Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture

by Simon Reynolds

  Taking the Detroit desolation of May’s work towards an almost fey forlorn-ness, Craig became a role model for all those techno artists in Britain, like The Black Dog, who wanted to make album-length, home-oriented electronic mindfood. He became the producer’s producer, worshipped for the texturological detail and nuance in his compositions. On BFC’s ‘Galaxy’, the glowing synth-pulse really sounds like the spermazoic spangle of the Milky Way; on ‘Evolution’, the whispery treated breakbeat is a rustle that makes your brain itch, rather than your feet twitch. The guru of softcore, Craig’s tracks generally elevate atmospherics over energy; his rhythms are relentlessly, restlessly intelligent, but rarely that dance-coercive; the rudimentary looped breakbeat on BFC’s ‘Please Stand By’ is inspired by Shut Up And Dance, but it doesn’t capture their ’ardkore fervour. Another Craig classic – Innerzone Orchestra’s 1992 release ‘Bug In The Bassbin’ – has been hailed as a prototype for jungle. But the track’s loping double-bassline and breakbeat shuffle, while engagingly off-kilter, is neither jungalistic nor particularly danceable.

  Journalist Tony Marcus’s verdict on the Six Nine track ‘Desire’ – closer to ‘an emotion bomb than a dance record’ – applies to most of Craig’s work. As with the May/Craig collaboration ‘Kao-Tic Harmony’, ‘Desire’ features a keening synth melody that soars up and slides down the octave in fitful lurches; it feels like a kite, whose strings are attached to your heart, being tugged and buffeted by the wind. 1993’s ‘At Les’ – released under Carl’s own name – is even more moistly melancholy. The trickle-down synth-pattern sounds like a syncopated sob, like fat teardrops rolling down a cheek. Like a couple of other early Craig classics, the song reappeared on his 1997 album More Songs About Food and Revolutionary Art. The title is a high-minded sounding but vague call to arms. In the spirit of the first-wave Detroit aesthetes, this is a bourgois-bohemian crusade for refinement, taste, elegance. As Craig puts it in the sleevenotes, ‘This is not a revolution against government. This is a revolution against ignorance.’

  While Carl Craig became the touchstone for many British producers who wanted to make atmospheric home-listening electronica, those who remained committed to the dancefloor looked to Underground Resistance and its former members Jeff Mills and Robert Hood. With Mills and Hood departed, UR became a Mike Banks solo project in all but name. On the ‘Galaxy 2 Galaxy’ double-EP, Banks abandoned juggernaut industrialism for a rhapsodic fusion-tinged sound (‘Hi-Tech Jazz’, as the opening track put it), hints of which had been heard in earlier UR classics like ‘Eye of the Storm’ and ‘Jupiter Jazz’. The warrior-priest iconography endured: the labels depicted Bruce Lee and Geronimo, the latter a nod to Banks’ half Native American ancestry. But the music sounded pacific rather than militant – all fluttery arpeggiated twirls and nimble-fingered fluency. With the cosmic disco of ‘Starsailing’, UR seemed to have finally ascended into the mystic. Engraved into the run-out vinyl of the fourth side of the EP was a proclamation: ‘Alpha / Omega – Final Transmission: I Found It / There Is Existence Other than Us / I Have Transformed. The Tones are the Keys To It All! I’ll Be Back – Mad Mike.’

  Any fears that Banks had swapped his rage for space-cadet serenity were partly assuaged by his series of Red Planet EPs. In Mars, the warlike planet, he found an image that perfectly reconciled the militant/ mystic dialectic. Although Jeff Mills now denies that there was ever any anger or politics involved in Underground Resistance, Banks – in his rare public utterances – has spoken out about the twin genocides in his family tree (his mother Blackfoot Indian, his father black) and how they fuel his struggle against the ‘forktongue’ propaganda of the ‘programmers’. Like the Wu Tang Clan’s use of rhymes as ‘liquid swords’, Banks proposes resistance through tribal rhythms, through the war dance. On the ‘Red Planet VI’ EP, the highpoint of the series, ‘Ghostdancer’ is named after the messianic religion that swept through the reservation-trapped and defeat-traumatized Native American tribes in the 1890s – the desperate belief that by dancing and chanting the white invaders could be magicked out of existence and the dead tribespeople brought back to life. Much of the time, however, the sleek sheen of tracks like ‘Skypainter’ and ‘Windwalker’ summons up the spirits of George Benson and Stanley Clarke rather than Crazy Horse and Eldridge Cleaver.

  Mills and Hood, meanwhile, were developing their enormously influential brand of minimalist techno with the Waveform Transmission album series. 1993’s Vol. 2 – recorded by Hood as The Vision – proclaimed: ‘This release is dedicated to the form of simplicity the reasoning of vision.’ Hood’s 1994 double-pack ‘Minimal Nation’ and Internal Empire album offered the aural equivalent of a bread-and-water regime. Jeff Mills’s output is at least energizing in its stark ferocity. On Waveform Transmission Vol. 1 and Vol. 3, four-on-the-floor techno is taken as hard and fast as it can go without actually turning into gabba. This is techno as monastic discipline, rigour as mortification of the flesh. The spartan frenzy and flagellating pulses of ‘The Hacker’ and ‘Wrath of The Punisher’ are like a scourge for the hedonistic excesses of rave. Chaste, chastening, a chastisement: Mills’s music brings a whole new spin to the drug slang ‘getting caned’.

  Mills’s other big influence on Detroit purists is his conceptualism. Waveform Transmission Vol. 3 came with lofty-sounding and frankly pompous sleevenotes: ‘As barriers fall around the world, the need to understand others and the way they live, think and dream is a task that is nearly impossible to imagine without theory and explanation. And as we approach the next century with hope and prosperity, this need soon becomes a necessity rather than a recreational urge.’ For the releases on his own Axis label, Mills’s music became increasingly concept-driven. ‘Cycle 30’, for instance, took the vinyl-innovations of UR to the furthest degree: the release consisted of nine locked grooves, five second riffs and beat-loops that were designed for DJs to use as mixing material. ‘Cycle 30’ also referred to Mills’s belief that ‘roughly every thirty years we seem to repeat ourselves in terms of music, fashion, design . . . In the sixties, there was this thirst for innovation . . . If you go back [thirty years earlier] to the thirties, it’s also a big time of innovation: New York’s World Fair, Superman, a lot of home appliances . . . the washing machine and all that crazy stuff, the toaster, the waffle iron.’ Based on his belief in such dubious cycles, Mills argues that the era of minimal techno (allegedly an echo of sixties minimalist art) is about to give way to a form of abstract expressionist techno, with producers bringing more of their signature back into the music.

  Keeping the Faith

  Jeff Mills belongs to a tradition of black scholar-musicians and autodidacts: Sun Ra, Anthony Braxton, Derrick May, DJ Spooky. Instead of inspiring thoughtless, sweaty fun, Mills believes dance music should be the vehicle for lofty intellectualism and weighty-verging-on-ponderous concepts. ‘Let me be very very clear,’ he says, with the barest hint of annoyance. ‘Underground Resistance wasn’t militant, nor was it angry . . . I’m not angry now . . . The music that I make now has absolutely nothing to do with colour. It has nothing to do with man/woman, East/West, up/down, but more [to do with] “the mind”. The mind has no colour . . . There’s this perception that if you’re black and you make music, then you must be angry. Or you must be “deep”. Or you must be out to get money and women. Or you must be high when you made that record. It’s one of the four. And the media does a really good job of staying within those four categories. But in these cases, it’s neither of those.’

  To which you might respond, what’s left? If you remove race, class, gender, sexuality, the body and the craving for intoxication from the picture, what exactly remains to fuel the music? Just the ‘pure’ play of ideation. The result is music that appeals to a disinterested and disembodied consciousness. The formalism of minimal techno has some parallels with minimalism in the pictorial arts and in avant-classical composition; both have been critiqued as spiritualized evasions of political reality, as attempts to transcend the messy and
profane realm of History and Materiality in the quest for the ‘timeless’ and territorially unbounded.

  If the musical legacy of Derrick May and Jeff Mills is largely unimpeachable, the mentality they have fathered throughout the world of ‘serious’ techno is, I believe, a largely pernicious influence. This anti-Dionysian mindset favours elegance over energy, serenity over passion, restraint over abandon. It’s a value system shared by Detroit purists both within the Motor City and across the globe. In Detroit itself, artists like Alan Oldham, Stacy Pullen/Silent Phase, Kenny Larkin, Dan Curtin, Claude Young, Jay Denham, Marc Kinchen, Terence Dixon and John Beltran, uphold the tradition. Many of these producers were corralled on to a 1996 double CD compiled by Eddie ‘Flashin’ ’ Fowlkes, which he titled True People as a stinging rebuke to the rest of the world for daring to tamper with the Detroit blueprint. Detroit is living in denial. Techno has long since slipped out of its custodianship, the evolution-through-mutation of music has thrown up such mongrels as bleep-and-bass, Belgian hardcore, jungle, trance and gabba, all of which owe as much to other cities (the Bronx; Kingston, Jamaica; Dusseldorf; Sheffield; London; Chicago) as they do to Detroit. The ancestral lineage of Detroit has been contaminated by ‘alien’ genes; the music’s been ‘bastardized’. But lest we forget, illegitimate heirs tend to lead more interesting lives.

  If anything, the idea and ideal of ‘Detroit’ is even stronger outside the city, thanks to British Detroit-purists. Leading lights in the realm of neo-Detroit ‘abstract dance’ include the British labels Soma, Ferox, Ifach and Peacefrog, and producers like Peter Ford, Dave Angel, Neil Landstruum, Funk D’Void, Ian O’Brien (who titled a track ‘Mad Mike Disease’ as a nod to the endemic influence of the UR/Red Planet maestro), The Surgeon, Russ Gabriel, Luke Slater, Adam Beyer and Mark Broom (whose alter ego Midnight Funk Association is named after the Electrifyin’ Mojo’s legendary Detriot radio show). It is a world where people talk not of labels but ‘imprints’, and funk is spelt ‘phunk’ to give it an air of, er, phuturism.

  One of the most vocal of the Detroit-acolytes is tech-jazz artist Kirk deGiorgio. From early efforts like ‘Dance Intellect’ to his late nineties As One output, deGiorgio has dedicated himself to the notion that Detroit techno is the successor to the synth-oriented jazz-funk of fusioneers like Herbie Hancock and George Duke. ‘I never saw techno as anything else but a continuation of black music,’ he told Muzik magazine in 1997. ‘I didn’t think of it as any new kind of music. It was just that the technology and the sounds were different.’

  This neo-conservative attitude – the self-effacing notion that white musicians like deGiorgio himself have nothing to add to black music; the idea that music never really undergoes revolutions – reminds me of nothing so much as the British blues-bore purists of the late sixties and early seventies. Actually, given that Detroit techno was a response to European electro-pop, we should really reverse the analogy: Atkins, May and Saunderson are equivalent to Clapton, Beck and Page, virtuoso players worshipped for their purist fidelity to the original music (Kraftwerk for the Belleville Three, Muddy Waters for the ex-Yardbirds). The hip-hop influences (breakbeats and samples) that revolutionized British rave music are studiously shunned by the Detroit purists, who believe synthesizers are more ‘musical’ than computers. There is literally no future in this traditionalist approach; the notion that the music of Derrick May (or Carl Craig, or Jeff Mills) represents the Way, the Light and the Truth is no more helpful than the early seventies belief that ‘Clapton Is God’.

  This is not to say that Detroit techno has nothing more to offer electronic music. For instance, Kevin Saunderson (the most impurist of the Belleville Three – he even put out great hardcore tracks in 1992 like ‘Uptempo’ and ‘Mental Techno’, using the alter-ego Tronikhouse) has inspired some exciting records, like Dave Clarke’s ‘Red’ series. In the wake of UR outfit Drexciya, the Detroit area has also seen an upsurge of electro-influenced music – artists like Ectomorph, Aux 88 and Dopplereffekt, labels like Interdimensional Transmissions and Direct Beat. Returning to Detroit techno’s early eighties roots as a distant cousin of New York electro, these producers have thrillingly revived Kraftwerk’s glacial Germanic geometry and rigid drum machine beats, but – breaking with Detroit’s overly refined aura – they also add a booty-shaking boom influenced by Miami bass music’s lewd low frequency oscillations.

  Meanwhile, in Europe, the Tresor-affiliated labels Basic Channel and Chain Reaction have brilliantly pursued their vision of tech-house abstraction through a million shades of lustrous grey. But for the most part, European neo-Detroit techno-phunk is music that feels anal and inhibited, crippled by its fear of heterodoxy. Its ‘radicalism’ is defined by its refusals, by what it denies itself – overt tunefulness, explicit emotion, vulgar exuberance, breakbeats, intoxication. Detroit-purism was born of the impulse to de-crass-ify techno and restore it to its pre-rave sobriety and subtlety. A cruel irony, then, that Colin Faver’s long-running ‘Abstrakt Dance’ show on KISS FM was terminated in the spring of 1997, in order to make room for happy hardcore, the cheesy-and-cheerful sound of rave fundamentalism at its most defiantly E’d up.

  NINE

  THIS SOUND IS FOR THE UNDERGROUND

  PIRATE RADIO

  ‘Well out of that now, into this – sounds of the Lucky Spin, believer! Along with the MC OC, along with the full studio crew. Lively business! Shout going out to Rattle, you know the koo. Cooked food, love it to the bone! To the marrow! Normality, believe! L-I-V-E and direct, to the koo. Are you ready, wind-your-waist crew? And those who’s driving around Don-land North East South and West, we’ve got you locked!!! 10.57, get on the case, for the hardcore, hardcore bass. For ya face – 100 per cent bass! All right, red-eye crew, you know the koo. Going out to you, wind-your-waist crew . . . and all those who’s l-l-l-lickin’ it in Don-land in their cars, driving about Don-land, the Don-ites and Don-’eads. Do-it-like-this, jungalist! Believe me, ’ardkore’s firing!’

  – MC OC, Don FM, 1993

  All through the nineties, London’s ’ardkore and jungle pirate stations have disrupted the decorum of the FM airwaves with their vulgar fervour and rude-boy attitude. MCs surf the DJs’ polyrhythmic pandemonium of breaks ’n’ bass with a Dada-doggerel of druggy buzzwords, party-hard exhortations and renegade war-cries: sublime ‘nonsense’ that is purely invocatory, designed to bind its scattered addressees into a community, mobilize it into an army.

  London’s jungle pirates come and go, but at any time of year, you can scan the frequency spectrum at the weekend and find at least a dozen. There are many more illegal stations in the capital, and throughout Britain, representing other dance-genres neglected by mainstream radio: dancehall reggae, soul, house and garage, rap, and more. Some regard themselves as a providers of a community service, like North London reggae pirate Station FM, with its anti-drug messages and funki-dread positivity. And some are so well-organized and well-behaved they’re like independent commercial radio stations that just haven’t bothered to secure a licence, like Dream FM in Leeds, with its all-week-long transmissions and stringent rules about no swearing on air, no playing records with drug references.

  My passion, though, is for the pirate stations that seem the most piratical, the stations for whom surviving outside the law is part of the thrill. And that means the jungle pirates. Actually, given that jungle stations like Kool got more ‘professional’ by the late nineties, it really means the unruly ’ardkore pirates of 1991 – 3: Touchdown, Defection, Rush, Format, Pulse, Eruption, Impact, Destiny, Function, and many more.

  Out of a personal archive of hundreds of hours of taped transmissions, my favourite sequence is from a mid-week broadcast by a station called Lightning, seemingly hi-jacked for just one night by the FMB Crew (it stands for Fucking Mind Bending). After about an hour of rambling, nursery-rhyme banter, ranging from the sinister and scatological to the nonsensical and outright indecipherable, the duo suddenly get possessed by a kind of free-associational delirium. T
he soundtrack is a wondrously zany X Project track that warps choirboy Aled Jones’s hit ‘Walking In The Air’ into a speedfreak anthem: ‘we’re walking in the air / while people down below are sleeping as we fly’.

  MC no. 1: ‘Biggin’ up the Acting Hard Massive. Stiff as an ’ard on! Work it up! Working up the-rush-in-the-place!’

  MC no. 2: ‘And it’s haitch with a hot.’

  MC no. 1: ‘Biggin’ up the Hot Man, the Metal Man, hold it down. Cinders. You know the score . . . Cackooo Crew! Big it up, big it up, doing-the-do!’

  MC no. 2: ‘Havin’ em in the loo, in the loo-’

  MC no. 1: ‘Hot hot-’

  MC no. 2: ‘Doing a lovely poo poo!’

  MC no. 1: ‘Buzzin’ hard! Having a bubble, in the studio.’

  MC no. 2: ‘Trippin’ out! Phone us an ambulance. Phone don’t work, give us bell – see if it works. Could save a life or two. Or three. Come on, rush with me!’

  MC no. 1: ‘Going out to Sammy in Stratford, you know the koo. The didgeridoo, the ’abadabadoo.’