Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (87 page)
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Authors: Simon Reynolds
BOOK: Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture
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Metrohaus, I call it: DJs like Superpitcher and Mayer are well groomed, willowy, epicene types, and the places they play tend to be designer bars with glitzy-but-arty decor. Microhouse appeals to European middle-class youth, kids who are bohemian in their drug taking and sexual freedom but bourgeois in their love of designer commodities and careerism (typically working in media, the arts, design, computing). The music found a similarly urban but ninety-nine per cent white (and Europhile) audience in America.
Microhouse is a post-rave sound: you can get fucked up to it, drugs definitely enhance the rich detail in the sound, but it’s not essential, because the energy level of the house tempo doesn’t demand cranking up your nervous system artificially. The music appeals to the mind and the body in equal measure, works as well at home as in the club. Personally, I found it the default option for when you had people round for dinner, perfect audio decor (how metrosexual is that!) Artists like Isolee and Koze hit just the right median point between stimulating and unobtrusive: the music wasn’t bland, but it didn’t impose itself either.
Because the model was house rather than rave, though, the slow builds and the plateau-like chug-chug-chug of it all make for a bit of a
level
experience in the club. And the detail-oriented aesthetic, with its minute, occasionally verging-on-imperceptible fluctuations of texture resulted in an oddly centreless music that left people who’d been through the rave heyday like myself crying out for some full throttle, for-the-jugular energy. Avoiding the ‘rude ’n’ cheesy’ side of rave, microhouse is a connoisseur sound, made by and for people who’ve been immersed in the culture for some while and who simply don’t want crass riffs and anthemic hooks. Earlier I mentioned the concept of the Zone of Fruitless Intensification, the numbing death trap that every style of music seems to drive itself into eventually. In micro’s case, that was reached circa 2003 – 4 when the music got too nouvelle-cuisiney.
level
experience in the club. And the detail-oriented aesthetic, with its minute, occasionally verging-on-imperceptible fluctuations of texture resulted in an oddly centreless music that left people who’d been through the rave heyday like myself crying out for some full throttle, for-the-jugular energy. Avoiding the ‘rude ’n’ cheesy’ side of rave, microhouse is a connoisseur sound, made by and for people who’ve been immersed in the culture for some while and who simply don’t want crass riffs and anthemic hooks. Earlier I mentioned the concept of the Zone of Fruitless Intensification, the numbing death trap that every style of music seems to drive itself into eventually. In micro’s case, that was reached circa 2003 – 4 when the music got too nouvelle-cuisiney.
Perhaps that explains why there was a sudden self-generated shift within Eurodance towards the MONSTER RIFF. The biggest European dance-floor anthem of 2004 was ‘Rocker’ by German techno veterans Alter Ego, its crude chugging rhythm and squealing riff blatantly modelled on heavy metal. Rising producers like Black Strobe, Tiefschwarz and Kiki released tracks steeped in the influence of industrial and Goth. Kiki even parodied Andrew Eldritch’s hollow-chested doom-drone baritone on ‘The End Of The World’. Then came a post-Daft Punk wave of French rifftronica spearheaded by the distortion-obsessed duo Justine and the former thrash-metal fans behind the label Ed Banger.
The most peculiar aspect of Eurotronica’s sudden penchant for rocking out was the fad for schaffel. In its simplest form, this meant replacing house’s evenly emphasized four-to-the-floor beat with a 6/8 time signature. If that doesn’t conjure any associations, think ‘Spirit In The Sky’ by Norman Greenbaum. The swing and stomp of early seventies glam rock and glitterbeat was the main inspiration, but another source, authentic to Mittel Europa, was the polka. Wolfgang Voigt can claim to have pioneered the idea of schaffel back in the mid-nineties with his T. Rex sampling Love Inc. track ‘Hot Love’. And it was Kompakt that really pushed the fad in 2004 with schaffel tracks galore and the compilation series
Schaffelfieber (
which translates as
Shuffle Fever
). Titillating as the craze was, schaffel seemed a sure sign that dance had lost its way and had entered a midlife crisis of aesthetic rudderlessness. Through its own evolutionary path, techno had often hit upon rock-like riff structures and blaring noises. But this was something altogether different and really rather lame: the wholesale importation of a rhythmic structure from a thirty-year-old rock fad.
Schaffelfieber (
which translates as
Shuffle Fever
). Titillating as the craze was, schaffel seemed a sure sign that dance had lost its way and had entered a midlife crisis of aesthetic rudderlessness. Through its own evolutionary path, techno had often hit upon rock-like riff structures and blaring noises. But this was something altogether different and really rather lame: the wholesale importation of a rhythmic structure from a thirty-year-old rock fad.
Constant innovation had been a central aspect of rave music’s self-conception from the start. But by the mid-noughties, the movement seemed to be going through the uncomfortable process of shedding that part of its identity and coming to terms with the idea that its own future would no longer involve futurism. If you look at the historical arc of dance music, there’s a striking resemblance with rock’s evolution, except that instead of moving forward in decade phases, the metabolically accelerated rave scene proceeded through five-year units. Dance’s equivalent to the sixties would be 1988 – 92: the era of the first raves, when the music glowed with the starry-eyed euphoria of a culture’s extreme youth and the flow of immortal anthems seemed endless. Next came the seventies, the half-decade from 1993 – 7: a darker, more troubled, but still incomparably rich period of genre fragmentation, drug-malaise-induced darkness, increasing musical complexity (concept albums!) countered by punk-like strategies of renewal-through-reduction. From 1998 – 2002, dance moved into a self-referential and auto-cannibalizing phase akin to the rock eighties: revivalisms galore, fads for electro and synthpop, acid house and early jungle.
How to characterize the muddled period from 2002 – 7? I would argue that this actually resembles the nineties in rock, a
post
-postmodernist phase, rich in invention but lacking a clear direction forward. Grunge, for instance, didn’t dramatically expand the boundaries of the rock form, but neither was it a straightforward revival or retro-eclectic pastiche. Likewise, in recent years the sharpest operators in dance music – Tiefschwarz, LCD Soundsystem, Recloose, Maurice Fulton, Booka Shade – are roughly equivalent to PJ Harvey or Pavement, artists working within an established form but finding new possibilities. Today’s producers have a scholarly knowledge of the history of dance music. They are skilled at getting period-evocative sounds and take delight in hunting down little crevices of obscure, out-of-the-way music (like the early eighties disco-meets-Krautrock-based Cosmic scene in northernmost Italy, inspiration for the ‘space disco’ sound pioneered by Lindstrom). But although the source material they work with is totally precedented and sometimes predates rave itself, these producers cleverly weld disparate elements into composites that feel fresh. It’s the distinction between innovation and originality. We rarely get the shock of the new that the acid-house bass or mentasm noise or jungle breakbeats offered. Instead we get the milder thrills of the subtle twist or artful permutation. Oh, there are still a handful of artists pushing the music into unknown spaces, like the brilliant Chilean-exiled-to-Berlin DJ-producer Ricardo Villalobos, creator of mindbending tracks like ‘Dexter’, whose pendulously gloopy textures make it feel like Time itself is slowing down, or ‘Fizheuer Zieheuer’, a 37-minute-long, emaciated dub-house groove whose sole melodic content consists of horn refrains sampled from a Serbian brass band. But overall, dance music today is recombinant, the soundtrack of an era of consolidation.
post
-postmodernist phase, rich in invention but lacking a clear direction forward. Grunge, for instance, didn’t dramatically expand the boundaries of the rock form, but neither was it a straightforward revival or retro-eclectic pastiche. Likewise, in recent years the sharpest operators in dance music – Tiefschwarz, LCD Soundsystem, Recloose, Maurice Fulton, Booka Shade – are roughly equivalent to PJ Harvey or Pavement, artists working within an established form but finding new possibilities. Today’s producers have a scholarly knowledge of the history of dance music. They are skilled at getting period-evocative sounds and take delight in hunting down little crevices of obscure, out-of-the-way music (like the early eighties disco-meets-Krautrock-based Cosmic scene in northernmost Italy, inspiration for the ‘space disco’ sound pioneered by Lindstrom). But although the source material they work with is totally precedented and sometimes predates rave itself, these producers cleverly weld disparate elements into composites that feel fresh. It’s the distinction between innovation and originality. We rarely get the shock of the new that the acid-house bass or mentasm noise or jungle breakbeats offered. Instead we get the milder thrills of the subtle twist or artful permutation. Oh, there are still a handful of artists pushing the music into unknown spaces, like the brilliant Chilean-exiled-to-Berlin DJ-producer Ricardo Villalobos, creator of mindbending tracks like ‘Dexter’, whose pendulously gloopy textures make it feel like Time itself is slowing down, or ‘Fizheuer Zieheuer’, a 37-minute-long, emaciated dub-house groove whose sole melodic content consists of horn refrains sampled from a Serbian brass band. But overall, dance music today is recombinant, the soundtrack of an era of consolidation.
And what about the legacy of hardcore rave, the burning heartcore of
Energy Flash
? Anyone who actually experienced that nineties surge is going to be spiritually scarred for life. The folk memory of that moment – when future-fucking innovation was massively popular rather than confined to the academic ghetto – has also affected many who came afterwards and didn’t witness it with their own ears. So it’s not surprising that the populist vanguard sounds of hardcore, gabba and jungle still reverberate through the contemporary soundscape. That period serves as the touchstone and prime resource for two of the major genres that emerged in the last ten years, breakcore and dubstep.
Energy Flash
? Anyone who actually experienced that nineties surge is going to be spiritually scarred for life. The folk memory of that moment – when future-fucking innovation was massively popular rather than confined to the academic ghetto – has also affected many who came afterwards and didn’t witness it with their own ears. So it’s not surprising that the populist vanguard sounds of hardcore, gabba and jungle still reverberate through the contemporary soundscape. That period serves as the touchstone and prime resource for two of the major genres that emerged in the last ten years, breakcore and dubstep.
Breakcore could almost be conceived as a riposte to microhouse. The style is patched together from all the rude ’n’ cheesy street sounds that could never be part of the Kompakt universe: jungle, gabba, dancehall, Miami bass, gangstarap, etc. Ironically, the scene started as an offshoot of IDM, aka ‘intelligent dance music’. The connective bridge was the ‘drill ’n’ bass’ sound, the fad for parody-jungle spearheaded by IDM gods Squarepusher, Luke Vibert and Aphex Twin. Although the drill ’n’ bassheads often seemed to be smirking, many actually had genuine affection and admiration for breakbeat hardcore. For some, 1992-and-all-that had been their entry point into electronic music in the first place. One such true fan was Mike Paradinas, aka
μ
- Ziq. Along with the abstract electronica you’d expect, his Planet Mu label became a home for breakcore whippersnappers like Venetian Snares and Shitmat, as well as new music by real-deal hardcore veterans like Producer, Hellfish and Bizzy B. Planet Mu also released an anthology of archival jungle by Remarc entitled
Soundmurderer
.
μ
- Ziq. Along with the abstract electronica you’d expect, his Planet Mu label became a home for breakcore whippersnappers like Venetian Snares and Shitmat, as well as new music by real-deal hardcore veterans like Producer, Hellfish and Bizzy B. Planet Mu also released an anthology of archival jungle by Remarc entitled
Soundmurderer
.
Remarc-style ‘rinse out’ junglizm – the 1994 sound of shredded Amen breaks and ragga samples – is the cornerstone of the breakcore genre. Producers like Venetian Snares made the style even more frenetic and fractured, mashing the Amens until the music became mosh-able rather than danceable. Many breakcore folk had been into hardcore punk before getting into electronic music. The Tigerbeat 6 label in San Francisco became a focus for this emergent breakcore sensibility. Here indie rock’s aesthetic (and
ethic
) of lo-fi and DIY meshed with the obsessive-compulsive geek science of electronica. The result was music perfect for the generation raised on video games, a cartoon-crazy romp riddled with audio pratfalls and sonic japes, an insanely event-
full
sound created by producers seemingly scared witless of losing the listener’s attention.
ethic
) of lo-fi and DIY meshed with the obsessive-compulsive geek science of electronica. The result was music perfect for the generation raised on video games, a cartoon-crazy romp riddled with audio pratfalls and sonic japes, an insanely event-
full
sound created by producers seemingly scared witless of losing the listener’s attention.
Kid 606, the founder of Tigerbeat, was a classic exponent of breakcore’s attention-deficit-disorder style. His records collided IDM mannerisms (post-Oval glitches and hiccups, wisps of Aphex-like melody, graunchy Autechre noise) with lumpen rumpus nicked from a host of ‘Stupid Dance Musics’ – gabba, jungle, ragga et al. Real name Manuel Depredo, the Kid had an almost Tourette’s-level compulsion to be the thorn in IDM’s side, puncturing the scene’s po-faced pomposity. One gambit involved tweaking American IDM fans’ chronic Anglophilia: their worship of first-wave electronic listening music luminaries like Richard D. James, their endless online discussions about Autechre’s ‘granular synthesis’ techniques or the huge sums they’d paid for rare early EPs by Boards of Canada. The Tigerbeat 6 stance was defiantly patriotic and iconoclastic: Depredo’s buddy J. Lesser wrote a track called ‘Markus Popp Can Kiss My Redneck Ass’, followed shortly by Kid 606’s ‘Luke Vibert Can Kiss My Indie-Punk Whiteboy Ass’. In both cases, of course, the sacrilege masked anxiety of influence vis-à-vis the pioneers of – respectively – glitch and drill ’n’ bass. Along with the spiky, sarcastic attitude, another punk-rock trait was Tigerbeat’s emphasis on live performance, which broke with the IDM norm of static laptop twiddlers. Lesser often stage-dived mid-set, while Blectum from Blechdom, a female duo whose music collided abstract-expressionist electronics with potty-mouthed grrl humour and
Ubu Roi
-like scatological grotesquerie, brought a performance-art element to their shows, sometimes playing encased inside a gigantic two-person body suit.
Ubu Roi
-like scatological grotesquerie, brought a performance-art element to their shows, sometimes playing encased inside a gigantic two-person body suit.
Tigerbeat 6 were just one node in an international network of breakcore – labels like Broklyn Beats, Irritant, Mashit, Cock Rock Disco, producers like Speedranch Janksy, Hrvatski, V/Vm, knifehand-chop, Donna Summer. It’s an incestuous little rhizome, endlessly inbreeding through split singles, one-off collaborations, remix swaps. With records released in editions of 500 or less, breakcore was the fulfilment of DIY-punk’s ideal of a culture where there’s no gap between engaged artist and passive spectator, if only because almost everyone on its fervent but distinctly compact dance floors is either a DJ or producer themselves. For those who remember nineties rave as a lived experience, breakcore induces a cognitive dissonance, a sort of temporal rupture where you’re neither in the present nor back in the day but caught in the eerie limbo of retro. Because it’s so referential (and reverential) towards jungle and gabba, breakcore can’t help but remind you of a time when these sounds were popular on a mass level. The material this music is built from carries the memory-afterimages of huge crowds flailing their limbs to abstract noises and convulsive beats – a poignant aural mirage of a massive that’s simply absconded.
As for London itself, the city-state heartland of the hardcore continuum . . . well, at the cusp of the noughties, the scene started to split into three distinct directions. First, there was UK garage: after 2step’s 1999 – 2001 pop crossover boom collapsed, the sound went back into the underground. Four-to-the-floor garage and 2step were now static styles, their evolutionary potential exhausted. But they remained popular fare both as golden oldies and as new tracks in the vintage style, on the pirates and in clubs, where UKG continued to supply the perennial demand on the part of adult clubbers for a classy soundtrack for getting expensively drunk and copping off. Speed garage in its purest form thrived as the North of England style known as ‘bassline house’, pure 1997 timewarp bizznizz. But in London itself, garage actually regressed a bit, reverting to what the music sounded like before the prefix ‘speed’ got added to it: a de-junglized sound known as ‘urban house’ and then simply ‘funky house’. Timmi Magic, one of the veteran garage DJs pushing this sound, talked about getting rid of the MC and the rewinds (the dancehall/jungle elements) and filling the resulting vibe deficit with . . . a live percussionist. Oooh gosh.
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