The truth lies somewhere between these two poles of expressive subjectivity and objective functionalism. Even when s/he is trying to express feelings, rather than simply make something (some thing) that works on the dancefloor, the techno auteur is not present in the art work in the way that the singer/songwriter can be said to be present in rock. For rock critics, the Song is a mini-novel, a story (either personal confession or character study). As instrumental music, techno is closer to the plastic arts or architecture than literature, in that it involves the creation of an imaginary environment.
The material with which the techno auteur works – timbre/texture, rhythm and space – are precisely those elements that rock criticism ignores in favour of meaning, which is extracted almost exclusively from close study of lyrics and persona. Rock critics use techniques borrowed from literary criticism or sociology to interpret rock in terms of the singer’s biography/neurosis, or the music’s social relevance. Devoid of text, dance music and ambient are better understood using metaphors from the visual arts: ‘the soundscape’, ‘aural decor’, ‘a soundtrack for an imaginary movie’, ‘audio-sculpture’.
But these metaphors aren’t really satisfactory either, since they tend towards the static (fine for ambient, but not for dance music). Dance music happens through time (it moves) and it’s kinaesthetic (it makes you move). Dance tracks are less about ‘communication’ in the rock sense and more like engines for ‘the programming of sensations’ (Susan Sontag). Triggering motor/muscular reflexes and recalibrating your body, the rhythms and textures of jungle, trance, garage, etc., each make you move through the world in a different way.
Of course, rock is also rich with non-verbal elements; a hefty proportion of its pleasure and power reside in the sound, the groove, the riff. Nonetheless, critics continue to discuss rock as a series of stories or statements. Because it isn’t figurative (it gets rid of both the singer and the persona/character in the song), dance music intensifies the non-referential but deeply evocative/provocative aspects at work in all forms of music – the very stuff that criticism can’t handle (in both senses of the word). From the text-biased vantage of rock criticism, dance music is troubling precisely because it seems to be all materiality and no meaning. Entirely an appeal to the body and the senses, it offers no food for thought. Mere ear-candy, it gives you an ‘empty’ sugar-rush.
In this respect, techno and house exacerbate the original sins of disco, which was dissed by rock fans and crits as superficial and lyrically trite. Rave music completes the trajectory began by disco when it depersonalized the vocal mannerisms of funk and soul. In techno and house, vocals are either eliminated or survive mostly as soul-diva samples, which are diced, processed, and moulded like some ectoplasmic substance. Rave music doesn’t so much abolish ‘soul’ as disperse it across the entire field of sound. This is music that’s all erogenous surface and no depth, ‘skin’ without ‘heart’.
The Imagineer
Sampladelic dance music also problematizes standard notions about creativity and authorship in pop music. Not only is the Romantic figure of the Creator displaced by the less glamorous curator (the DJ-TURNED-PRODUCER), but the lines between art and craft, inspiration and technique, are blurred. Once, it was possible to distinguish between music and its production, between the song and the recording tricks with which it’s embellished. But with dance tracks, the music is the production. Increasingly, the figure of the producer blurs with the engineer, traditionally regarded as a mere technician who facilitates the sonic ideas and aspirations of band and producer. In most dance music, though, it’s the timbre and penetration of a bass-tone, the sensuous feel of a sample-texture, the gait of a drum-loop, that’s the real hook, not the sequence of notes that constitutes ‘the melody’.
All this has ignited a hotbed of fiercely contested questions about publishing credits and payment. Where do you draw the line between producer/engineer and composer? The rise of figures like Rob Playford (Goldie’s partner), Howie B, Nico Sykes of No U Turn, is proof that we need to start thinking of the engineer as poet, as weaver-of-dreams. Once ‘creativity’ and ‘composition’ have been reconceptualized in this way, the history of rock suddenly looks different. Why does the law say that you can’t copyright a beat or a sound? Why did Mick Jagger and Keith Richards get the publishing credit and royalties for ‘Satisfaction’, when it’s Charlie Watts’s drum part that provides the song’s killer hook? We might start to rethink James Brown as simultaneously the CEO and the public trademark of a funk corporation, an early seventies polyrhythm-factory churning out breakbeats, B-lines, horn-stabs and rhythm-guitar tics – quality components of such machine-tooled durability they’re still being cannabilized by engineer/producers in rap and jungle today. Instead of J. B.’s ponderous ballads and portentous Soul Statesmanship, we might consider his greatest contribution to this legacy to be his sex-machine repertoire of hyper-syncopated vocal grunts and gasps.
Special Effects
The problems that rock critics have with dance music are reminiscent of the hostile incomprehension with which highbrow cineastes greet certain sorts of genre movie like science fiction and horror. Cinephiles vainly search these movies for what they valourize: great acting, sparkling dialogue, character development, a non-corny plot, and meaning (insight into the human condition, social resonance). Ironically, these are values that pertain more to literary or theatrical drama, than to the cinematic per se.
But these elements of narrative and character are present in genre movies as mere formality, a structural framework for the purely cinematic: the retinal intensities of ultra-violent action, special effects, and (in sci-fi movies) futuristic mise-en-scène and decor. Here, the true filmic poets are set designers like H. R. Giger (Alien) and effects-engineers like Douglas Trumbull (2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters , Blade Runner). With their emphasis on the sheerly spectacular and sensational, science-fiction and horror flicks simply take after their literary sources. In William Gibson’s novels, what you read for are his prose-poem evocations of cyberspace as a techno-sublime, not the hackneyed dialogue.
If techno can be thought of in this way (the track as a framework for the display of special effects and processing), what, then, constitutes the ‘sublime’ in techno? The answer is sound-in-itself. ‘If I can’t create a sound that I like, I find it very hard to create a song,’ Kevin Saunderson told Music Technology magazine in 1988. ‘I get inspired by a good sound . . . it gives me a feeling for a rhythm or a melody. The sound’s the most important thing.’ In most music, timbre and ‘chromatics’ are the medium, the pigment as it were, through which the important thing – the melody, the emotional meaning – is expressed. In techno, melody is merely an implement or ruse for the displaying of texture/timbre/sound-matter. This is why most rave music shuns complicated melody-lines in favour of riffs, vamps and ostinatos (short motifs repeated persistently at the same pitch throughout the composition). In the ultra-minimalist ‘tech-house’ of the Basic Channel and Chain Reaction labels, simple riffs serve to twist and crinkle the sound-fabric in order to best show off its properties; what you thrill to is the scintillating play of ‘light’ as it creases and folds, crumples and kinks.
The Now-Machine
‘The richer the sensory interface, the more reduced is the function of narrative.’
– Scott Bukatman on video games, Terminal Identity
Basic Channel and Chain Reaction tracks have a curious quality: listening to them is sublime, but afterwards it’s hard to retain anything but the faintest flavour of the experience. Bar the odd bassline, there’s nothing you can hum to yourself. This is because the tracks are all percussion and timbre, the two elements of music that are hardest to memorize. In Rhythm and Noise, Gracyk points out that our memory of chromatics (timbre/texture in music, colour in painting) fades faster than our memory of pitch and line. Similarly, timbre and space cannot be notated on a score. Yet it’s these amnesiac, ineffable, untranscribable elements in music that are the
most bliss-rich.
In The Pleasures of The Text, Roland Barthes argues that ‘criticism is always historical or prospective . . . the presentation of bliss is forbidden it: its preferred material is culture, which is everything in us except our present’. Timbre, rhythm, space: these elements in music are all related to sensuously overwhelming immediacy. They are the now-intensive elements in rock and in techno. Rock began the work that techno completed: accentuating rhythm, elevating timbre (distortion, effects, grain-of-the-voice), opening up dub-space. Structurally, rock and techno both fit theorist Andrew Chester’s notion of intensional music (complexity achieved through modulation and inflection of simple melodic units, as in African music), as opposed to the extensional structures of Western classical music (theme and variations, crisis and resolution).
Techno and house create a subtly different form of heightened immediacy to African music – a sort of future-now. (This is an effect of the music’s reliance on the vamp – originally a brief introductory passage repeated several times before a solo or verse in order to whip up anticipation, but in techno sometimes making up the whole body of the track.) Timbre-saturated, repetitive but tilted always to the next now, techno is an immediacy-machine, stretching time into a continuous present. Which is where the drug/technology interface comes into play. Not just because techno works well with substances like MDMA, marijuana, LSD, speed, etc., which all amplify the sensory intensity of the present moment. But because the music itself drugs the listener, looping consciousness then derailing it, stranding it in a nowhere/ nowhen, where there is only sensation, ‘where now lasts longer’.
SIXTEEN
FUCK DANCE, LET’S ART
THE POST-RAVE
EXPERIMENTAL
FRINGE
‘All the people I know make music in their bedrooms, and it’s more personal because you’re not thinking about clubs. When I go to a studio, I see people working with the specific intention to make people dance. But working in your bedroom, it’s more like art.’
– Luke Vibert (Wagon Christ/Plug)
By the end of 1995, a new zone of music-making had emerged out of the ruins of ‘electronic listening music’: a sort of post-rave omni-genre wherein techno’s purity was ‘contaminated’ by an influx of ideas from jungle, trip hop, all over. Not particularly danceable, yet too restlessly rhythmic and texturally startling to be ambient chill-out, this music might be dubbed art-tekno, since the only appropriate listener response is a sort of fascinated contemplation. Imagine a museum dedicated not to the past but the future, where you marvel at the bizarre audio-sculptures, let your ears wander through the sound-installations, and boggle at the noise contraptions as they go about their pointless, captivating tasks.
One of the earliest events dedicated to this new omni-genre, the Electronic Lounge, was actually situated in the bar at an art gallery, London’s ICA (Institute for Contemporary Arts). Other audio-salons opened in artists’ studios (New York’s Soundlab), or in pub basements (London’s The Rumpus Room); some evolved out of the old chill-out side-rooms at clubs and raves. Dubbed ‘freestyle’, ‘eclectro’ and, in New York, ‘illbient’, these events were dedicated to the astounding, near-heretical notion that you might get a series of DJs playing different styles of music during one night, or even DJs who mixed up different genres/tempos in a single set (typically, a melange of trip hop, E-Z listening, soundtrack music, mellow drum and bass and nouveau electro).
These clubs were a response to the emergence of a new post-rave/ post-rap/post-rock perimeter-zone where refugees, fleeing the shackles of genre and the constraining expectations of scene, gathered to trade ideas. This circuit of home-studio, bedroom boffins includes Mike Paradinas (μ-Ziq/Jake Slazenger), Bedouin Ascent, Scanner, David Toop, Patrick Pulsinger, Matthew Herbert (Wishmountain/Dr Rockit), Mouse On Mars, Squarepusher, Luke Vibert (Wagon Christ/Plug), plus former avant-rock musicians like Kevin Martin (Techno-Animal/The Sidewinder/The Bug) and Mark Clifford (Seefeel/Disjecta). Alongside eyecatching, exquisitely packaged, collector-fetish singles and EPs – released by labels like Clear, Sahko, Cheap, Sabotage, Leaf – the prime format for art-tekno is the compilation, as with Lo Recordings’ Extreme Possibilities and United Mutations series, or the Kevin Martin compiled Macro Dub Infection anthologies.
How is this new post-rave/post-everything music different from Warp’s electronic listening music? The latter was always limited by its neo-Detroit purism (no breakbeats), plus the perennial ‘progressive’ anti-dance stance. As a result, ‘intelligent techno was definitely rather anaemic on the rhythmic side’, as Kingsuk Biswas of Bedouin Ascent put it. In 1995, jungle’s polyrhythmic exuberance gave techno a hefty and sorely needed kick up the arse, forcing it to liven up its ideas about rhythm. Richard James, for instance, responded with the inspired breakbeat tomfoolery of AFX’s ‘Hangable Auto Bulb’ EPs and Aphex Twin’s ‘Girl/Boy’ EP.
This renewed interest in percussive complexity remains oddly cerebral in cast, though. In freestyle salons, headnodding rather than bootyshaking is the order of the day, and there’s no drug factor, just beer and an occasional, discreet spliff. This is a mostly bourgeois-bohemian milieu of rootless cosmopolitans, rather than a hardcore dance scene. In the structural sense of the word, as opposed to its pejorative meaning, the post-rave experimental fringe is parasitic on drug-and-dance driven scenes, hijacking their ideas and giving them an avant-garde twist.
Take the mini-genre of jungle by non-junglists for non-junglists – AFX, Plug, Witchman, Squarepusher – that is sometimes jocularly referred to as ‘drill and bass’, because the breakbeats are so sped up they sound like Woody Woodpecker on PCP. Because these producers don’t belong to the drum and bass community, they’re free to take the idiomatic features of jungle – fucked-up breakbeats, mutant bass, sampladelic collage – and exacerbate them way beyond any conceivable use-value to DJ or dancer. Not only are the beats so convoluted and body-baffling they’d clear any dancefloor instantly, but the Dada absurdism of the samples creates a mood of whimsy that doesn’t fit either of the two moods the jungle community demands: genteel and smooth-rollin’ at ‘intelligent’ clubs, menacing ’n’ mashed-up at hard-steppin’ joints.
So AFX’s ‘Children Talking’ pivots around daft soundbites of a little kid talking about ‘mashed potatoes’, while on Aphex Twin’s ‘Milk Man’, Richard James actually sings a wistful ditty in the persona of a small boy who wishes he could get milk ‘from the milkman’s wife’s tits’. And on Squarepusher’s Feed Me Weird Things and Hard Normal Daddy, Tom Jenkinson replaces jungle’s booming low-end with twiddly fretless slap-bass, played by himself à la fusioneer Jaco Pastorius. The most quirked-out examples from this quasi-jungle genre are Luke Vibert’s first two Plug EPs Visible Crater Funk and Rebuilt Kev. Here jungle’s breakbeat-science gets warped into Heath Robinson/Professor Brainstorm-style mad inventor mayhem. Plug tracks resemble cranked-up, cantankerous contraptions gone haywire; their grotesquely contorted polyrhythms will tie your limbs in knots if you’re fool enough to dance. Needless to say, the reaction from the junglist community has been muted.
Twisted Science
A stylistic nomad, Luke Vibert is a prime exponent of the post-everything omni-genre. After the glacial ambience of his Wagon Christ 1994 debut Phat Lab Nightmare, Vibert veered off into cheesy-but-deranged trip hop with Throbbing Pouch. Over moonwalking mid-tempo breakbeats and bulbous bass, Vibert wafts a pungent fug of samples: keening strings, jazz-fusion woodwinds, E-Z listening orchestration, film-noir incidental themes, Moog synth, vibes, slap-bass, owl hoots, doowop harmonies, android vocals, etc. Vibert has an alchemist’s approach to sampling. It’s all about ‘getting good sounds out of absolute shit. I listen to piles of cheesy records. For some reason I tend to only sample stuff I don’t like!’
At times, Throbbing Pouch’s effect is like you’re drowning and the entirety of late twentieth-century music is flashing before your ears, garbled and grotesquely intermingled. ‘Phase Everyday’ flits from ja
zz-funk nonchalance to acid-house pulserama to dubbed-up desolation within the space of a minute. Tracks like ‘Down Under’ and ‘Scrapes’ are animated audio-mazes, sonic labyrinths that mutate through time as well as elaborate through space, and whose honeycomb chambers and corridors seem alive with detail. Where most trip hop demands a prone attitude of stoned passivity from its listener, Wagon Christ music stones you. This is blunted music with an edge.
On the subject of drugs, Vibert once told The Wire: ‘They’re my best mate, they changed the way I heard everything.’ ‘Actually, I said “hash is my best mate”!’, Luke told me. ‘That’s not true anymore, but originally it did open my mind to different sorts of music, ’cos I was a bit narrow-minded. Smoking went hand in hand with getting into dub and funk.’ If marijuana is one reason Vibert’s work is so disorientating, another is the queasy fluctuation of pitch he often employs, making the Wagon Christ material sound like a cross between Schoenberg and jazz-funk. Luke uses a feature on his sampler that allows him to modulate pitch and explore fractions of a tone, echoing the ‘microton-ality’ of avant-classical composition and much non-Western musics, like Indian ragas. Hip hop often has that smeared-pitch, detuned quality too, because, Luke explained, ‘when you put samples together, they’re usually not going to be in tune. If you get them synched up time-wise, they’re almost always off-key. And that’s a wicked effect – the samples sort of gnaw at each other!’
Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture Page 50
