Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (91 page)

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Authors: Simon Reynolds

BOOK: Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture
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The anti-groove thing you get with so much IDM, where they take rhythmic ideas from dance genres but mess them up, is related to another assumption in experimental music generally which is: absence of structure = freedom. Not only is this both pat and old hat, but genuinely startling surprises are relatively scarce in the experimental field. In their own way, all these subgenres of abstract whatnot are quite conventionalized. The innovations become clichés really rapidly, something you saw with the whole post-Oval glitch area. A lot of the signifiers of supposed intelligence or experimentalism are actually conventions constructed at particular moments by labels, fans, artists and critics together. Overall, I think the ratio of maverick inspiration to herd mentality is about the same in dance and non-dance.
 
Another genre you don’t seem to rate that highly is Detroit techno. What gives?
Actually, I have total respect and love for the original music. Well, I can remember being slightly underwhelmed by that first Detroit compilation in 1988, it didn’t seem as out-there as the acid-house tracks. But as music, all the original stuff is undeniable. That said, at the time, Detroit seemed more like an adjunct to Chicago house. You only really started to get people going on about Detroit as this lost origin and foundational set of principles that had been betrayed when hardcore took over in 1991 – 2. It was a reactive and reactionary myth. The rave explosion had really been fuelled by acid house, Todd Terry and Italian piano house. ‘Strings Of Life’ was a rave anthem, sure, but if there had only ever been Detroit techno . . . there’d simply
be
no rave culture. There’d just be this network of small, hipster scenes in various cities around the world. This idea of Detroit as the alpha and omega of electronic dance music seems historically inaccurate because it’s not like electronic dance music didn’t exist before Juan Atkins and Kevin Saunderson and May started making tracks. They were largely responding to music from Europe. It’s more realistic to see Detroit as a crucial node in a network, a way station, somewhere the music stopped for a while before moving on. Detroit’s big innovation was stripping out the voices and the song element. That was an important shift.
 
When those guys decided – quite late in the day, almost a last-minute thing – to settle on the word ‘techno’ as the name for their music, that in itself was something that set off a lot of reverberations. What do you think of the role of technology in all this music?
It’s complicated. Techno and its sister genres identify themselves as machine music, there’s a cult of various sound or rhythm-making equipment, bands taking names like 808 State or House of 909 after Roland drum machines. And sonically there’s a cult of the machinic, whether it’s a mechanistic rhythm feel that isn’t swinging but inhumanly regular, or it’s square-wave synth-sounds that don’t resemble acoustic tonalities, or hard-angled riffs. But the idea that techno music is about cutting-edge technology obscures the fact that the culture is largely based on outmoded machinery and media! Vinyl, by the time rave took off, was already meant to be obsolete. If you think of pirate radio . . . the idea of broadcasting through the air, rather than cable, was pretty quaint: it’s something that’s been around since the early twentieth-century. A lot of the most fetishized drum machines and synths weren’t the latest gear, they were often outmoded or discontinued models, as with the Roland 303. The latest top-of-the-line equipment is more likely to be in the recording studio used by Celine Dion or some modern rock band than in Jeff Mills’s studio. Even MDMA had been around for years. Somehow all these
old things
that had been hanging around for ages came together in this amazing cultural synergy, like the parts of a jigsaw puzzle.
Clearly, though, the idea of new technology, or finding the new thing to do with technology, is at the heart of electronica’s self-conception. What happens is that a new piece of technology becomes available, and at first it’s so expensive that only established, wealthy musicians and producers have access to it, and they use it to do things that are old-fashioned, in line with the music that made them wealthy in the first place. Then the equipment drops in price dramatically and everybody has access to it, and in those circumstances it tends to be culturally astute non-musician types (some in the Eno mould, others street-smart teenagers) who find all the unexpected applications of the new machinery. You get a bunch of startling innovations, and then things level out again as everyone assimilates the new technology and the old hierarchies of talent over non-musicality reassert themselves again. Being a post-punk veteran I tend to valorize the surge moments when the sharp-witted DIY barbarians seize the new tools or think up new ways of bending existing tools, e.g. hardcore, with the sped-up breakbeats and sine-wave basslines and squeaky voices. I really like those moments when people who break the rules because they don’t
know
the rules seize the initiative, and you get all kinds of interestingly wrong-sounding music, improperly integrated fusions. When ‘musicality’ comes back, as it inevitably does, it’s less interesting . . . because ‘music’ has been done really hasn’t it? There’s an awful lot of good, musical stuff on the planet already!
 
People often find the ‘genre thing’ in dance music annoying. Why are there so many
subgenres? Isn’t a lot of it just hair-splitting or hype, generated by journalists and scene boosters?
I’ve always been slightly amazed by how rock critics get in a lather about dance’s genre-mania. Their genre-phobia often presents itself as virtuous scepticism, this ‘I’m not easily fooled’ immunity to hype. But it’s less about not being credulous as it is incredulity – sheer stubborn disbelief that this dance-music thing could be big enough or
deserving
enough to have all these internal divisions. But the electronic dance culture is massive, it involves millions all across the globe, and it’s been going on for twenty years at least. Something that big is bound to fragment and many of the fractures are going to be meaningful. Ninety per cent of the genre terms originate from the subcultures themselves. Rather than journalist inventions imposed from above, they’re semantic condensations of popular desire. Mostly they arose for practical reasons. In the earliest days, people just talked about ‘house’. Then differentiations within house gradually crept in: deep house, hard house, tribal house. At a certain point, the word ‘house’ alone wasn’t useful as an umbrella term for everything. So many records were being made, in different territories, that the stylistic parameters were drifting apart. When DJs or punters went to record stores and asked the salesperson about the new records that had come in, the assistant would ask ‘What you looking for?’ and as a result a degree of terminological precision emerged to characterize these different flavours of house. Some terms would gain currency and spread through the culture, often materializing first in flyers for raves or clubs. Promoters found it expedient to give some indication of the range of sounds you could expect at the event. You want people who are into the sound to come to the club, otherwise it’s neither viable nor vibey.
The first major split was between house and techno, the latter indicating a harder, harsher sound, more overtly futuristic and instrumental rather than songful. Then as the music mutated and splintered further, talking of all these new flavours as subcategories of house or techno made less and less sense. Hence hardcore, jungle, trance, gabba. Usually the split-off was preceded by an intermediary phase – I remember people talking of ‘jungle house’ or ‘jungle techno’, ‘gabba house’. Then the new genre breaks off as an independent entity.
There is one major downside of the style-fragmentation syndrome in dance music, and this is that it’s made clubbing less unpredictable. Since sonic styles are often linked to different groups of people, this increasing genre-precision went hand in hand with social stratification. The original ethos of rave – social mixing, sonic mishmash – has faded, although there have been periodic attempts to resurrect the original notion of ‘house’ as a more diffuse and catholic category, and also anti-genre revolts into pure eclecticism.
If you’re plunging in at the deep end as a dance-music neophyte, the genre-mania can be confusing and off-putting. But the definitions and distinctions get more urgent the more steeped you are in the culture. It’s a way of talking about the music, about where it should go next. One of the reasons dance culture keeps generating all these new genre terms is because the participants have this urgent feeling that they’re moving into new territory and they want to signpost that. So it’s an expression of the culture’s neophiliac and future-minded orientation. Rock has loads of subgenres too, but generally speaking hype-energy condenses more around individual buzz-bands or artists. In dance, where auteurism is not such a force, it coheres around new genres or scene formations. The genre is the level at which it makes most sense to talk about the music, its future
and
its past.
 
What are the specific challenges in writing about dance music?
‘Rhythm Is A Mystery’, as K-Klass put it. It is hard to write about why one groove or beat is more compelling than another. Even if you get into drummer talk of triplets and so forth, or into programming technicalities, the ‘it’ – that edge of distinction, of excellence and difference that sets one track or producer apart – just endlessly recedes from your grasp. It’s relatively easy to write generalities about ‘breakbeat science’ but almost infinitely harder to convey the signature that makes, say, a Dillinja track instantly recognizable to the trained ear. The same applies to any genre of dance music – it’s really hard to explicate precisely what makes a producer superior to another. That said, you could say the same about a songwriter’s melodic gift in pop music, or the ineffable quality of a certain guitar player’s way with riff or solo. But with these other genres there tend to be more ways you can avoid the music, and talk instead about lyrics, persona, biography. Dance music, by diminishing or stripping away altogether the other elements that you might critically latch onto as a bulwark against the mystical materiality of music, does shove you head first into the realm of pure sound. Writing about dance music confronts you in a very direct way with the old ‘dancing about architecture’ futility/absurdity dilemma – because it is so purely musical, functional . . . I suspect a lot of the people who might have made good dance critics, who have real taste and knowledge of its history, become DJs instead – because you can actually support the music and evangelize in a very direct way: playing it to people. Why bother to write about it, then? As my old fanzine comrade Paul Oldfield put it, because there’s ‘the possibility that words might fail interestingly or suggestively.’
Most dance reviews, when you boil them down, all they’re saying is ‘this is a funky record’. One odd thing about dance journalism as a whole is that it almost never discusses dancing itself – the specific physical responses triggered by whatever genre they’re writing about. I do go in for that a bit in
Energy Flash
– discussing how the music demands or enforces certain kinds of movement – but I’d like to have taken it further.
 
So what would you change about this book, or add to it, if you were doing it again?
I’d have more about the experiential side of clubbing and raving. The structure of a night, the journey you go on. The adventures, the ephemeral encounters, the fleeting perceptions. Scoring drugs, the anticipation and nervousness involved in that. The crowd reactions and the relations between intimate strangers on the floor – those pursed, knowing smiles of people on E. A big part of what dance culture is about as an experience is hard to capture and convey.
In a lot of ways, poetry is more effective. There’s a book called
Cyber Positive
by an outfit called o [rphan] d [rift] that contains a lot of prose poetry evocations of the more extreme experiences you can have with techno and drugs. The one good bit in the club-culture Britmovie
Human Traffic
is where the annoying storyline finally reaches the rave floor and the white hole of Ecstatic experience in which narrative incandesces: the voice-over from the lead character Jip intoning about how ‘we’re thinking clearly yet not thinking at all . . . We flow in unison . . . I wish this was real . . .’ Some of the ‘talking head’ commentaries in Maja Classen’s
Feiern: Don’t Forget to Go Home
, a documentary about the Berlin techno scene, have this quality, with the interviewees slipping into a phenomenological or spiritual register: ‘it was the wordless time . . . it was our poem of bliss’, ‘time feels like a space that’s expanding and finally disappearing’. What’s great about that documentary is that it sidelines the whole trainspotter side of dance culture in favour of what the music makes possible: certain sorts of spaces and relations, a loss of self that feels like finding your true self, an intense if transitory sensation of contact and communion.
There’s a massive contradiction running through
Energy Flash
. As a critical history, it’s necessarily ‘recollected in tranquility’; there’s an impulse to collect and contain, contextualize and interpret. Genre genealogies are traced, auteuristic arcs delineated. Yet the energy centre of the book, what fuels it, is anti-historical and against interpretation. It’s my memories, blurred and fragmentary, of this period of my life organized around convulsive bliss. Throughout most of my really intense raving experiences, I never really cared who the DJs were or what the tracks playing were called. I can’t name a single DJ that I went to check out in that first year and a half, and although I would really have liked to know what the tracks were on all the pirate tapes I was recording off the radio, I wasn’t making any effort to find out. I was just going with the flow of it all. At that time raving was primarily about the experience of going out with my friends as a gang and bonding: you had a rough idea of what the music would be depending on the choice of club, but that was it really. It was only later on that I became a discriminating consumer, started to develop a knowledge of labels and producers.

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