Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture

by Simon Reynolds

  FOURTEEN

  WAR IN THE JUNGLE

  INTELLIGENT DRUM

  AND BASS VERSUS

  TECHSTEP

  ‘The major labels are pushing ragga-jungle ’cos it’s dance music with a frontperson, which is easier to sell. Whereas real drum and bass is engineer’s music, all the action is behind the scenes. That’s why it’ll never become chart-pop. Where it will become more widely accepted is as experimental album-based music. It’ll be the next century’s equivalent to seventies progressive rock. None of that guitars and drums bizness!’

  – Rob Playford, boss of Moving Shadow, late 1994

  In the summer of 1994, the music press, the British record industry and legal dance radio stations like Kiss FM finally woke up to jungle. Initially, the focus was exclusively on the most visible side of the scene, ruffneck ragga-jungle, and coverage was often sensationalistic, alluding to unsubstantiated rumours of crack abuse.

  All this infuriated the self-consciously experimental contingent of the drum and bass community – labels such as Moving Shadow, Reinforced and Good Looking; artists like Goldie, Omni Trio, Foul Play, 4 Hero, LTJ Bukem. Together, these artists had forged a sound that I dubbed, with deliberate oxymoronic intentions, ‘ambient jungle’ (because of the way it combined frenetic beats with a soothing overlay of multitextured atmospherics), and ‘artcore’. Within the scene, vaguer and ultimately more problematic terms – ‘deep’ and ‘intelligent’ – emerged to designate the new style of drum and bass.

  Starting in the summer of 1993, there had been the first glimpses of a new direction in breakbeat hardcore: away from the dark side, towards a new optimism, albeit fragile and bittersweet. From Moving Shadow and Reinforced came bliss-drenched releases like Omni Trio’s ‘Mystic Stepper (Feel Better)’, Foul Play’s ‘Open Your Mind’, 4 Hero’s ‘Journey Into The Light’. With ‘Music’ and ‘Atlantis (I Need You)’, LTJ Bukem invented oceanic jungle. ‘Atlantis’ was jungle’s equivalent of Hendrix’s ‘1983, A Merman I Should Turn To Be’: over a susurrating sea of beats and bongos float scintillating motes and spangle-trails, and the languorous ‘mmmm’s’ and soul-caressing sighs of a ‘quiet storm’ diva. If ‘Atlantis’ imagined utopia as a subaqua paradise, ‘Music’ – a near nine-minute dream-drift of nebulous texture-swirls, Milky Way synth-clusters and orgasmic exhalations – was cosmic. Radically uneventful, ‘Music’ and ‘Atlantis’ were heretically at odds with the staccato freneticism of ’ardkore. Bukem had shown it was possible to speed up the breakbeats until the body was bypassed altogether, thereby transforming hardcore into relaxing music. Rhythm itself became a soothing stream of ambience, a fluid medium in which you immerse yourself.

  ‘Angel’ by Metalheads (aka Goldie) sounded another death knell for darkside. Fusing Diane Charlemagne’s live, jazzy vocal with 150 b.p.m. breaks, eerie samples from Byrne and Eno’s My Life In the Bush Of Ghosts, a bedlam of sampled horns, and Beltram-style terror-riffs, ‘Angel’ was an astonishing soundclash of tenderness and terrorism; the song showed that hardcore could become more conventionally ‘musical’ without losing its edge. Timestretching – a process that allows a sample to be sped up or slowed down to fit any tempo of beat, without changing its pitch – allowed producers to make the vocal element of their track sound ‘normal’, as opposed to the helium-shrill, chipmunk voices in early hardcore.

  As with Warp’s electronic listening music initiative in 1992, ambient jungle was partly the result of an emerging generation gap within breakbeat. While younger producers still oriented their music towards DJs and dancers, the older hardcore artists were now starting to make music that worked better at home than on the dancefloor, as album tracks rather than material for the DJ’s relentless cut ’n’ mix. As the ‘intelligent’ drum and bass style took shape, its purveyors increasingly defined themselves against the populist fare that ruled the dancefloor at the big raves and clubs: on one hand, the ‘cheesy’ E-lation of ‘happy hardcore’, on the other, the rowdy, rude-boy menace of ragga-jungle. Goldie dismissed the ‘booyacka’ ragga tracks as unimaginative and unoriginal, immature music for immature people. Late in 1994, LTJ Bukem founded Speed, a club with an explicit ‘no ragga’ policy. And in 1994, the intelligent contingent had a point. Compared with the increasingly formulaic dancehall-influenced tracks, the new ‘artcore’ was a breath of fresh air. More than that, it was the most thrilling sound on the planet.

  Shadowplay

  Omni Trio is not a trio. It’s actually just one guy, Rob Haigh, a mid-thirties studio wizard reared on a strictly avant-garde diet: the post-punk experimentalism of Pere Ubu, Pop Group, The Fall, the early seventies sonic sorcery of Miles Davis and dub-pioneers like King Tubby, and above all the Krautrock triumvirate of Can, Faust and Neu! ‘I liked the way the German bands abandoned formal song structures and experimented with sounds and textures, the repetitive nature of the music, the shifting layers and patterns,’ Haigh explains.

  After starting out in an avant-funk band called The Truth Club, Haigh turned on to house in 1989 – Derrick May, early Warp, Orbital. But he was even more excited by the first hardcore tracks using hip-hop beats. When rave’s great parting of the ways occurred (the anti-’ardkore media backlash of 1992), he ‘couldn’t abandon the breakbeats, and go back to house’s Roland 909 kick and hi-hat pattern’. Sticking to his hardcore guns, Haigh avoided the cul-de-sac of trance and ambient that sucked in so many other avant-funk vets.

  Bridging the gap between darkside and ambient jungle, Omni Trio’s first tracks for Moving Shadow – ‘Mystic Stepper (Feel Good)’ and ‘Stronger’, from the ‘Vol. 2’ EP – sounded at once ecstatic and harrowed. Amidst the funerally funky clutter of stumbling, fitful breaks and tolling bells on ‘Mystic Stepper’, the soul-diva’s exhortation ‘feel good’ sounds strangely wracked and uncertain, capturing the trepidation of a subculture struggling to convince itself it’s having fun as Ecstasy’s panic-rush kicks in. ‘Stronger’ is even more sorrowful and vulnerable, with its ‘know I’m not strong enough’ sample and heart-tremor B-line.

  1994’s ‘Vol. 3’, ‘Vol. 4’ and ‘Vol. 5’ revealed Haigh to be the John Barry of hardcore. On ‘Thru The Vibe’, harp-cascades and deliberate Michael LeGrand piano chords lead into a roundelay of hypergasmic female gasps and ‘yeah!’s before the track lets rip with a twisting break that rattles like a rivet-gun. Despite the lack of lead vocals and conventional verse-chorus-verse structures, Haigh’s hook-laden tracks feel like songs, like pop music. ‘Thru The Vibe’, ‘Living For the Future’ and ‘Soul Freestyle’ are epic pop-as-architecture constructions that move expertly through build-up and breakdown, orgasm and afterglow. Haigh orchestrates sampladelic symphonies out of moondust harps, mellotronic strings, seething bongos, and acappella beseechings.

  But for all his brilliant arrangements, Haigh’s real forte is as a virtuoso orchestrator of rhythm. Throughout his work, Haigh’s beats are so nuanced, so full of varied accents, that it’s like listening to a real-time, hands-on drummer who’s improvising around the groove. ‘Vol. 5: Soul Promenade’ showcased a new development that Haigh called ‘the soul step’. ‘The first and third beats are emphasized, giving the illusion that the track is running at 80 b.p.m. and 160 b.p.m. at the same time. This gives the music room to breathe, and makes it easier to dance to.’ Hence the ferocious elegance, the murderous panache, of Omni Trio tunes. Like the half-speed reggae bassline, the soul-step transformed jungle into smooth-grooving, sexy music.

  What I really love about Omni Trio, though – as best exemplified by Haigh’s all-time masterpiece ‘Renegade Snares’ – is the music’s sentimentality; the way the tenderness of the voices and tingly, almost twee piano motifs fit the huggy, open-hearted poignancy of the Ecstasy experience. It’s a quality that Kodwo Eshun captured in his plea: ‘open your mind to the kindness of Omni Trio’.

  Omni Trio allies and ‘Renegade Snares’ remixers par excellence, Foul Play were another Moving Shadow act who played a crucial role in the rise of ambient jungle.
Stephen ‘Brad’ Bradshaw, John Morrow and Steve Gurley first weirded up the pirate radio airwaves in 1992 with the ectoplasmic textures and judderquake beats of ‘Dubbing U’ and ‘Survival’, the latter featuring perhaps the most tremulous Morse Code oscillator-riff of all time. Then Foul Play really made their mark on the hardcore scene with ‘Vol. 3’ and its attendant remix EPs. ‘Open Your Mind (Foul Play Remix)’ wafts billowing soul harmonies over viciously crisp breaks. The killer hook, though, is a diaphonous ripple of ethereal sample-stuff, a succulent squiggle-shimmer that’s honey to the ear. It’s the closest I’ve ever heard to an aural simulation of a shiver-down-the-spine, a shudder of loved-up rapture. Midway, the track veers into the twilight-zone, turns morbid and haunted, before letting rip with a veritable St Valentine’s Day Massacre of rapid-fire snares. Finally the diva’s voice resurges like a ghost buffeted on the breeze. Probably my favourite hardcore track ever, ‘Open Your Mind’ is as goosepimply as the entire works of My Bloody Valentine liquidized in a blender and injected into your spine.

  ‘Open Your Mind’ and the equally ravishing ‘Finest Illusion’ were like the return of 1992-style happy rave, only grown-up a bit; the callow euphoria now tinged with poignancy, a bittersweet foretaste of the comedown after the high. Like Bukem’s ‘Music’ and ‘Atlantis’, ‘Open’ and ‘Finest’ shined a light at the end of the long tunnel of ‘darkside’. ‘Dark got silly, people trying to be the darkest of the dark,’ says Brad. ‘Some of it was okay, but a lot of it was definitely “rock music”,’ he adds, meaning music for crack heads, people who smoke rock cocaine. After Steve Gurley left the band, Foul Play lay low for a year, then in November 1994 unleashed ‘Being With You’, a soul-harrowing blitz of infra-red bass, cluster-bombs of phuture-jazz synth-chords and aerobatic vocal samples courtesy of swingbeat-diva Mary J. Blige. The band’s own remix of ‘Being’, with its after-image trailing jitter-riffs, still stands as one of the most hallucinatory, positively Martian slices of artcore ever.

  Ghetto Technology

  As the Moving Shadow roster moved towards a sunkissed, purely affirmative sound, other artcore producers continued to insist on jungle’s roots in ‘darkness’. Metalheads’ ‘Angel’ and its flipside ‘You and Me’ typified this meld of soothing and sinister, a style Goldie dubbed ‘ghetto blues for the nineties’.

  Blown away by ‘Angel’, I tracked Goldie down in the summer of 1993. During the phone interview, it quickly became clear that Goldie was a very angry man, who chafed against the public perception of hardcore as ‘just a fun thing for fifteen-year-olds to get off their nut to’. He lambasted the West End progressive house élite, and railed against Kiss FM for their refusal to play breakbeat tracks. (Apparently, when he personally brought round an advance of ‘Angel’, they laughed him out of the door.) ‘Maybe the only way forward for me is in film, doing soundtracks,’ he wondered dejectedly. He was also deeply frustrated by his limited production resources. ‘Give me Sven Vath’s studio for a week,’ he beseeched, almost spitting out the dismal prog-tekno guru’s name, ‘and I’ll give you operas!’

  Offspring of an English mother and an absentee Jamaican father, Goldie spent most of his childhood flitting between different foster families in the Midlands, before becoming a prime mover in the early UK hip-hop scene. His aerosol skills took him to New York, as a participant in a BBC documentary on graffiti and B-boy culture. After a spell of flirting with Rastafarianism and reading Revelations, Goldie moved to Miami, where he worked in a flea market making customized gold teeth (hence his nickname) and got involved in the criminal underworld. Returning to Britain in the late eighties, he hung out with the Nellee Hooper/Soul II Soul/Massive Attack milieu (Massive’s 3D had been one of his old graffiti buddies) and made some music with trip hopper Howie B, before getting swept up in rave culture. At hardcore haven Rage, the futuristic breakbeat techno played by resident DJs Grooverider and Fabio blew his mind. Tracking tunes by Nebula II and Manix back to their label, Goldie became part of the Reinforced crew, where he acted as a sort of producer/A & R/spokesman, and, under the name Rufige Cru, released awesome tracks like the gaseous bliss-overdose ‘Menace’.

  Just as aerosol-wielding B-boys transformed vandalistic I-am-SOMEBODY rage into signature and style, so Goldie’s music turned the delinquent aggression of hardcore into artcore. When I first met Goldie in the flesh in February 1994, he was working on the intro of his meisterwerk, a twenty-two minute long concept track about time and the dark side of urban life. During the summer, I got a preview of the fully-formed magnum opus, ‘Timeless’. Goldie warned me that the track would play funny tricks with my sense of time, that the twenty-two minutes would seem to pass in five, and he was right.

  First came ‘Inner City Life’, a yearning reverie of sanctuary from ‘inner city pressure’, sung by Diane Charlemagne. Then the song glides into the ghetto with ‘Jah’, Goldie’s cyber-dub riposte to ragga-jungle: pressure-drop bass, a warrior-horde of swarming breaks, and an eerie greeting-the-aliens motif à la Close Encounters. The track’s climactic sequence is a threnody of synapse-searing strings and multi-tracked Ms Charlemagnes. Finally, a reprise of ‘Inner City Life’ subsides into the coda’s slow resolution.

  Listening to Goldie describe the track’s construction, it seemed like every cobra-coiled breakbeat, every swathe of morbidly angelic strings, every haunted inflection of Charlemagne’s vocal, had some autobiographical referent, some coded significance in his private mythology/ demonology. ‘It was time to deal with inner-city life, straight to the jugular,’ he told me at his local café in Chalk Farm. ‘In New York and Miami, I saw what’s happening in Britain now: the first generation of rock stars’ – i.e., crack-heads – ‘Kids who are just going through the paradise state, who are about to become victims. “Timeless” is Revelation. It’s all right taking these kids into euphoria, into a dream-state, but you have to come back to reality. What I’ve tried to provide is that comedown.’

  ‘Rob and I,’ he continued, referring to his engineer partner and ‘perfect interface’, Rob Playford of Moving Shadow, ‘we’re dealing with a subculture that’s took a lot of drugs. Rob and I know how to tap into their heads. When you’re on drugs, don’t go near “Timeless”,’cos it will take your soul out, take it on a fuckin’ journey, and hand it back to you, smokin’. We are about tapping into people’s innards.

  ‘Technically, “Timeless” is like a Rolex,’ Goldie continued, never shy to blow his own trumpet. ‘Beautiful surface, but the mechanism inside is a mindfuck. The loops, they’ve been sculpted, they’re in 4D.’ Drawing parallels between the perspectival trickery of Escher and the trompe l’oreille effects of the duo’s production, he claimed that he and Playford were so far ahead of the game that they’d had to coin their own private technical terminology for their favourite effects (‘igniting a loop’, ‘snaking out a break’, ‘tubing a sound’) and pet sounds (‘zord’, ‘blade’, ‘twister’, ‘sub-stain’). ‘We’ve learned to do magic with the bluntest of instruments,’ he said, referring to the way jungle producers work with relatively low-level technology. ‘It’s like my graffiti paintings: give a graphic designer an aerosol and he won’t be able to do shit with it. Nobody can come in and beat us at our own game.’

  ‘Timeless’ – the title track of Goldie’s major label debut album – took over a year to come out. In the mean time, two other semi-conceptual jungle albums hit the racks, both created by allies of Goldie’s: 4 Hero’s Parallel Universe and A Guy Called Gerald’s Black Secret Technology. The latter’s title had a double meaning that threaded through the album’s utopian/dystopian content. On one hand, it aligned Gerald Simpson with the black science fiction, Afro-Futurist tradition in pop: Sun Ra as Saturn-born ambassador for the Omniverse, Hendrix landing his ‘kinky machine’, George Clinton’s Mothership taking the Afronauts to a lost homeland on the other side of the galaxy, Afrika Bambaataa’s twin fetish for Kraftwerk’s Teutonic rigour and for Nubian science, Juan Atkins and Derrick May’s cybertronic mindscapes.
But Gerald originally heard the phrase ‘black secret technology’ on a TV talk show about government mind control via the media.

  The album’s title perfectly captured an ambivalence that runs through the junglist imagination, where technology figures as both orgasmatron (a pleasuredome of artificially induced sensations) and Panopticon (the terrordome in which every individual is constantly under Authority’s punitive gaze). Technology promises ‘total control’, but there’s a deadly ambiguity: does that phrase refer to empowering individuals and facilitating resistance, or to the secret agendas of corporations and government agencies? When it comes to state-of-the-art gadgetry, we’re all potentially in the position of Gene Hackman’s surveillance expert in The Conversation, who ends up fucked over by the very machinery of which he’s a virtuoso.

  Jungle is a subculture based around abusing technology rather than being abused by it. And so Gerald takes a boyish delight in the sheer ‘deviousness’ of the ever-escalating, technology-mediated struggle between Control and Anarchy. ‘There’s always ways around it,’ he grins. ‘If someone was scanning into this room with a directional microphone, we could scan them back and find out their exact location. When we were at school, we used to fiddle fruit machines. They always came back with some new trick to stop us, but we always got round it. We’d find ways to get credits on Space Invaders’ machines. It was like, ghetto technology!’

  As with a lot of post-rave producers, there’s something vaguely autoerotic or even autistic about Gerald’s techno-fetishism. When I ask him if he ever feels like a cyborg, in so far as his machines are extensions of his body that give him superhuman powers, he frankly admits that working in his studio, ‘it’s like your own world and you become like the god’. On the album, ‘Cybergen’ is all about an ‘imaginary drug that’s basically virtual reality, you’re in total control of the experience. The vocal says “It’s too late to turn back now,” and that’s making the point that it’s no use saying we can’t cope with this technology, that it’s going to ruin society. ’Cos the technology’s already here. You either cope with it or you’re lost. Kids today are already totally hooked into it. Kids today are frightening! I grew up with records, and now I know how to manipulate them. When today’s kids’ – the Playstation generation, he means – ‘grow up, they’ll know how to manipulate the visual side of it.’