Forbidding Planet
Underground Resistance’s musical evolution chimes in with a dialectic that runs through ‘serious’ black pop, a tension between the militant tendency and the mystic impulse. On one hand, there’s the lineage of consciousness-raising agit-prop and righteous rage: The Last Poets, Gil Scott Heron, Public Enemy, KRS1. On the other, there’s the ‘black science fiction’ tradition of otherworldly dreamers and eso-terrorists: Sun Ra, Lee Perry, George Clinton, Earth Wind and Fire, A. R. Kane. With its outer-spatial imagery and utopian/dystopian futurism, most Detroit techno falls into the second camp: transcending terrestial oppression by travelling ‘strange celestial roads’ of the imagination.
Of course, some artists shift back and forth across the militant/ mystic divide; Underground Resistance are a prime example. ‘Where does my fascination with space come from? From wanting to escape from here,’ Mike Banks told Jockey Slut magazine in a rare interview. With the album X-102 Discovers The Rings of Saturn (1992), the trio left behind terrestial alienation for alien realms. ‘X-102 was the first release where it became non-territorial,’ says Mills. ‘It’s a planet in the solar system, but it became non-mankind, it exceeded all those barriers and territories.’ Underground Resistance seemed fascinated by Saturn’s inhuman and inhospitable qualities, its hostility to life; the sleevenotes invite the listener to ‘imagine being in an atmosphere where all your god given senses are extinct . . . where your existence is but a mere fragment in a ring around a nucleus that glows like a ball of fire.’ Where most techno evocations of outer space are idyllic verging on twee, X-102 is harsh and bleak; tracks like ‘Enceladus’, ‘Hyperion’ and ‘Titan’ offer a kind of astral industrial music.
With tracks for each of Saturn’s three rings and nine moons, and one for the planet surface itself, X-102 was a concept album. The sleevenotes relate information on the composition and possible origins of Saturn’s satellites and rings; on the vinyl version, the grooves are patterned to correspond to the relative width of the rings and the distances inter alia. For the next instalment in the series, X-103, Mills and Co turned from one Sun Ra obsession (Saturn) to another: Atlantis. The group spent over six months researching the X-103 project. ‘We had to find out the theories and the facts of Atlantis . . . the shape of the city, what was actually in the temples, and relating things like that to vinyl, how we make the label actually significant, the grooves of the record.’ The inner sleeve depicts a city plan of Atlantis, with its tree-ring like districts orbiting the centre, its palaces, horse-racing stadium, gardens and gymnasia. Although both Rings of Saturn and Atlantis are brilliant albums, the conceptual overkill, with its odd echo of mid-seventies prog rock, was a worrying sign. It set the tone for Mills’s solo career, in which – by his own admission – concepts took up more of his energy than making the actual music.
Razing the Speed Limit
Like Underground Resistance, +8 – the other prime mover in Detroit’s second wave – gradually evolved from industrial-tinged hardcore to a trippy-but-minimal ‘progressive’ techno sound that increasingly came with high-falutin’ concepts attached. The label was formed by Richie Hawtin and John Aquaviva shortly after the pair met at The Shelter, where the nineteen-year-old Hawtin was DJ-ing. Both lived across the border in Canada. Aquaviva was a successful local DJ in London, Ontario, while Hawtin lived in Windsor (the Canadian automotive capital directly adjacent to Detroit), where his British father was a robotic technician at General Motors. Hawtin grew up in an intensely electronic atmosphere, surrounded by computers and the electrical gizmos constructed by his dad, and was exposed from an early age to Hawtin Sr.’s collection of Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream and other synth records. As a teenager, Hawtin got into Front 242-style Euro Body Music, then discovered Detroit techno.
When the pair met in 1989, Aquaviva had been DJ-ing for some time using the moniker J. Aquaviva +8. The name combined a pun on Chicago ‘jack’ tracks with the idea of playing with the Technics pitch-adjust shifted to plus 8 for maximum velocity. ‘At that time, as DJs we were all playing faster,’ remembers Hawtin, ‘When Jeff Mills played on the radio’ – as the Wizard, Mills could be heard six nights a week on WJLB – ‘everything was cranked up, and it was so intense and progressive. [In 1989 – 90] the whole vibe was “let’s go! Screw what’s going on today or yesterday, we’re about what’s going on tomorrow!”’
In this spirit, Hawtin and Aquaviva christened their label +8, and, for their second release, put out a white label that bore no artist or track information, just the slogan: ‘The Future Sound of Detroit’. This forthright proclamation – not just ‘we have arrived’, but the implication that the old guard were now history – got the fledgling label a lot of attention, but also put quite a few backs up amongst the first-wave Detroit music-makers: who the fuck were these Caucasian Canuck upstarts? When the track became more widely available in late 1990, ‘Technarchy’ by Cybersonik (Hawtin, Aquaviva and their mate Dan Bell) became a huge anthem in the European rave scene. Its ponderous bumble-bee of a bass riff slotted perfectly next to the bruising bombast of Euro-hardcore, but there was also a unique +8 quality, a cold Midwestern trippiness.
Over the next eighteen months, +8 unleashed a series of progressively faster and fiercer tracks, partly fuelled by their friendly rivalry with Underground Resistance. ‘Vortex’ by Final Exposure (a collaboration between Hawtin and Joey Beltram and Mundo Muzique of Second Phase/‘Mentasm’ fame) is like being sucked up inside a cyclone composed of African killer-bees. Recording solo as F. U. S. E. (it stood for Futuristic Underground Subsonic Experiments), Hawtin revived the acid house Roland 303 sound on mantra-nomic monsters like ‘Substance Abuse’ and ‘F. U.’ The latter might be his all-time masterpiece: an audio-analogue of Vasarely’s op art, ‘F. U.’ and its sequel ‘F. U. 2’ induce a dark exultation, a sense of locked-on-target propulsion.
+8’s headlong escalation to harder-faster extremities peaked in early 1992 with Circuit Breaker’s ‘Overkill’ / ‘Frenz-E’ and Cybersonik’s ‘Thrash’. The latter was intended almost as a piss-take on other rave producers who were equating intensity with hardness and velocity. ‘It got to the point where we felt “wooah, time to put the brakes on!”’ says Hawtin. He and Bell put out one final Cybersonik record at the start of 1993, ‘Machine Gun’ b/w ‘Jackhammer’, crediting its production to The White Noise Association. ‘We don’t even like that record, it was a statement [to the rest of the rave scene] – kind of, “we don’t know what you guys are doing, but it’s not what we’re about”.’
Like ‘progressive’-minded producers across the globe, +8 were aghast at the drug-fuelled dynamic that was driving hardcore techno to new extremes of braindead brutalism. Despite having played no small role in this escalation, they were now recoiling from the remorseless acceleration of the tempo, the increasingly regimented and funkless nature of the rhythms. The music was changing not just because of Ecstasy and amphetamine abuse, but because of the context it was designed for – raves, not clubs. ‘There was a revolution against clubs,’ remembers Aquaviva, ‘Kind of ‘fuck this tired old shit, we’re gonna do our own thing in a warehouse.’ At one-off raves, promoters booked a lot of DJs, so that instead of one or two DJs playing all night for their regular crowd, it shifted to shorter sets.’
Rather than taking the audience on a journey with peaks and lows, the rave DJs played full-on non-stop for the whole of their hour on the decks – partly to avoid being blown away by the next DJs and partly to pander to the drug-fuelled requirements of the audience. ‘Even though the DJs rose in stature, they were handcuffed in what they could do,’ says Aquaviva. ‘DJ-ing as an artform took a step back.’ The music also got harder and faster because the warehouse raves were one-offs. ‘Instead of going to a couple of clubs every week, the tendency was to save your pent-up energy for the one-off rave, go all out . . . All these factors came together and made rave culture into a different animal from club culture – the raves were more like illegal rock ’n’ roll c
oncerts. It was fun at the time, but it got a little out of control.’
The turning point for Hawtin and Aquaviva came in early 1992 when they found themselves in a Rotterdam club called Parkzicht – the crucible for the Dutch ultra-hardcore sound called gabba. ‘Gabba is Dutch for buddy,’ says Aquaviva. ‘A lot of the guys are dock workers, they’re into harder music, so gabba is basically the sound of the buddies letting off steam.’ At Parkzicht, the DJs and crowd were very partial to ‘Thrash Beats’, the stripped down version of Cybersonik’s ‘Thrash’ – at 150 b.p.m., the fastest +8 release to date. Hawtin and Aquaviva noticed that the Rotterdam ruffneck audience were yelling along to the song. With slowly dawning horror, they realized that what sounded like a football chant was actually ‘joden, joden’ (‘jews, jews’). In fact, it was a football chant, used by supporters of Rotterdam’s team Feynoord against Amsterdam’s Ajax (whose fans sometimes flew the Israeli flag at games, as a proud nod to the city’s Jewish mercantile past). ‘Our Dutch friends are, like, “no worries, it’s just a football chant”,’ says Aquaviva. ‘But I’m like, “fuck that, that’s not who I am. I’m not a Nazi, I can make people rock without making them be hostile.”’
From that point on, +8 changed tack. ‘Intensity = good, hard = bad’ was now the label’s creed; bringing back the funk and the soul to electronic music was the quest. Aquaviva started the house-oriented sub-label Definitive, while Hawtin directed his energies towards the fusion of Detroit techno and Chicago acid via his new alter-ego Plastikman. ‘It was always the one sound that didn’t sound like anything you’d ever heard,’ he says, trying to explain the Roland TB 303’s magnetic appeal. Plastikman’s 1993 debut album Sheet One was one long paean to the synergy of 303’s and LSD. Tracks like ‘Plasticine’ offer a kind of monochrome, sensory-deprivation version of psychedelia. The cover – a simulation of a perforated sheet of acid blotters – is so convincing that a young man in Texas, pulled over for a traffic violation, was arrested when the cop saw the CD insert lying on his car seat. ‘He was thrown in jail for a couple of days while the cops tested it,’ says Hawtin, ‘I felt sorry for the kid but I don’t know if he was showing off to his friends, pretending he had acid. I know of other people who’ve sold the CD covers as real acid. There were people who ate the whole thing trying to get a buzz off it.’
Having helped kickstart gabba in Holland with ‘Thrash Beats’, +8 also contributed to the evolution of German trance. Hawtin’s neo-acid direction was an important influence, but the real catalyst was the streamlined kineticism of +8 artist Speedy J, aka Dutch producer Jochem Paap. ‘Along with other Detroit-sounding artists, we were some of the first people to go to Germany,’ says Aquaviva. ‘Towards the end of ’91, we performed at Berlin Independence Days.’ At this music festival, Speedy J played live, and ‘blew us and all the Detroit guys away. And that spurred his track “Pullover” into the huge success that it was. Although he’s Dutch, he’s one of the foreigners who helped put the second wave of Detroit on the map. Speedy is as much Detroit and Chicago as anyone, and he took it to that other level, he set the tone in Europe. [The Germans] had their own scene, but we certainly gave them impetus [to become] one of the techno powerhouses.’
In the mid-nineties, Berlin became a haven for many Detroit producers. Blake Baxter and Jeff Mills moved there for some time; Juan Atkins and Eddie ‘Flashin” Fowlkes released tracks via the Berlin purist techno label Tresor, and collaborated with 3MB’s Thomas Fehlmann and Moritz Von Oswald. Tresor subtitled their second compilation: Berlin – Detroit: A Techno Alliance. Underground Resistance were particularly influential on the Frankfurt labels Force Inc and PCP. Citing ‘The Art of Stalking’ as his favourite track of all time, PCP’s The Mover offered a Teutonic take on Suburban Knight’s creepy, crepuscular sound – tracks like ‘Nightflight (Non-Stop To Kaos)’, post-apocalyptic EPs like ‘Frontal Sickness’ and ‘Final Sickness’, and a 12 inch on R & Sreleased under the very UR-like alter-ego Spiritual Combat. Meanwhile, Richie Hawtin and Speedy J’s tracks for +8 influenced the 303-fired hardtrance of labels like Frankfurt’s Harthouse and Berlin’s MFS.
That said, +8 were eventually as perturbed by the evolution of trance as they were by Dutch gabba. ‘At one hard party in Limburgh in ’92, they had these Thorens turntables that could go to plus 25,’ remembers Aquaviva. ‘The DJ was playing this really heavy trance and the people were dancing like zombies, arms out and bouncing to the 160 – 180 b.p.m. rhythms. This freaked me out, I called it the Nazi waltz. Later I was DJ-ing, playing classic techno and house, and the DJ came up and said: “Can’t you play anything the crowd likes, and that’s y’know, faster?” I vowed never to play in Germany, and in fact it took me a year and half to play there again.’
Nonetheless, there did seem to be a striking affinity between the American Midwestern and German ideas of rave. There was an industrial influence, both environmental (in the Ruhr/General Motors sense) and musical (Euro Body Music). There was even a weird racial link, in so far as Michigan, Minnesota, Illinois and other Midwestern states had a high proportion of German and Scandinavian settlers. ‘I think the Midwest and Northern Europe have a lot of common bonds,’ concurs Aquaviva. ‘I DJ in the South of Europe a lot, and the Mediterranean people are much more laid back, so I play more groovier, house-ier music. Spain has very little in common with Detroit!’
As trance got more metronomic and monolithic, Richie Hawtin dedicated himself to bringing back ‘the groove, the soulfulness’ of the Roland 303 acid sound. ‘To me the 303 always had this weird funkiness, I always found the 303 really sexy.’ His response was a drastic drop in tempo on the second Plastikman album, 1994’s Muzik, resulting in mid-tempo 303 ballads that took you on a pleasant stroll through the cosmos instead of breaking the speed limit on the Astrobahn. As a DJ, Hawtin was also bucking the trance-core trend for full-on velocity, by mixing in house and even garage tunes. ‘That was during the years after the separation of [techno into different styles]. It was a depressing thing for a lot of us. I’ve always enjoyed playing longer sets. When I do them, I take things up-down, fast-slow, encompassing different kinds of music.’
This anti-rave philosophy informed +8’s parties in the Midwest. ‘It wasn’t just about playing all new superhard stuff,’ says Aquaviva, ‘It was about two DJs playing the whole night, embracing the old principles of house, when there weren’t enough records being made to play only one style all night.’ Says Hawtin: ‘We’re not putting on raves, we’re not putting on flashy coloured lightshows and your favourite ten DJs. It’s me and John and one or two other people . . . We create some kind of weird atmosphere in a room, put a great system in, and build an atmosphere for people to lose themselves into. Very minimal, stripped down, bare bones, but a lot of thought goes into it.’ +8 did an event called Heaven and Hell, with ‘a black room where it was just very intense, and a chill-out room which was all white – white mattresses, little children’s bathing pools, bowls of fruit. It was like heaven, and it was to make people realize that this music isn’t just about losing it.’ Despite the LSD-blotter cover of Sheet One, +8 also began to distance themselves from hallucinogens, as they saw the drug abuse get out of hand on the American rave scene. ‘People I know just went overboard with Ecstasy,’ says Hawtin. ‘So there’s a little tag line on the second Plastikman album, that says “Just because you like chocolate cake, doesn’t mean you eat it everyday.” That was just a backhanded way of saying “’Cmon guys, figure it out, get a grip.”’
We Are the Music Makers
Unlike Chicago acid house, Detroit techno was never a drug-oriented music. The word ‘rave’, with its connotations of frenzy and loss-of-control, had never been applicable to the elegant aestheticism of Derrick May and Co. By 1993, the more serious-minded producers in Britain and Europe were embarking on a return to Detroit principles, as a way of sidestepping what they perceived as the drug-determined dead ends of hardcore and hard trance. For guidance, they looked to three figures and three directions: the ‘hi
-tech jazz’ being made by Mad Mike under the aegis of Underground Resistance and Red Planet, the austere minimalism of Jeff Mills, and the softcore romanticism of Carl Craig.
Born in 1969 and brought up in Detroit’s middle-class West Side, Craig took Detroit’s Europhile tendencies even further than his mentor Derrick May. As a sensitive teenager, he was into bands like The Cure, Bauhaus and The Smiths. ‘I could relate to Morrissey, ’cos he sounded like somebody who never got any women,’ he says. Alongside his diet of Anglo miserablism and avant-funk like Mark Stewart and Throbbing Gristle (he later named an EP ‘Four Jazz Funk Greats’ in homage to one of TG’s albums), Craig shared the typical Motor City appetite for synth-driven dance music. He dug Prince, Kraftwerk and Italian ‘progressive’ disco. Falling under May’s tutelage, he toured Europe as a member of Rythim Is Rythim, worked on the 1989 remix of ‘Strings of Life’, and in 1991 co-wrote the sublime ‘Kao-Tic Harmony’ (which was released as the flipside of Derrick May’s only nineties release to date, ‘Icon’). By this point, Craig was already making his own tracks and releasing them via his own labels RetroActive and Planet E, using a plethora of whimsical alter-egos: Psyche, BFC (it stood for Betty Ford Clinic), Piece, Six Nine, Shop, Innerzone Orchestra and Paperclip People.
Psyche’s ‘Elements’ was the solitary highlight of Techno 2, the disappointing sequel to the Virgin compilation that had first put Detroit on the map. Reflective, in both the ‘introspective’ and ‘opalescent’ senses of the word, ‘Elements’ revealed Craig to be Detroit’s most gifted miniaturist. With its open-hearted yearning and twinkling textures, ‘Elements’ conjured up the image of a lonely boy moping in a bedroom studio, where he combined his lo-tech palette of tone-colours and his teardrops to paint exquisite audio watercolours. There were shades of the electro-calligraphic brushwork of Thomas Leer, Japan and Sylvian/Sakomoto. This wasn’t party-hard music, but the pensive frettings of one of life’s wallflowers. Indeed, the low-key anxiety of ‘Neurotic Behaviour’ (from the first Psyche EP, released in 1990) was a world away from the psychotic tantrums of hardcore techno.
Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture Page 30
