Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture

by Simon Reynolds

  Kinder-Tekno

  Sometimes the world of post-rave electronica resembles nothing so much as a kindergarten, full of little boys daubing texture-goo on the walls and moulding sample-stuff like Play-Doh. Nobody better fits the metaphor of art-tekno as an ‘adventure playground for the imagination’ than German duo Mouse On Mars. Andi Toma and Jan St Werner met in a health-food store when they both got embroiled in an argument over who should get the last packet of muesli. They decided to share it. Then they discovered they both made music, and decided to share sounds, setting off an adventure that has resulted in some of the most captivating, enchanted-with-itself electronica around.

  Mouse On Mars are as much a post-rock band as a post-techno outfit; they are influenced more by Can, Neu! and the Beach Boys (‘Die Seele Von Brian Wilson’ sampled a fragment of lunatic doo-wop from ‘Wind Chimes’) than by Kraftwerk. ‘When we play live, sometimes people don’t even realize we’re an electronic band,’ claimed Andi. ‘We use guitars, which we put through effects and try to make fit harmonically with the sequenced and sampled elements.’

  The title of Mouse On Mars’s 1994 debut Vulvaland sounds risqué, but it couldn’t be more innocent: it was inspired by an imaginary island in the German kids’ TV marionette-show Ausenberger Puppen-tiste . ‘It’s called Lummerland,’ Jan told me, ‘but we adapted it to Vulvaland. That’s our idea of a utopia that’s here and now, not in the future where you can’t reach it. Everyone has their own kind of Vulvaland where they like to go.’ With the second album Iahora Tahiti, ‘It’s like we’ve left Vulvaland and are now ready for adventures. Iahora Tahiti could be a pirate cry – “We conquer Tahiti!” ’

  Ensconced in their studio-playpen, Andi and Jan treat their machines like playmates. ‘We don’t like to control them,’ Andi told me. ‘We trust them, let them do their own thing. If the computer goes mad because there’s a thunderstorm coming and too much static in the air, and it makes a strange noise, we are very happy to use it. The machines have maximum freedom, the people have maximum freedom; they should care for each other.’ Mouse On Mars music is built up from multiple layers of exquisitely naïve, music-box melodies. ‘I like music-boxes a lot,’ says Jan. ‘It’s magical – like someone smiling really strangely. I always get, how you say, a goose-skin? Goosepimples!’ The duo prefer simple melodies because they don’t distract from the pair’s real priority, ‘the melody of sound’: succulent, stroke-able textures, timbres so tantalizing you want to taste or touch them, a whole palette of glow-tones and chime-colours.

  Rhizomatic Renegades

  In the late nineties, the German-speaking world has emerged as a bastion of post-everything experimentalism. In Austria, there’s the abstract hip hop of Patrick Pulsinger and Erdum Tunakan’s Cheap label, and the twisted neo-electro of Sabotage (both a label and a sort of art-terrorist collective). In Germany, Cologne and its neighbour Dusseldorf form a closeknit art-tekno/post-rock milieu that encompasses Mike Ink, Dr Walker, Pluramon, To Rococo Rot, Mouse On Mars and Jan St Werner’s side project Microstoria. On a less avant-garde and more cyberpunk tip, Berlin has spawned the anti-rave scene called Digital Hardcore. Finally there’s Frankfurt, home to Mille Plateaux and its sister labels Force Inc, Riot Beats and Chrome.

  Frankfurt is simultaneously Germany’s financial capital and a longstanding centre of anti-capitalist theory, thanks to the famous ‘Frankfurt School’ (Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer et al). Today, the Frankfurt School is mostly remembered for its neo-Marxist/high Modernist disdain for popular culture as the twentieth-century’s opiate-of-the-people. Adorno is regularly used as an Aunt Sally figure by cultural studies academics as a prequel to their semiotic readings of ‘anti-hegemonic resistance’ encoded in Madonna videos. While there’s no denying Adorno deserves derision for his infamously suspect comments about the ‘eunuch-like sound’ of jazz (whose secret message was ‘give up your masculinity, let yourself be castrated’), his critique of pop culture’s role as safety valve and social control is not so easily shrugged off. His verdict on the swing-jazz inspired frenzies of the jitterbug – ‘merely to be carried away by anything at all, to have something of their own, compensates for their impoverished and barren existence’ – could easily be transposed to nineties rave culture, which – from happy hardcore to gabba to Goa trance – is now rigidly ritualized and conservative.

  Mille Plateaux shares something of the Frankfurt School’s oppositional attitude to mass culture. For label boss Achim Szepanski, Germany’s rave industry – which dominates the pop mainstream – is so institutionalized and regulated it verges on the totalitarian. Named after Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (a colossal tome that Foucault hailed as ‘an introduction to the non-fascist life’), Mille Plateaux release deconstruction techno. Situating their activity both within and against the genre conventions of post-rave styles like electronica, house, jungle and trip hop, Mille Plateaux point out these musics’ premature closures and seize their missed opportunities.

  Szepanski got involved in student politics in the radical, post-1968 climate of the mid-seventies. He read Marx, flirted with Maoism, protested conditions in the German prison system. Later in the decade, he immersed himself in the post-punk experimentalist scene alongside the likes of D.A.F., playing in the industrial band P16D4. In the eighties he went back to college, watched the Left die and got very depressed, consoling himself with alcohol and the misanthropic philosophy of E. M. Cioran. Two late eighties breakthroughs pulled him out of the mire: his encounter with the post-structuralist thought of Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida, et al, and his excitement about hip hop and house. While still working on a doctorate about Foucault, he started the first DJ-oriented record store in Frankfurt and founded the Blackout label.

  By the early nineties, Szepanski was tripping out to A Thousand Plateaus. The experience was revelatory and galvanizing, because Deleuze and Guattari’s theories showed him ‘that you don’t have to be negative or sad if you want to be militant, even if what you fight against is very bad. The Frankfurt School and Marxism has a very linear interpretation of history and a totalizing view of society, whereas Deleuze and Guattari say that society is more than just the economy and the state, it’s a multitude of sub-systems, and local struggles.’ From this, Achim conceived the strategy of context-based subversion which informs his labels: hard-techno and house with Force Inc, electronica with Mille Plateaux, jungle with Riot Beats, trip hop with the Electric Ladyland compilations, techstep with Chrome. These interventions are situated somewhere between parody and riposte, demonstrating what these genres could really be like if they lived up to or exceeded their accompanying ‘progressive’ rhetoric.

  Founded in 1991, Force Inc was initially influenced by Detroit renegades Underground Resistance: not just sonically, but by ‘their whole anti-corporate, anti-commodification of dance stance’. In its first year, Force Inc’s neo-Detroit/Chicago acieed sound and ‘guerrilla parties’ had a lot of impact in Germany. But as trance tedium took over in 1992, Force Inc ‘made a radical break,’ towards an ‘abstract industrial’ version of breakbeat hardcore that weirdly paralleled the proto-jungle emerging in Britain. Szepanski and Co even loved the much derided sped-up squeaky-voice tracks that ruled UK rave in 1992. ‘Maybe it was just our peculiar warped interpretation, but the sped-up vocals sounded like a serious attempt to deconstruct pop music. One dimension to this was using sampled voices like instruments or noise, destroying the pop ideology that says that the voice is the expression of the human subject.’

  In 1993 – 4, Szepanski watched aghast as rave went overground in Germany, with ‘the return of melody, New Age elements, insistently kitsch harmonies and timbres’. With this degeneration of the underground sound came the consolidation of a German rave establishment, centred around the party organization Mayday and its record label Low Spirit, music channel Viva TV, and Berlin’s annual and massive street rave, Love Parade. The charts were swamped with Low Sp
irit pop-rave smashes like ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow’ and ‘Tears Don’t Lie’ (based on tunes from musicals or German folk music), while the ‘intelligent’ alternative was the middlebrow trance of Sven Vath and his Harthouse label.

  For Achim, what happened to German rave illustrated Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of ‘deterritorialization’ and ‘reterritorialization’. Deterritorialization is when a culture gets all fluxed up – as with punk, early rave, jungle – resulting in a breakthrough into new aesthetic, social and cognitive spaces. Reterritorialization is the inevitable stabilization of chaos into a new order: the internal emergence of style codes and orthodoxies, the external co-optation of subcultural energy by the leisure industry. Szepanski has a groovy German word for what rave, once so liberating, turned into: freizeitknast, a pleasure-prison. Regulated experiences, punctual rapture, predictable music. Szepanski talks of how ‘techno today is stabilized and regulated by an overcoding machine (the combination of major labels, rave organizations, mass media)’. Rave started as anarchy (illegal parties, pirate radio, social/ racial/sexual mixing) but quickly became a form of cultural fascism. ‘The techniques of mass-mobilization and crowd-consciousness have similarities to fascism. Fascism was mobilizing people for the war-machines, rave is mobilizing people for pleasure-machines . . .’

  Just as Force Inc worked with and against the demands of the dancefloor, Mille Plateaux began in 1994 as sort of an answer to ‘electronic listening music’. For Szepanski, if not so explicitly for the roster of Steel, Gas, Cristian Vogel, et al, Mille Plateaux output is the musical praxis to Deleuzian theory, sonically fleshing out concepts such as ‘rhizomatic’. The rhizome – meaning a network of stems, like grass or ferns, that are laterally connected, as opposed to ‘hierarchical’ root-systems like trees – is used by Deleuze and Guattari to evoke a kind of polymorphous perversity of the body politic. ‘Rhizomatic’ music might include the fractal, flow-motion funk of Can and early seventies Miles Davis (based around the ‘nobody solos and everybody solos’ principle), dub reggae (with its dismantling of the normal ranking of instruments in the mix), and the cut ’n’ splice mixology of hip hop, house and jungle DJs.

  Rather than fusion, this is a fissile aesthetic. Achim talks of achieving a ‘synthesization of heterogenous sounds and material through a kind of composition that holds the sound elements together without them losing their heterogeneity’. He talks, in fluent Deleuze-speak, of ‘disjunctive singularities’, ‘music without centre, radically fractured . . . and conflicting’, of opening up ‘a continuum of infinite variations in which the sound material molecularizes’, and of ‘sound-streams’ that simulate the sound of the cosmic rauschen (an evocative German word whose meanings include ‘rustle’, ‘roar’ and ‘rush’).

  The music that most substantiates Szepanski’s high-falutin’ rhetoric can be found, appropriately enough, on In Memoriam Gilles Deleuze, a double CD tribute assembled by Mille Plateaux following Deleuze’s suicide in 1995 at age seventy. Highlights include Alec Empire’s ‘Bon Voyage’, a Stockhausen-meets-The Clangers electro-blip reverbscape; Christophe Charles’s ‘Undirections/Continuum’, a (musique) concrète jungle of found sounds, tone-blobs and reversed glissandi; and Rome’s ‘Intermodal’, a dyslexic drone-mosaic of echo/reverb effects and grievously processed bass. The most interesting Mille Plateaux artists are making a modern successor to electro-acoustic and musique concrete, but by using sampling and other forms of digital technology, rather than the more antiquated and tricksy methods of manual tape-splicing used by avant-classical composers. Mille Plateaux’s star act, the Berlin duo Oval, recall Karlheinz Stockhausen – not just with the densely-textured disorientation of their music, but with their rarefied discourse and further-out-than-thou hauteur vis-à-vis their contemporaries.

  Interviewing Oval is challenging. Their methods are obscure, their theory fabulously arcane, their utterances marinated in irony. Humble enquiries about backgrounds and influences are met with rolling of the eyes, sniggers, and ‘next question!’ Tentative characterizations of their activity are treated as a reduction or misrepresentation of the Oval project.

  Perhaps all that can be safely said is that Oval’s ‘music’ offers an uncanny, seductive beauty of treacherous surfaces and labyrinthine recesses. Their two Mille Plateaux albums Systemich and 94 Diskont are the most swoon-inducing records I’ve heard since My Bloody Valentine’s ‘To Here Knows When’. The twenty minute long ‘Do While’ for instance, is like Spacemen 3’s Playing With Fire pulverized into a million fluorescent splinters, then tiled into a ‘musaic’ grotto of impossible acoustics and refractory glints. Lovely, in an insidious, synapse-lacerating way.

  Much effort clearly went into making something endlessly listenable, yet Oval have confused their admirers by insisting in interviews that music is not one of their interests. Turns out this isn’t strictly true: ‘Our effort constantly oscillates between a very conscious and affirmative use of music technology, and an often clueless, ‘critical’ abuse of that technology,’ says Markus Popp. ‘We always wanted to offensively suggest something “new” from “outside” or “before” the digital domain. “Before”, in that everything we have released so far could easily have been done on a couple of reel-to-reel tape machines . . .’

  Yet Oval’s activity is dependent on nineties digital technology. According to Popp, the trio’s impetus is to expose the ‘conditions and constraints under which music in the nineties is created’, and by extension, to interrogate the entire technology-mediated nature of today’s information society. ‘Experimentation in music, at least nowadays, is for most people a tame, safely “guided tour” through MIDI software and hardware,’ says Popp. ‘Most of the music produced by using this equipment proved to be no more than a predictable effect of the hardware or software involved.’

  Oval resist this deadlock, or expose it, by having ‘an audible user-interface’. In nuts and bolts terms, this involves fucking with the hardware and software that organizes and enables today’s post-rave electronica. Most critical of these technologies is MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface), which allows different pieces of equipment to be co-ordinated like the players in a band, or instrumental ‘voices’ in an orchestra. Despite, or rather because of, MIDI technology’s reliance on this ‘deplorably dated music-metaphor’, Oval deliberately use its sonic syntax, because their real interest is in standardization. They combat the ‘determinism within these programmes’ by erasing the manufacturer’s distinction between ‘features’ and ‘bugs’. Just as Hendrix aestheticized feedback (a ‘bug’ or improper effect immanent in the electric guitar but hitherto unexploited) and hip hoppers abused the stylus and turntable, Oval fuck with digital technology: by tampering with MIDI hardware and, most famously, by deliberately damaging and painting over CDs. Taking the unhappy CD player’s anguished noises – glitches, skips, and distressed cyber-muzik generated when the machine tries to calculate and compensate for missing algorhythmic information – Oval painstakingly assembled the material into the glistening audio-maze that is Diskont.

  Typically recalcitrant, Oval reject terms like ‘sabotage’ or ‘vandalism’ to describe the CD-treatments. ‘Vandalizing?’ sneers Popp. ‘In my perspective, the CD treatments are only a humble attempt to reestablish a decent, tangible, material basis for one of many possible musical stances in the nineties. It’s our personal, tiny aesthetic margin for intervention from within software.’ Oval do use the word ‘disobedience’, though, which also has a frisson of subversion. But perhaps the term that best describes Oval’s oblique strategies is deconstruction, at least in its precise original meaning: Derrida and Co’s close, rigorous reading of philosophical texts in order to unsettle the terms of post-Enlightenment thought from within. Deconstruction involved unravelling the rhetorical tropes and purely literary sleights that compose any text’s supposedly rational argument; it meant exposing the text’s blindspots, paradoxes and hidden complicities. Oval similarly talk of engaging in a kind of non-
antagonistic dialogue with corporate digital culture, with Sony, IBM, Microsoft, Roland, Apple.

  Blindspots and contradictions abound in Oval’s own rhetoric. They speak in punk-style anyone-can-do-it terms of deliberately keeping their activity at the ‘lowest entry-level’, of not wanting ‘to convey an image of arcane technology and years of expert study in digital signal processing and programming’. Yet their discourse is often absurdly forbidding and user-unfriendly. Then there’s the way they deny any musical intentions, only to later come close to characterizing their project as an enrichment of music; they claim the invention of a ‘completely new music-paradigm’, or even ‘a new kind of perception’. The next step for Oval is the realm of the interactive; they are working on a kind of digital authoring system. ‘It’s not exactly CD-ROM or hypertext,’ explains Popp. ‘But it will involve guiding the user through some kind of design-environment, and basically enabling people to make Oval records themselves.’

  Party for Your Right to Fight

  When asked about his relationship to techno, Oval’s labelmate Alec Empire declares bluntly: ‘Rave is dead, it’s boring! House is disco and techno is progressive rock.’ An engaging fellow who’s constantly laughing, usually at his own utterances, Alec Empire divides his energy between fostering the Berlin-based anti-rave scene called Digital Hardcore, and recording as a solo artist for Mille Plateaux and Force Inc, where his output ranges from the edgy eclecticism of Limited Editions 1990 – 94 and Generation Star Wars to the sombre fugue-state electronica of Low On Ice and the psycho-kitsch of Hypermodern Jazz 2000.5 (a sort of twisted riposte to the E-Z listening fad).