to be, or they appear to be,’ says Jeff Mills. ‘That maybe you should pay more attention to what you’re buying or what you’re listening to.’
As well as triggering ideas and confounding expectations, these ‘gimmicks’ also made the records into fetish objects, and added to the mystique of the band, who were by now a cult in Europe. Indeed, the music Underground Resistance were making at their 1991 – 2 peak was very much in synch with the reigning Euro-hardcore sound. ‘Sonic Destroyer’ features a classic rave-style Morse Code oscillator-riff, plus gastro-enteric bass-blasts like someone voiding their bowels in panic. ‘Fury’ is similar to T99’s ‘Belgian hoover’ classic ‘Anasthasia’, heavy me(n)tal techno with Carmina Burana-like choral stabs. The only difference is that the fuel for UR’s (f)ire isn’t amphetamine psychosis but their peculiar brand of non-specific belligerence (hence the vague album title Revolution For Change).
This early, bellicose phase of Underground Resistance peaked with the awesome ‘Death Star’, which sounds like a gigantic, demonic glitterball, flashing off death-rays in every direction, pulverizing planets and vaporizing interstellar armadas. This time the slogan carved into the vinyl is ‘Unit Deathstar Mission – Eliminate Anti-Underground Forces’, making explicit the Star Wars-derived allegory of UR as Jedi Knights resisting the Evil Empire of the music industry; UR as gnostic warrior-priests who can channel ‘The Force’ (as one of the B-side tracks is titled). Shortly after ‘Death Star’ came ‘Message To the Majors’, an even more blatant two-finger salute to the record companies then signing up techno acts in anticipation of rave’s breakthrough in America.
In the summer of 1992, UR formed a sub-label called World Power Alliance and issued three one-sided singles, all pertaining to the Second World War. On the music-free side of each release was etched a lengthy and rather bombastic communiqué to the pan-global techno underground:. . . The Alliance is dedicated to the Advancement of the Human Race by Way of Sonic Experimentation . . . The W. P. A. was designed to bring the world’s minds together to combat the mediocre audio and visual programming being fed to the inhabitants of Earth, this programming is stagnating the minds of the people building a wall between races and world peace. The Wall must be destroyed, and it will Fall . . . By using the untapped energy potential of sound, the W. P. A. will smash the wall much the same as certain frequencies shatter glass. Brothers of the underground, transmit your tones and frequencies from all locations of this world and wreak havoc on the programmers. THIS IS WAR! Long Live The Underground.
The idea for the World Power Alliance emerged after the three members of UR – Mills, Banks and Rob Noise (Robert Hood) – had travelled outside Detroit. ‘We thought it would be interesting for each of us to devote a particular release to a particular country and their armed forces,’ says Mills. That two of the three ‘armed forces’ chosen belonged to Axis, rather than Allied, powers, is striking proof of the curiously apolitical and disinterested admiration UR had for military qualities like discipline, ruthlessness, realpolitik and subterfuge. Banks’ effort, ‘Kamikaze’, comes with label notes that extravagantly hail the death-bound Japanese divebombers: ‘With dedication unmatched in history, young men sacrifice their lives for something they believe in. With bravery like that one can never be beaten.’ The Jeff Mills’ composition is named ‘The Seawolf’ after the German U-boats that preyed on Allied merchant ships, and, breaking with traditional naval chivalry, gave no warning before attacking. ‘TERROR FROM BELOW’ is etched in the vinyl; the track sounds like a stalking sub aquatic hunter, with a Roland 303 pulse seeming to home in on its target like a periscope’s cross-hairs. Last in the series was Hood’s ‘Belgian Resistance’. Probably a tribute to Benelux hardcore, its label notes offered a bizarre fantasy of an ‘underground legion’ of anti-Nazi Belgians ‘breeding and waiting in the dark, battle scarred caverns, waiting for revenge’, decades after German surrender.
Knight of the Hunter
Underground Resistance the label wasn’t just an outlet for Banks’, Mills’ and Hood’s collective output as UR. They also released tracks by other second-wave Detroit artists, such as Drexciya (the sub-oceanic science fiction of EPs like ‘The Aquatic Invasion’ and ‘The Bubble Metropolis’), Scan 7 and Suburban Knight, aka James Pennington.
Born in 1965, Pennington was actually a first-wave Detroit techno producer; a room mate of Kevin Saunderson’s, he’d contributed to Inner City’s ‘Big Fun’, and his first two Suburban Knight singles came out on Derrick May’s Transmat label. Recorded in the mid-eighties but released only in 1990, Pennington’s second release via Transmat – ‘The Art of Stalking’ – launched him on an obsession that runs through all his Underground Resistance work: nocturnal predators.
A pioneering slice of Detroit darkside, ‘The Art of Stalking’ consists of little more than a high-pitched, pizzicato bassline and highly-strung drum-track. The track twitches with tiptoe-and-tenterhook trepidation, leaving it up to the listener whether to identify with the pursuer or the pursued. The inspiration came from Pennington’s fondness for American TV’s Discovery channel, and specifically a wildlife documentary about the plains of Africa which used night-vision camera to show ‘the lions killing gazelle, tigers just walking stealthily through the jungle then disappearing in seconds.’
Named after the word for ‘a creature who hunts by night’, Pennington’s debut for Underground Resistance was ‘Nocturbulous Behaviour’, a twilight-zone surge through dread-soaked streets. The credits read ‘mixed by the Ultimate Survivor’, making explicit the political subtext of Pennington’s fascination with night-vision: social Darwinism, the dog-eat-dog struggle of post-Fordist Detroit, with its apartheid-style ghost-townships and affluent white suburbs. Specifically, Pennington was inspired by the way the bat evolved radar to achieve an evolutionary edge, a topic he returned to with 1996’s ‘Echo Location’ (on the ‘By Night’ EP).
Another inspiration came from a German journalist who hailed Suburban Knight’s music as ‘an advancement of “metal tank”’. This imaginary genre – ‘metal tank’ – fired Pennington’s imagination because he was already obsessed with Germany, partly because of Kraftwerk and partly because of his grandfather’s Second World War stories. ‘Just the coldness,’ he free-associates, ‘Grey. Harshness. I thought Germany was like how it’s televisioned over here. A black-and-white country that’s been bombed to hell. And then these guys [Kraftwerk] came out of the rubble and made this electronic shit. That fascinated me. All the stuff that my grandfather was telling me, and the music that we were listening to from overseas, really came together as one whole picture.’
Taking a tangent away from this Teutonic terrordome of the mind’s eye, Pennington’s next outing for UR was one disc of the 1994 double-pack ‘Dark Energy’, an explicitly Afro-centric statement. Bearing the slogan ‘escape the chains on your music’ and a black-edged silhouette of the Dark Continent, the label revealed that the tracks were recorded in the Black Planet Studios (a homage to Public Enemy’s third album Fear of a Black Planet) and that ‘Strike Leader James (Suburban Night) Pennington’ was c
ommander in chief of these ‘sonic strikes against programming strongholds’.
On Pennington’s disc, the phosphorescent-sounding ‘Midnight Sunshine’ was inspired by his grandpa’s tales of anti-aircraft flares and by his own ‘infatuation with Playstation flight-simulation games’. ‘Mau Mau (The Spirit)’ was a tribute to the tribal guerrillas who harried white settlers in fifties Kenya. Pennington explains that the track is about how the Mau Mau ‘reigned over’ the European colonists, despite the latter’s technological superiority. With the Black Panthers’ inspired ‘Mind Of A Panther’ completing the tryptych, ‘Dark Energy’ as a whole was about ‘going back to my roots, man . . . my [curiosity about] never seeing my homeland. I can’t say I come from Somali Land, I don’t know. But I wanna get back there. It was great back in that day, with spears and shields, against the cannons and guns.’ The EP was an attempt to draw spiritual sustenance from this mind’s eye Motherland, in order to survive as an exile in AmeriKKKa. ‘It’s a struggle to find where our true roots are. We’ve still got brothers killing brothers. White on black killing. I just think it would be settled a lot more if you knew where you came from and all the things you’d been through as a people. Not just being a slave and colonialism. ’Cos that’s all we know – we don’t know any ethnic dishes. I think we’d be better as a people if we knew that, if I could honestly say to you, “I come from the Zulu tribe”.’
Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture Page 29
