Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture

by Simon Reynolds

  Techstep is a sado-masochist sound. Ed Rush declared bluntly ‘I want to hurt people with my beats,’ and one No U Turn release had the phrase ‘hurter’s mission’ scratched into the vinyl. This terrorist stance is in marked contrast to the rhetoric of intelligent drum and bass artists, with their talk of ‘educating’ the audience, ‘opening minds’ and ‘easing the pressure’ of urban life. Sonically, techstep’s dry, clenched sound couldn’t have been further from the massaging, muscle-relaxing stream of genteel sound oozed by DJs like Bukem and Fabio, all soothing synth-washes and sax loops seemingly on loan from Grover Washington Jnr and Kenny G.

  While the intelligent and jazz-step producers prided themselves on their ‘musicality’, the techstep producers veered to the opposite extreme: a bracing ‘anti-musicality’. With its incorporation of atonal, unpitched timbres, non-musical sounds and horror-movie soundtrack dissonance, the new artcore noir was simply far more avant-garde than the likes of Bukem. In an abiding confusion about what constitutes ‘progression’ for electronic music, the intelligent drum and bass producers were simply too deferential to traditional ideas about melody, arrangement, ‘nice’ textures, the importance of proper songs and hands-on, real-time instrumentation.

  By the end of 1996, producers like Nasty Habits/Doc Scott, Dom and Roland, Boymerang, E-Sassin, Cyborgz and Optical had joined No U Turn on their ‘hurter’s mission’. Techstep got even more industrial and stiff-jointed, at times verging on gabba, or a syncopated, sped-up update of The Swans. Above all, the music got colder. The Numanoid synth-riff on Nasty Habits’ awesome ‘Shadowboxin” sears the ear with its glacial grandeur, while the trudging two-step beat always makes me imagine a commando jogging under napalm skies with a rocket launcher on his hip. No U Turn themselves reached something of a pinnacle with the dark exultation of Trace/Nico’s ‘Squadron’, whose Carmina Burana-gone-cyberpunk fanfares slash and scythe like the Grim Reaper.

  Where did the apocalpytic glee, the morbid and perverse jouissance, in techstep stem from? Nico described the music-making process – all night, red-eye sessions conducted in a ganja fog – as a horrible experience that poisoned his nervous system with tension. Ed Rush talked of deliberately smokin’ weed to get ‘dark, evil thoughts’, the kind of skunkanoia without which he couldn’t achieve the right vibe for his tracks. Like Wu-Tang-style horrorcore rap, techstep seemed based around the active pursuit of phobia and psychosis as entertainment. Which begged the question: what exactly were the social conditions that had created such a big audience for music that fucks with your head so extensively, that appears to be ‘no fun’?

  Future-Shock Troops

  ‘It’s like this: some people are sharks, and some people are marks. If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. Play pussy, get fucked. Come prepared or run away scared . . . You can’t always count on E to shelter you from being vic’ed.’

  – Breakbeat Mailing List Correspondent’s riposte to other

  correspondents’ complaints about the loveless,

  intimidating vibe at jungle events

  If rave culture was a displaced form of working-class collectivity, with its ‘love, peace and unity’ running counter to Thatcherite social atomization, then jungle is rave music after the death of the rave ethos. Punning on the Labour history of cooperatives and friendly societies, I’d call jungle an ‘unfriendly society’. Since 1993 and hardcore’s slide into the twilight-zone, debates about ‘where did our love go?’ have convulsed the UK breakbeat community, with grim tales being related of muggings outside clubs, of fights and ‘crack’ vibes inside. Disenchanted ravers sloped off to form the happy hardcore scene. Others defended the demise of the euphoric vibe, arguing that jungle’s atmosphere wasn’t moody, it was ‘serious’.

  In the abscence of Ecstasy, jungle began to embrace an ideology of real-ness that paralleled the worldview of American hardcore rap. L. Double and Shy FX’s ‘The Shit’, a classic 1996 roller of a jump-up tune, kicked off with a gangsta monologue: ‘Yo man, there’s a gang of muthafuckers out there on the dick . . . Non-reality seeing, non reality feeling, non-reality-living-ass muthafuckas, man. And I don’t know, man, reality, it’s important to me.’ In hip hop, ‘real’ has two meanings. First, it means authentic, uncompromised music that refuses to sell out to the music industry. ‘Real’ also signifies that the music reflects a ‘reality’ constituted by late capitalist economic instability, institutionalized racism, and increased surveillance and harassment of youth by the police. Hence tracks like T. Power’s ‘Police State’ and Photek’s neurotic ‘The Hidden Camera’: lyric-free critiques of a country that conducts the most intense surveillance of its own citizenry in the world (most UK city centres now have spy cameras). ‘Real’ means the death of the social; it means corporations who respond to increased profits not by raising pay or improving benefits but downsizing (laying off the permanent work-force in order to create a floating employment pool of part-time and freelance workers without benefits or job security).

  ‘Real’ is a neo-medieval scenario; you could compare downsizing to enclosure, where the aristocracy threw the peasants off the land and reduced them to a vagabond underclass. Like gangsta rap, jungle reflects a medieval paranoiascape of robber barons, pirate corporations, secret societies and covert operations. Hence the popularity, as a source of samples and song titles, of martial arts films and gangsta movies like The Godfather, Reservoir Dogs, Goodfellas and Carlito’s Way, whose universe revolves around concepts of righteous violence and blood-honour.

  Where gangsta hardstep shares the Wu-Tang Clan’s neo-medieval vision of late capitalism, techstep is more influenced by dystopian sci-fi movies like Blade Runner, Robocop, Terminator et al, which contain a subliminally anti-capitalist message, imagining the future as a return to the Dark Ages, complete with fortress cities and bandit clans. Hence No U Turn tracks like ‘The Droid’ and ‘Replicants’, or Adam F’s ‘Metropolis’. ‘Amtrak’, another late 1996 Trace/Nico meisterwerk, pivots around the sample ‘here is a group trying to accomplish one thing’ – that is, ‘to get into the future’. Given the scary millennial soundscape No U Turn paint, this begs the question: why the hurry to get there? The answer: in a new Dark Age, it’s the ‘dark’ that will come into their own. ‘Dark’ is where primordial energies meet digital technique, where id gets scientific. Identify with this marauding music, and you define yourself as predator not prey.

  What you affiliate yourself to in techstep is the will-to-power of technology itself, the motor behind late capitalism as it rampages over human priorities and tears communities apart. The name No U Turn captures this sense that there’s no turning back. It also has a submerged political resonance: one of Margaret Thatcher’s famous boasts was ‘This lady’s not for turning’ – her refusal to bow to pressure from liberal Tories to make a U Turn on Conservative policies like privatization and the assault on welfare. These same policies led to the catastrophic realization of another infamous Thatcher pronouncement: ‘There is no such thing as society.’

  The pervasive sense of slippin’ into a new Dark Age, of an insidious breakdown of the social contract, generates anxieties that are repressed but resurface in unlikely ways and places. Resistance doesn’t necessarily take the ‘logical’ form of collective activism (unions, left-wing politics); it can be so distorted and imaginatively impoverished by the conditions of capitalism itself, that it express itself as, say, the proto-fascist, anti-corporate nostalgia of America’s right-wing militias, or as a sort of hyper-individualistic survivalism.

  In jungle, the response is a ‘realism’ that accepts a socially constructed reality as ‘natural’. To ‘get real’ is to confront a state-of-nature where dog eats dog, where you’re either a winner or a loser, and where most will be losers. There’s a cold rage seething in jungle, but it’s expressed within the terms of an anti-capitalist yet non-socialist politics, and expressed defensively: as a determination that the underground will not be co-opted by the mainstream. ‘Undergroun
d’ can be understood sociologically as a metaphor for the underclass, or psychologically, as a metaphor for a fortress psyche: the survivalist self, primed and ready for combat.

  Jungle’s sound-world constitutes a sort of abstract social realism; when I listen to techstep, the beats sound like collapsing (new) buildings and the bass feels like the social fabric shredding. Jungle’s treacherous rhythms offer its audience an education in anxiety (and anxiety, according to Freud, is an essential defence mechanism, without which you’d be vulnerable to trauma). ‘It is defeat that you must learn to prepare for,’ runs the martial arts movie sample in Source Direct’s ‘The Cult’, a track that pioneered the post-techstep style I call ‘neurofunk’ (clinical and obsessively nuanced production, foreboding ambient drones, blips ’n’ blurts of electronic noise, and chugging, curiously inhibited two-step beats that don’t even sound like breakbeats anymore). Neurofunk is the fun-free culmination of jungle’s strategy of ‘cultural resistance’: the eroticization of anxiety. Immerse yourself in the phobic, and you make dread your element.

  The battery of sensations offered by a six hour stint at AWOL, Millennium or any ‘non-intelligent’ jungle club, induces a mixture of shell-shock and future-shock. Alvin Toffler defined F-shock as what happens when the human adaptive mechanism seizes up in response to an overload of stimuli, novelty, surprise. Triggering neural reflexes and fight-or-flight responses, jungle’s rhythmic assault-course hypes up the listener’s adaptive capability in readiness for the worst the twenty-first century has up its sleeve. If jungle is a martial artform, clubs like AWOL are church for the soul-jah and killah priest, inculcating a kind of spiritual fortitude.

  All this is why going to AWOL is serious bizness, as opposed to ‘fun’. Jungle is the living death of rave, the sound of living with and living through the dream’s demise. Every synapse-shredding snare and cranium-cracking bass-bomb is an alarm-call saying ‘Wake up, that dream is over. Time to get real.’

  FIFTEEN

  DIGITAL PSYCHEDELIA

  SAMPLING AND THE

  SOUNDSCAPE

  ‘Sampladelia’ is an umbrella term covering a vast range of contemporary hallucino-genres – trip hop, techno, jungle, house, post-rock, swingbeat, and more. ‘Sampladelic’ refers to disorientating, perception-warping music created using the sampler and other forms of digital technology.

  The sampler is a computer that converts sound into numbers, the zeros and ones of digital code. In its early days, the sampler was used primarily as a quote machine, a device for copying a segment of pre-recorded music and replaying it on a keyboard at any pitch or tempo. But because the sound has been converted into digital data, the information can be easily rearranged. This means the source can be disguised to the point of unrecognizability, and it opens up a near-infinite realm of sound-morphing possibilities.

  At its most advanced, sampladelia drastically expands upon the recording methods developed by late sixties psychedelia. Acid rock groups departed from the ‘naturalistic’ model of recording (documenting the band in performance) and used multitracking, overdubbing, reversing, echo and other sonic processes to create sounds that could never be achieved by a band playing in real-time. This anti-naturalistic aspect of sampling has been intensified by recent music technology developments like ‘hard disk editing’, which is like having a recording studio, with a mixing desk and an array of effects, inside your computer. With hard disk editing (aka digital multitrack recording), sound-sources can be chopped up, stretched, treated, looped, and recombined, all within the ‘virtual’ space of the computer.

  The sampler is not necessarily the most important instrument in the techno producer’s arsenal. While some producers enthuse about the sampler as the ultimate creative tool (‘the new electric guitar’), others prefer synthesizers (particularly old-fashioned analogue synths, with their knobs and dials) for their hand’s on, real-time element, which requires traditional dextrous musicianship. Sampling breaks with traditional ideas of ‘musicality’, though, and so I’m using ‘sampladelia’ as general rubric for rave music’s revolutionary implications: its radical break with the ideals of real-time interactive playing and natural acoustic space that still govern most music-making.

  Beats + Pieces

  Although the first people to use the technique – via the expensive Fairlight Computer Musical Instrument – were art rockers like Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush, the age of sampladelia really began when cheaper machines like the Emu Emulator and Ensoniq Mirage fell into the hands of rap producers. Sampling was the logical extension of the hip hop DJ’s cut ’n’ mix vinyl bricolage. Shifting from the block party model of the DJ-and-MC, hip hop became a studio-based art based around the producer-as-auteur and rapper-as-poet. Meanwhile, in the UK, the new cut-price samplers catalysed the ‘DJ record’ fad of 1987 – 8. Influenced by The Art of Noise, Mantronix and Steinski, artists like Coldcut, Bomb The Bass, M/A/R/R/S and S’Express created breakbeat-driven sample-collages that had hip hop’s funky feel but were uptempo enough to slot into a set of house music.

  Critiques of sampling focused on the regurgitative, referential nature of the practice, the gleeful disregard for conventional musical skill, and the fact that these records were brazen extravanganzas of sonic larceny. Enthusiasts promptly seized these accusations and turned them around into proof of sampling’s subversiveness: its transgression of copyright, its punk-style democratization of music-making. Coldcut’s ‘Beats + Pieces’ pre-empted and mocked the anti-sampling fogies with the sleeve slogan ‘Sorry, but this just isn’t music.’

  By 1990, sampladelia had blossomed into a more subtle and covert aesthetic. Hip hop and rave producers increasingly eschewed blatant lifts in favour of microscopic fragments from obscure sources – partly out of a desire to be more creative, and partly because music publishers had their hawk-eyes trained on the extra royalties they could glean by prosecuting unauthorized usage of their clients’ compositions. Once the sampling-as-theft notion dropped off the agenda, attitudes to the instrument split between postmodernist versus modernist. For some, the sampler is still a tool for collage, for elaborate games of Pop Art referentiality. For others, the sampler represents an easy-as-pie update of musique concrète’s tricky and time-consuming tape-splicing techniques. Here, digital technology functions as a crucible for sonic alchemy – the transmutation of source material into something ‘new’, sounds that seemingly originate from imaginary or even unimaginable instruments. The guiding ethos is a fierce conviction that all samples must be masked, all sources unrecognizable. Yet there’s a sense in which this approach reduces the sampler to a synthesizer, and thereby misses what is truly idiomatic to the machine: taking the known and making it strange, yet still retaining an uncanny, just-recognizable trace of the original’s aura.

  In late nineties dance music, sampladelia mostly falls somewhere between these two poles of postmodernist referentiality and musique concrète re-creation. The texture of these tracks still has a touched-by-human-hand feel, but the lifts are sufficiently brief or arcane as to preclude triggering specific pop-cultural associations in the listener. The model of creativity here is seventies jazz fusion; not only is the ideology borrowed from that period, but so are most of the samples. A lot of trip hop and jungle is basically fusion on the cheap: instead of a band jamming together, the producer is like a band-leader deftly arranging the expert playing of musicians from different genres and eras.

  Trip hopper Howie B, for instance, described his track ‘Martian Economics’ as a ‘collaboration . . . like me doing a tune with [keyboard legend] Jimmy Smith, even though he wasn’t there.’ For Howie B and similar artists like Beck and DJ Shadow, part of the creative process is the pre-production research of going on record buying sprees, then sifting through hundreds of hours of music for suitable samples. ‘I’ll take anything, it can be as small as a triangle hit, and I’ll spread it across a [sampling] keyboard and turn it into a tuned piano,’ says Howie B. ‘I’ll take a Latin timbale recorded in 1932
and make it into a percussion pattern, or snatch some vocal and take it four octaves down until it’s a lion’s roar.’

  The Body Electric

  Although it can be performed live, techno is rarely born in real-time. Rather, electronic music is programmed and assembled sequence by sequence, layer by layer. Even the separate constituents of a track, like keyboard riffs and arpeggios, don’t necessarily come into being as a discrete musical event. Step-writing, a technique whereby sequences are written on the computer screen, allows for the note-by-note construction of complicated riffs that are often beyond the real-time capababilities of even the most dextrous keyboardist. Not only does this make it easy to correct errors and add nuances, but sequences can be rearranged, run backwards and generally fucked around with on a trial-and-error basis. Furthermore, the same basic riff-pattern can be played in any ‘color’, with the musicians free to choose from a vast sonic palette of synthesized instruments and self-invented sampladelic timbres.

  On the surface, this would appear to be a radical break with the spontaneism of rock ’n’ roll. In truth, from very early on in the music’s history, rock bands used studio technology to correct mistakes and overdub extra instrumental parts, if only to make the records sound as densely vibrant as the live band. In Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock, Theodore Gracyk argues that it is precisely rock’s interest in phonography (the art of recording) that separates it from folk and jazz, where records are usually documents of a performance. In folk and jazz, it is respectively the song and the improvisation that count; in rock, the record is the basic unit of musical meaning. In this respect, hip hop and techno represent the apotheosis of rock’s interest in sound-in-itself (timbre, effects) and virtual space (unrealistic acoustics).