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News | 27/08/2010 | BenAcid MixTape
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| 28/08/2010 | The Love I'll Give You Single
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| 28/08/2010 | Live @ Urban Grooves
Live at Urban Grooves record shop in 2003
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| 27/08/2010 | The Love I'll Give You Vocal mix
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| 26/08/2010 | The Love I'll Give You
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| 24/08/2010 | Techno Music and Mediation
Futuresound: Techno Music and Mediation
(Abridged, text-only version of an HTML document of the same name)
Ethnomusicology Senior Project, completed on December 16, 1996
University of Washington, Seattle
Author: Morgan Lang, mhl21@columbia.edu
Project Sponsor: Aaron Fox
Contents:
Introduction: (a) "A Note on the Internet," and (b) "(Sonic)
Facts Regarding Techno and the Author's Orientation to it."
Part 1: Techno City: an Overview of the History and
Diversification of Techno.
Part 2: Techno Tribe: Utopian-Futurist and Future-Primitive
Ideals and their expressions in Rave Culture.
Part 3: Techno Logo: The Mediation of Techno.
We feel affinities not only with the past, but also with the futures
that didn't materialise, and with the other variations of the
present that we suspect run parallel to the one we have agreed to
live in.
--Brian Eno
Whether they're real or imaginary, animate or inanimate, one must
form one's mediators. It's a series: If you don't belong to a
series, even a completely imaginary one, you're lost. I need my
mediators to express myself, and they'd never express themselves
without me: one is always working in a group, even when it doesn't
appear to be the case.
--Gilles
Deleuze
Introduction
To some, it is the "heavy metal of dance music," this music
which has occasionally been disparaged as sounding like
"car alarms set to disco," this typically beat-heavy,
bass-thumping dance music which has, in fact, derived some
of its sound symbology from disco, as well as from funk,
rap, and numerous lesser-known genres. Techno music, the
term I use as a top-level rubric for an ever-increasing
variety of postmodern dance music (Hilker and Behlendorf)
is, of course, more varied in its scope than either of the
above mentioned descriptions would lead one to believe.
Techno, depending on whom one asks, has existed for
approximately ten yearsit is not new music when compared
with some music genres of the '90s: Lo-fi, Neo-Lounge, and
Grunge, but it is music which has diversified and evolved
considerably since its beginnings in the mid '80's. The
music appears fresh and compelling because of its frequent
use of the newest and most powerful recording and
sound-processing technology, and because of its role in
the development of what is commonly termed "rave culture,"(with
its concomitant argot, fashions, and utopian-futurist
philosophies, its self-conscious marketing devices which
simultaneously appeal to, contradict, and exploit music
consumers' desire for the new and the rarethe "underground"
stuff), and it can terefore be stated that Techno is perhaps
the most compelling and cutting-edge of contemporary popular
music genres. That relatively little academic attention
has been devoted to electronic dance music is somewhat
surprising, considering Techno's popularity, creative
dynamism, and relevance toand reflection ofthe processes
of cultural formation and mediation in information-age
capitalist society. Those interested in learning more about
contemporary dance music culture should read Sarah Thornton's
excellent book, Club Cultures, which discusses in detail
the cultural processes I only have enough space to allude
to here.
My purposes in developing this HTML document are as follows:
(1) to provide a basic narrative of Techno's history and
process of diversification, (2) to analyze representations
of Techno's supposed transcendent/ utopian "meanings" by
its devotees and its detractors as exemplified in aural,
textual, and experiential/performance media, and (3) to
examine Techno's role as a commoditized cultural focal
point. I do not pretend to offer a comprehensive look at
every aspect of Techno; rather, I want to suggest to the
reader that there is much yet to be studied, and that Techno
music and rave culture are appropriate and promising subjects
for Ethnomusicologists and anyone interested in popular
culture. The HTML format appears to be one of the most
suitable for my purposes since it allows me to make examples
of the music I will be discussing readily available to the
reader. Words and phrases in bold type denote links to
sound files I have provided; readers should click on these
links in order to hear brief excepts of the music being
discussed. Footnotes are available as hypertext links;
simply click on footnote markers in order to view them.
By using the WWW and the NEXIS-LEXIS databases in researching
my "paper," and by presenting what would ordinarily be a
"paper" as an HTML document I am, to a limited extent,
ironically engaging the tropes of computer and communications
technology as appropriately contradictory media for a
general critical discussion of Techno music and its embedded
processes of cultural mediation. When this project is made
available over the World Wide Web, it will in turn contribute
to the swirl of ever-changing perceptions regarding Techno,
and will therefore become a mediator itself.
A note on the Internet: Many documents used as source
material for this project were obtained via the WWW, which
has proved to be an invaluable resource for documents which
describe people's deepest and most personal thoughts
regarding music. It is obvious that the WWW is in some ways
an ideal research tool in that it allows people residing
in countries with well-developed communications networks
to express their thoughts in coherent, tidy, and easily
obtainable texts. It is also obvious that people who
communicate via the WWW tend to be educated, middle-class
white people, people who hardly constitute a representative
sampling of any cultural affiliation other than that of a
global association of individuals whose commonality originates
in their ability to obtain and wield telecommunications
technology. Texts which one may view via the Internet are
carefully mediated, inherently contrived, and may or may
not accurately describe what we may suppose to be "reality;"
that is, in the case of Techno music, what we might observe
on an experiential level at a dance club or rave. For these
reasons, the Internet is usually not an appropriate research
medium for ethnographers, even though it easily allows one
to "meet"and conduct detailed interviews withpeople who in
person would appear to be likely subjects for an ethnography.
It is important for the reader to recognize that the WWW
material I use does not and cannot act as a substitute for
an ethnography of a broad category of Techno listeners;
rather, it is representative of one segment of a broad
category, a sample of people whose ideation concerning
Techno and technology may be shaped in a circular and
self-reinforcing fashion by their use of technology. In
short: although the people who contribute to newsgroups
like alt.rave are an important part of the Techno listenership,
they are by no means representative of the entire spectrum.
(Sonic) facts regarding Techno and the author's orientation to it:
Overall, Techno is denoted by its slavish devotion to the beat, the use of
rhythm as a hypnotic tool. It is also distinguished by being primarily,
and in most cases entirely, created by electronic means. It is also noted
for its lack of vocals in most cases. Techno usually falls in the realm of
115-160 BPM There are of course exceptions to every one of these rules,
but these guidelines seem to survive the "what about" test most of the
time (Hilker and Behlendorf).
Here is an example of an archetypal Techno beat: consisting
of a single looped drum machine sample, it features a
perfectly constant tempo of about 140 BPM with equally
heavy emphasis on every pulse. This is perhaps the single
most "generic" sound in modern dance music, and one which
has been frequently used in Techno.
It should be stated at the outset that I am an enthusiastic
but discriminating fan of many Techno artists across a wide
range of genres. To point out another apparent link with
Heavy Metal, I am, like Robert Walser and his interviewees
in Running With the Devil (who are attracted by Heavy
Metal's power in the form of distortion and sonic intensity),
drawn to Techno mostly by its aural expressions of
powerexpressions which in Techno are most often heard as
over-accentuated bass frequencies, prominent drum and
percussion samples, and an extreme aural density across
the bandwidth. One may think of aural density as describing
the proportion of silence to sound apparent in a musical
event: if there is little apparent silence, the music thus
has a high aural density. In positing the preceding
description of what I believe to be the fundamental sounds
of Techno, I am fully aware that there are, as always,
exceptions which must be noted; for example, below the
reader will find a discussion of Ambient Techno, a style
of Techno in which all three of the aforementioned traits
are frequently absent.
Part 1: Techno City: an overview of the history and
diversification of Techno.
In August 1996, the Metropolitan Detroit Convention and
Visitor's Bureau began a campaign to change Detroit's
official slogan from the industrial-era "Detroit: the Motor
City" to something which would evoke the city's eventual
transformation into the postindustrial, service oriented
city it is slowly and painfully becoming. Upon soliciting
suggestions for a new slogan from its readers, the Detroit
News reported that a popular suggestion was that Detroit
be known to the world as "The Techno City," or "Techno
Town," quoting one respondent as writing that "Techno Town
is an ideal slogan because Techno music was created in
Detroit" ('From Autos').
There are a few differing accounts of the "origin myth" of
Techno, just as there are differing views of how Rock &
Roll and Rap came to be; however, most accounts place the
origin of Techno in Detroit in the early- to mid- 1980's.
During an innovative period concomitant with the development
of disco-influenced and vocal-laden House music in Chicago,
musicians in Detroit developed a style of music based on
more or less equal parts of European synthpop or "Euro
Disco" like Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream, and domestic
music such as Parliament/Funkadelic, Afrikaa Bambataa, and
Detroit's Cybertron, who were making heavily funk-influenced,
electronics-based music called, variously, "Electro-Funk"
or "Electro," and who had also been influenced by the purely
electronic bands of Europe. One of Cybertron's members,
Juan Atkins, is frequently credited with being the sole
inventor of both the term and the music "Techno," although
it is known that Atkins was in constant contact with other
Detroit musicians who were developing electronic dance
music and who shared similar musical influences (Sicko 60).
However, it is understandable that Atkins is seen as the
music's great progenitor, as he did create the single
"Techno City" in 1984, an independently-produced electronic
dance composition which became a huge hit in Europe,
particularly in London and Berlin, where it had the effect
of sonically reconfiguring Kraftwerk's music and broadening
electronic music's listenership; as a result, Europeans
began producing their own "Techno," adding their own
stylistic preferences to the palette they had been handed
by Atkins and his now popular co-inventors in Detroit, all
of whom shared the critical attention of the Europeans. It
is interesting that European accounts of the Techno origin
myth place the development of the genre at a later date in
Manchester, England, where, in 1990, the group 808 State
released the single Cubik. It is perhaps too easy to suppose
that Techno never would have happened had it not been for
the Detroit school, and it is important to recognize that
the process of diversification has almost entirely occurred
in Europe, particularly in London, Manchester, and Berlin,
large cities which already had a well-developed array of
dance clubs by the time Techno "arrived," and in which the
first Techno-only clubs were opened.
One may take a long view of the trans-Atlantic "waves"
which crossed and re-crossed the spatial and conceptual
European and U.S. scenes: Techno, having been originally
produced in Detroit, influenced numerous European artists
like 808 State, whose influence finally began reaching the
vast American music consumership through the distribution
of CD compilations which purported to provide a sampling
of "underground" European dance music. The Record reported
on this trend in 1992 by writing that "the techno represented
by big sellers such as the Movement and 2 Unlimited has
been tamed and is boffo in the [U.S.] 'burbs" ('The Masses').
The cyclical production-consumption-production process
seems to have begun again, as Detroit is again producing
"good product" and is experiencing something of a Techno
renaissance: American and European music consumers may now
purchase CD compilations of the newest Detroit "underground"
dance music-- music which reifies the authenticity of the
original Detroit Techno. Like the appellation denoting the
Motor/Techno City's previous musical identity, "Motown,"
this referencing of the locality of production cleverly
authenticates the music and thus the entire musical product.
This is a very common marketing technique which frequently
results in the back-formation of new musical genres; for
example, Goa, which now refers to music which has its own
original and distinctive musical characteristics, originally
referred only to music which happened to be played at beach
parties in Goa, India. The strategy in marketing the word
Goa is to sell the desirability of being at Goa attending
a beach party.
One of the effects of the Detroit renaissance is a renewed
interest in the city's original Techno: a documentary film,
"The Architects of Techno," is being produced (Allen and
Banks), and there is a sense that an attempt is being made
by listeners to re-authenticate their interest in Techno
music by familiarizing themselves, a mere decade after the
release of "Techno City," with what is seen by many as
being a kind of "roots music."
In the late 1980's Techno had arrived in Europe and had
begun its transformation into the variety of genres existing
today. In Berlin, radio DJ Monica Deitl began broadcasting
the new Motown sound, which immediately became desirable
as a music product and which created demand for Detroit
Techno at dance clubs. In response, DJ's such as Kid Paul
and Dr. Motte began specializing in Techno, playing records
in Berlin's first Techno club, UFO (Levy). In Britain,
pirate radio stations like KISS FM began broadcasting the
Techno that public and commercial radio stations refused
to touch. (Later KISS would be granted a commercial radio
license, thus negating its importance as a subcultural
focal point in the minds of many listeners) (Thornton
146-51). These stations also disseminated notices regarding
warehouse- and outdoor parties where Techno as well as the
vocal-oriented Chicago genre House, promoted in Europe as
Acid House, could be heard. These parties in unconventional
locales were directly influenced by the beach-party culture
of the Spanish Balearic islands, particularly Ibiza, where
young vacationing Britons danced to Reggae and House.
Following the re-emergence of the archaic appetite suppressant
MDMA (methylene dioxymethamphetamine) as the drug "Ecstasy"
in Dallas nightclubs in the mid 1980's, the drug began
circulating among people attending Techno clubs and the
parties which were now gaining popular notoriety as "raves"
(Hilker and Behlendorf), events where, in the public mind,
decadent and sexually promiscuous throngs of teenagers
danced all night in a drug-crazed frenzy. The mass-mediation
of this misconception both served to attract more young
people to what was now being viewed as a "movement" and to
form and cohere the subcultural status of "ravers," who
then began reinterpreting their image in a complex series
of processes to be discussed in the final section of this
work.
Among Techno's most well-liked genres in 1996 are Jungle
and its derivative Drum & Bass, as well as Ambient and
various eclectic forms which are in the process of becoming
identified/ marketed as genres, most notably those musics
which are currently being referred to using the optimistic
label Progressive or the somewhat more skeptical Ethno-Techno.
Jungle refers to music which came about as a result of the
club- and rave DJ's artistry and skill at the on-the-spot
creation of aural bricolage: consisting of a very wide
range of stylistic "cuts" (Hebdige) placed in apposition
to a "foreground" of altered hip-hop rhythm samples, Jungle
sounds like 160 BPM funk combined with a very wide array
of samples, turntable "scratches," and digital effects.
The most common forms of music one finds sampled in Jungle
are generally classic Reggae, Ragamuffin, Dub, Funk, and
Rap, whose BPM rates are usually calibrated to be exactly
half of the "foreground" beat, thus creating an effect
which may be heard as "two songs to dance toone aggressive
and fast, the other slower and relaxed. [One] can choose
which beat to pay attention to when dancing" (O' Malley).
Jungle used to be subsumed under the broader category
Breakbeat, along with another style, Darkside (a style
developed by DJ's in London dance clubs which uses "minor
keys to create an eerie feeling" [Hilker and Behlendorf],
but is otherwise similar to Jungle), but it has since been
promoted and accepted as a genre in its own right, spawning
in turn the creation of its own subgenre, Drum & Bass,
which is now in the process of transformation into a genre
from which further subdivisions shall depend.
Drum & Bass is, as its name implies, a style of music
dominated by drum and bass samples; in fact, it is really
just a stripped-down version of Jungle, often using many
of the same elements as Jungle, including scratching, but
far more sparingly, which results in a sound often lacking
the aforementioned "layering" effect. Drum & Bass has become
very popular in the United States during the past two years,
and many clubs now feature entire evenings devoted solely
to it.
Perhaps partly as a reaction to more frenetic musics like
Jungle, there now seems to be a countercurrent trend in
cities: Ambient is slow and subdued where most Techno is
fast and "in your face." Clubs and parties which feature
Ambient do not do so with the expectation that people will
attend in order to dance, although a great deal of Ambient
Techno is quite danceable. It is not a utilitarian sort of
music in the way that a great deal of Techno ishaving been
designed to do something to; i.e: dancebut rather it is
frequently used to help bring peoples' interactions into
the foreground, to provide a complimentary backdrop to
conversation and even the playing of board games (Strauss).
When compared to most varieties of Techno, Ambient seems
anachronistic in that it recalls the environmental "art
happenings" of the 1960's, the "Furniture Music" of Erik
Satie, and, most clearly, the work of Brian Eno, who is
alleged to have created the term "Ambient" in the mid-1970's
in a deliberate attempt to create a new music genre, one
which would not draw attention to itself while being played
and which would have the effect of relaxing the listener.
In clubs one finds Ambient, the "exotic" music of non-industrial
cultures, environmental recordings of forests (sans chainsaws,
of course), as well as what might be termed Eno's "classic
Ambient" being played in "chill rooms" adjacent to the main
floors where faster Techno is played as a main event. In
this context, chill rooms function as places where "aural
antidotes" to faster, more intense Techno can be absorbed
in a deliberately relaxed atmosphere. In a way, this music
is as pragmatically functional as dance-oriented Techno in
that its function is often to counterbalance the apparent
psychological and physiological effects of the volume,
speed, and aural density of dance-oriented Techno. Recorded
Ambient music often takes the form of a sound collage or
bricolage, and frequently features compositions which are
far longer than most Techno "songs" (that is, edited versions
of long mixes and remixes), and which require more time to
develop musical motifs and gestures than other genres which
usually state and restate a small number of themes. In a
club or rave context, of course, there is a continuous mix
of music which may gradually shift from one to another
emphasis, but, because of the vast differences between
Ambient and other genres, Ambient is emerging from the
chill rooms not into the main rooms, but rather into its
own parallel scene at parties and cub nights devoted solely
to Ambient.
Among global industrial cultures there exists a well-documented
process of "exoticizing" musics by infusing them with the
music of romanticized "tribal" peoples (preferably from
places far away from the actual site of cultural and economic
production): the strongest recent manifestation of this
tradition can be seen in the "world beat" and "world music"
trends beginning in the 1980's and increasing in strength
to the present day (Feld 266-8). In Techno we see this
trend appearing most blatantly in the style sometimes called
"Progressive" (although this term is sometimes also used
to describe Techno which uses "real," non-digital instruments
in live performances, and is also used as a term which
modifies preexisting genres: i.e. "progressive Trance") or
"Ethno Techno," a name sometimes used derisively. Here I
use the term simply because it more plainly evokes the
music's real content than the term "Progressive," which is
becoming more vague as it is used more frequently as a term
which ameliorates "hard" styles; for example, a recent
trend has combined two very different, very widely listened
to, and very profitable stylesDrum & Bass and Ambient. This
seemingly improbable mixture has been promoted under the
(assumed) name "Progressive Drum & Bass"that is, Drum &
Bass which features washes and patinas of chord colors,
"ethnic" sounds, and an overall lower aural density than
typical Drum & Bass.
That all of this labeling is "inorganic" and is intended
to aid the process of the commoditization of art is a 20th
century truismone which shall be more thoroughly discussed
in the Mediation section of this work. It should be pointed
out that "Ethno Techno" is also a term very frequently used
by the mass media and by industry journals such as Billboard;
therefore, it is definitely not a term which one would find
commonly used among Techno's self-defined subcultures,
except in order to indicate an ironic metacommentary on
the mediation process.
Ethno-Techno has a tendency to sonically associate the
concept of primitivity with that of environmental righteousness,
and to express these associations in compositions which
place "ethnic" sounds in aural conjunction with "environmental"
soundsthat is, real or imaginary soundscapes (see Schafer
77: 3-4) which feature a conspicuous lack of industrial or
"first world" sounds (and increasingly this is indeed an
imaginary soundscape). This conjunction equates romantic
notions of pre-industrialism with a sort of lost innocence
or a mythical idealized past now viewed as being represented
in the lives and musics of "indigenous peoples." This is
an interesting and contradictory facet of the Techno ethos:
that a connection to a primitive, pre-technological (and
therefore completely ahistorical) past may be created by
"quoting" contemporary "ethnic" musics within a composition,
frequently using the most advanced recording and production
technology as well as the network of the global capitalist
market as a medium of communication.
Part 2: Techno Tribe: Utopian-Futurist and Future-Primitive
Ideals in Rave Culture.
For me, raving is probably one of the single most
influential and important things in my life. It
brings me up when I'm down, opens my mind to new
people and lifestyles, promotes general feelings
of happiness and grooviness, and provides a place
where people from all walks of life can forget
their problems and differences and dance and have
a good time. It has introduced me to some of the
most creative, intelligent, funny, caring, soulful,
friendlypeople on the planet. And I know I'm not
alone.
So I wonder, if raving can bring this about in me
and others, what can it do for the world? Obviously
not everyone is going to like house and techno.
That's not the point I'm trying to makeIf raves
cansmash the walls of isolation and ignorance, it
stands as a perfect example of how the world could
be. The potential, energy, and technology are here
to bring about sweeping global change. The age-old
dream of one world, united inpeace, may not be far
above the horizon[and] consistently I can turn to
the music,the dance, and the vibe, [which]
consistentlylift my spirits and renew my hope. If
it can do it for me, it can do it for the world.
--excerpt from an alt.rave posting by Noah Raford.
We all know that PART of what makes our scene
extremely special and sacred is the fact that there
is no emphasis whatsoever on sex, sexuality, race,
religion, etc. When we gather at parties we become
ONEthere is no gay/straight, man/woman, white/black,
old/young, rich/poorwe simply see each other as
beautiful people and ultimately we can become one
pure energy mass of love.
--excerpt from an alt.rave posting by John Kawamoto.
For me, Techno is the most lyrical, most evocative
music I have yet found. It has inspired my passions
and thoughts, and has connected me with my emotions
like no other music. In its beat, I feel rhythm,
patterns, a cycle like life or the beat of our
hearts. The vocal samples, in their endless loops,
hold for me such poignancy and longingthey are
impossible, infinite, inhuman. Voices removed from
meaningsave that which we listeners bring to [the
experience of hearing] themtheir digitized humanity
is so plaintive, electronically cut off from context,
made "mute" in the face of technology, that they
become paradoxically human and inhuman
--excerpt from an alt.rave posting by Rhea Gossett.
Spirituality has fuck all to do with the rave scene.
It's just people getting off their heads and thinking
they're having a spiritual experience, when they've
probably never had one in their livesI live in
Manchester, England, and we probably have the
biggest club scene in the world, but there's no
fuckin' spirituality, just people having a good
timeas for cultures using drugs for religionfair
enough, maybe, but you can't compare it to people
paying to go in a club or going to a rave in a
field and listening to stomping house or techno.
--excerpt from an alt.rave posting by "Krispy."
Rave culture developed out of an appreciation for Techno
and House music in the late 1980's. When I use the term
"rave culture," I am referring to the entire global group
of people who listen and dance primarily to Techno music,
but who may not consider themselves to be members of a
coherent and self-aware structure, whether it is a culture
or subculture. In addition, by using the term "culture" as
opposed to "subculture" I adopt the terminology overwhelmingly
preferred by those ravers who provide, via the WWW, poetic
narratives (Fox 1991, 1995) which attempt to describe what
it means to be a "raver." Some of the individuals who
participate in these discussions may not be aware of the
academic connotations and denotations of the word "subculture,"
but they intuitively believe that theirs is a "true" culture,
one which, although it generally defines itself and is
naturalized as a reaction or countermovement to a perceived
hegemonic structure, ignores fine qualitative distinctions
by simply accepting the label "culture." As will be discussed
in the final section of this work, there is a continuum
which flows between mediated representations of rave
culture or subculture and self-defining poetic narratives
produced by supposed members of these groups. The ethos of
"rave culture" has been a very common subject of popular-
and niche market press articles, Internet newsgroups, and
involved, multi-participant "virtual" and "live" discussions
among ravers.
Most of those who comment on the subject agree that "raving"
(outwardly manifested simply as dancing and enjoying the
company of other people at raves) inspires and encourages
the expression of feelings of unity and purpose among those
who attend ravesparties which, amid all the hype and
poorly-informed media representations, perhaps may best be
generally defined as being public or invitation-only events
taking place at one or more geographic or (increasingly)
electronic locations where one can listen to Techno (although
other forms of music are frequently presented as well,
including live performances by non-Techno groups) (see
'Rave America'). The exact nature and purpose of the
aforementioned feelings of cohesion among ravers is, however,
a serious point of contention for those participants who
are concerned about definitions and representations of what
they believe to be "their" culture.
Some of the issues which inform and shape discussions regarding
the cultural ties between individual ravers are: whether the "spirit"
of raving should be confined to the time and locale of a rave or
whether it should extend into other social contexts in the "real"
world as a social and political agenda or ethical bias; whether
sexuality and gender are significant aspects of raving; how technology
aids or detracts from rave culture; whether ravers actually constitute
a coherent movement and whether that movement is political, musical,
spiritual, or a larger amalgam; whether spirituality associated
with raving should be inclusive or exclusive of "organized" religion,
and so forth. In short, people who listen to Techno and who consider
themselves to be part of a "rave culture" are attempting to define
that culture in a variety of ways which often have the effect of
instilling and reinforcing a sense of cultural membership, a process
which in turn generates more press articles, poetic narratives,
and discussions regarding the nature of this membership.
Most people who consider themselves to be ravers appear to be
convinced that raving promotes feelings of unity among people from
varying sexual orientations, national, and ethnic origins, and
classes who gather in order to dance in an atmosphere of cooperation
and mutual enjoyment. The rave scene is supposed to be accepting
of difference, yet we find that its identity is contradictory, for
how can it remain as a distinguishable cultural entity if it
indiscriminately accepts everyone? A rave is actually an elitist
scene which depends on the systematic rejection of what it perceives
as the "mainstream" in order to maintain a sense of belonging
(Thornton 5).
The ideals of non-discrimination, total inclusiveness, and "tribal"
unity are continually belied by several important aspects of rave
culture: the actual nature of the music production and dissemination
process; the actual content of a great deal of Techno music; the
actual exclusiveness of the Internet as a communications medium,
the actual difficulty (for outsiders who wish to affiliate themselves
with rave culture) of obtaining information regarding the times
and places where a rave is to occur; and the actual door policies
of clubs, about which Thornton writes:
It is a classic paradox that an institution so adept at segregation
at the nightly accommodation of different crowds, should be repeatedly
steeped in an ideology of social mixing. The discotheque/ disco/
club/ rave regularly re-invented itself to maintain an eternal
youth and to obfuscate dated relations to class culture (56).
Thornton continues by discussing the gender politics of
rave culture, citing Barbara Bradby's work. Bradby portrays
the utopian promise of rave culture as contradicting the
"ground zero" gender relations experienced at clubs and
raves, where residual male orientations toward the ownership
and control of technology still obtain, where most DJ's
and Techno musicians are still male, and where Techno music
is most often heard via media and venues which are owned
or controlled by men. Bradby describes the club scene as
a place where one can hear and dance to music mostly produced
by men which features mostly female vocal samples, a
"powerful restatement of traditional gender divisionsthe
association of men with culture, language, and technology,
and of women with emotion, the body, and sexuality" (168).
Thus rave culture is able to refer to ideals it would
perhaps like to see put into practice, but this mostly
serves only to differentiate ravers from the racist, sexist,
homophobic, and class- bound industrialized societies they
place themselves in apposition to.
Part 3: Techno Logo: the Mediation of Techno.
Communications media are inextricably involved in the meaning and
organization of youth subcultures. Youth subcultures are not organic,
unmediated social formations, nor are they autonomous, grassroots
cultures which only meet the media upon recuperative "selling out"On
the contrary, the media do not just represent but participate in
the assembly, demarcation and development of music cultures (Thornton
160).
Listening to Techno music, attending clubs and raves, and
discussing the nature of rave culture via the WWW are all
leisure activities which are, for the most part, engaged
in by individuals who live in industrialized nations and
who have a surplus of both time and money. How did Techno
music, once considered simply to be fun music to dance to,
become the focal point of today's rave culture, which
considers Techno to be a sort of cultural Great Attractor,
creating "worldwide" networks of "cybertribes" (Beltane 3)
and giving a sense of identity to its listeners, some of
whom consider themselves to be harbingers of "sweeping
global change" (Raford).
During the late 1980's and early 1990's Techno music and
the rave scene began gaining momentum just as personal
computers and digital sound processing equipment began to
be both affordable and widely availablemarketing innovations
made possible by the increased globalization of manufacturing
and distribution networks as well as by the cumulative
effects of increased automation and computerization at all
levels of commerce. At the same time, the Internet began
a process of naturalization as a communication medium with
the increased availability of online services. The combined
effect of these processes was to give people who listened
to Techno the tools to create and maintain cultural
affiliations very quickly and easily. With cheap digital
sampling and recording devices, individuals could creatively
respond to Techno's "arrival" by producing their own
recordings and distributing them directly to DJ's and
specialized record shops (Langlois 232). With the popularization
of the Internet, individuals could develop (more or less)
substantive relationships with other people interested in
Techno without being hindered by spatial separation;
therefore, technology is the mode of resistance by which
Techno- listeners were able to differentiate themselves
from "the masses" and cohere into "rave culture" in a
classic subcultural gesture.
What complicates matters when examining this model is that
the political and spiritual overtones of the missives
contributed to alt.techno are really only useful as gestures,
not as incitements of worldwide revolutionary consciousness.
The use of political and spiritual rhetoric by ravers
functions mostly as what Thornton refers to as "subcultural
capital" (11), a signifier of difference and uniqueness
with regard to perceived hegemonic structures and as a
token of subcultural membership, regardless of whether
the rhetoric is actually intended to produce social change.
Apparently believing that youth subcultures without exception
merely profess political concerns, Thornton takes a more
severe view than I do, writing that
These issues are clouded by the fondness that youth
subcultures have for appropriating political rhetorics and
frequently referring to 'rights' and 'freedoms,' 'equality
and unity.' This can be seen as a strategy by which political
issues are enlisted in order to give youthful leisure
activities that extra punch, that added je ne sais quois,
a sense of independence, even dangerThis is not evidence
of the politicization of youth as much as testimony to the
aestheticization of politics (167).
This "aestheticization of politics" is continually re-mediated by
the independent and major-label recording industries as well as by
rave promoters, club publicists, Techno musicians, DJ's, and ravers,
all of whomwith the exception of the lasthave a financial stake in
promoting the idea that there is actually such a coherent entity
as a rave culture. Individuals may purchase CD compilations of
Techno or attend raves which display the allure of revolutionary
spirit as an act of symbolic rebellion which, after all, may only
serve to reinforce hegemonic structures by allowing individual
"rebels" to derive meaning and satisfaction from the hegemonic
relationship (for more on symbolic rebellion see Willis 1977).
Techno is, finally, a thoroughly mediated music, from its continually
recombinant musical genres and its constant (re)generation of new
categories, labels, and self- definitions, to its circular processes
of both resistance and acceptance.
Works Cited
Allen, Derek and Banks, Carl. "The Architects of
Techno." (http://users.aol.com/dafilms/film.html).
Beltane Communique. "Cybertribe Rising."
(http://hyperreal.com/raves/spirit/politics/CyberTribe_Rising.html).
Bradby, Barbara. "Sampling Sexuality: Gender,
Technology and the Body in Dance Music."
Popular Music 12/2 (1993): 155-176.
Deleuze, Gilles. "Mediators." Zone 6: Incorporations.
New York: ZONE, 1992. 285.
Feld, Steven. "From Schizophonia to Schizmogenesis."
Music Grooves.Chicago: University of Chicago
Presss, 1994. 265-70.
Eno, Brian. Quoted in Hilker and Behlendorf, listed
below.
Fox, Aaron. "The Jukebox of History: Narratives of
Loss and Desire in the Discourse of Country
Music." Popular Music (vol. not available) 1991.
53-71.
Fox, Aaron. "Ain't it Funny How Time Slips Away:
Talk, Trash, and Technology in a Texas
'Redneck' Bar (copy of author's manuscript).
Gossett, Rhea. "Techno Music." Posting to alt.rave
newsgroup.
Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: the Meaning of Style.
London: Methuen. 1979.
Hilker, Chris and Behlendorf, Brian. "The Official
alt.rave FAQ."
(http://www.hyperreal.com/raves/altraveFAQ.html#intro).
"Jamie's Dance Music Genre Guide."
(http://www.maths.ex.ac.uk~james/tekno/genre.html).
Kawamoto, John. Posting to alt.rave newsgroup.
Krispy. "Utter Shite." Posting to alt.rave newsgroup.
Langlois, Tony. "Can You Feel it? Djs and House
Music Culture in the UK. Popular Music 11/2.
1992. 229-241.
Levy, Owen. "Techno Thrives in Unified Berlin."
Billboard November 6 1993 (original pagination
not available from NEXIS-LEXIS).
O'Malley, Soren. Personal communication.
Porcello, Tom. "The Ethics of Digital Audio Sampling:
Engineers' Discourse. Popular Music 10/1. 1991.
69-84.
Raford, Noah. "Dance for Tomorrow." Posting to
alt.rave newsgroup.
"Rave America Produces Sold Out Rave Party." PR
Newswire report. January 1, 1993.
Sanjek, David. "The Cultural Economy of Sound in
Contemporary Music." Paper given at the Preconference
Symposium on Music Technoculture at the 1995 annual
meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology. Los
Angeles, October 18, 1995.
Schafer, R. Murray. The Tuning of the World. New
York: Knopf, 1977.
Sicko, Dan. "Techno Rebels: Detroit's Agents of
Change." Urb Aug-Sep 1996. 60.
Strauss, Neil. "At the Clubs, Murmers and Ambient
Music." New York Times March 8, 1996. C1.
Thornton, Sarah. Club Cultures: Music, Media, and
Subcultural Capital. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan. 1996.
Walser, Robert. Running with the Devil: Power,
Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music.
Hanover, NH: Wesleyan. 1993.
| |
| 24/08/2010 | Machine Soul - A History Of Techno
by Jon Savage
[This article originally appeared in The Village Voice Summer 1993 "Rock & Roll Quarterly" insert.]
Oooh oooh Techno city
Hope you enjoy your stay
Welcome to Techno city
You will never want to go away
--Cybotron, "Techno City" (1984)
"The 'soul' of the machines has always been a part of our music. Trance always belongs to repetition, and everybody is looking for trance in life... in sex, in the emotional, in pleasure, in anything... so, the machines produce an absolutely perfec t trance."
--Ralf Hütter, 1991, quoted in Kraftwerk: Man Machine and Music, Pascal Bussy
"It's like a cry for survival," a panicked male voice calls out. The beat pauses, but the dancers do not. Then Orbital throw us back into the maelstrom: into a blasting Terry Riley sample, into the relentless machine rhythm, into a total environment of light and sound. We forget about the fact that we're tired, that the person in front of us is invading our space with his flailing arms. Then, suddenly, we're there: locked into the trance, the higher energy. It does happen, just like everybody always says: along with thousands of others, we lift off.
The Brixton Academy is a 3500-capacity venue in South London. Built at the turn of the century in the style of a Moorish temple, it may look beautiful but it's hard to enliven: groups as diverse as the Beastie Boys and Pavement have disappeared into its dark, grimy corners. Tonight, however, it is full of white light and movement: the whole stage is a mass of projections, strobes and dry ice, in front of which a raised dance floor has been put in. Above us is stretched white cloth: at the sides of the building, the alcoves are lit up and flanked by projections of pulsating globules.
The whole scene reminds me of the place I wanted to be when I was 18, the same age as most of this audience: the Avalon Ballroom. Never mind that most of the dancers were born long after the San Francisco scene had passed: they're busy chasing that everlasting present. The sound is techno but psychedelic references abound: in the light shows, the fashions (everything ranging form beatnik to short-hair to late '60s long-hair), the T-shirts that read "Feed Your Head" (that climactic line from Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit"), the polydrug use that is going on all around us.
This event is called Midi Circus: an ambitious attempt by the London promoters Megadog to make dance music performance work. It's obvious from the lightness of the atmosphere that time and energy have been spent on the staging. The acts selected --the Orb, Orbital, the Aphex Twin-- are the most interesting working in the techno/psych crossover that has moved into areas formerly associated with rock: large public events, raves, festivals. It's here you will find the millenarian subculture of techno primitives, half in electronic noise, half in earth-centered paganism.
Orbital's name is taken from the M25 Orbital motorway that circles London; it comes from the period, three years ago, when huge raves were held around the capital's outer limits. They've had a couple of hits, and have just released a fine second LP (due out in the U.S. next month). Tonight, they stand behind their synths wearing helmets with two beams roughly where their eyes would be. When the dry ice and the strobes are in full effect, they look like trolls from Star Wars, or, perhaps more unsettling, coal miners. And then, as machine noise swirls around us, it hits me. This is industrial displacement. Now that England has lost most of its heavy industry, its children are simulating an industrial experience for their entertainment and transcendence.
At first the art of music sought and achieved purity, limpidity and sweetness of sound. Then different sounds were amalgamated, care being taken, however, to caress the ear with gentle harmonies. Today music, as it becomes continually more complicated, strives to amalgamate the most dissonant, strange and harsh sounds. In this way we come ever closer to noise-sound.
--Luigi Russolo: "The Art of Noises" (1913)
Punk rock, new wave, and soul
Pop music, salsa, rock & roll
Calypso, reggae, rhythm and blues
Master mix those number one blues.
--G.L.O.B.E. and Whiz Kid: "Play That Beat Mr. DJ" (1983)
Techno is everywhere in England this year. Beginning as a term applying to a specific form of dance music --the minimal, electronic cuts that Detroiters like Derrick May, Juan Atkins, and Kevin Saunderson were making in the mid '80s-- techno has become a catchall pop buzzword: this year's grunge. When an unabashed Europop record like 2 Unlimited's "No Limit" --think Snap, think Black Box-- blithely includes a rap that goes "Techno techno techno techno," you know that you're living within a major pop phenomenon.
My experience of it has been colored by my recent circumstances: frequent travel, usually by car. Techno is the perfect travelling music, being all about speed: its repetitive rhythms, minimal melodies, and textural modulations are perfect for the constantly shifting perspectives offered by high-speed travel. Alternatively, the fizzing electronic sounds all too accurately reproduce the snap of synapses forced to process a relentless, swelling flood of electronic information.
If there is one central idea in techno, it is of the harmony between man and machine. As Juan Atkins puts it: "You gotta look at it like, techno is technological. It's an attitude to making music that sounds futuristic: something that hasn't been done before." This idea is commonplace throughout much of avant-garde 20th-century art --early musical examples include Russolo's 1913 Art of Noises manifesto and '20s ballets by Erik Satie ("Relâche") and George Antheil ("Ballet méchanique"). Many of Russolo's ideas prefigure today's techno in everything but the available hardware, like the use of nonmusical instruments in his 1914 composition, Awakening of a City.
Postwar pop culture is predicated on technology, and its use in mass production and consumption. Today's music technology inevitably favors unlimited mass reproduction, which is one of the reasons why the music industry, using the weapon of copyright, is always fighting a rearguard battle against its free availability. Just think of those "Home Taping Is Killing Music" stickers, the restrictive prices placed on every new Playback/Record facility (the twin tape deck, the DAT), the legal battles between samplers and copyright holders.
There are obviously ethical considerations here --it's easy to understand James Brown's outrage as his uncredited beats and screams underpin much of today's black music-- but at its best, today's new digital, or integrated analog and digital, technology c an encourage a free interplay of ideas, a real exchange of information. Most recording studios in the U.S. and Europe will have a sampler and a rack of CDs: a basic electronic library of Kraftwerk, James Brown, Led Zeppelin --today's Sound Bank.
Rap is where you first heard it --Grandmaster Flash's 1981 "Wheels of Steel," which scratched together Queen, Blondie, the Sugarhill Gang, the Furious Five, Sequence, and Spoonie Gee --but what is sampling if not digitized scratching? If rap is more an American phenomenon, techno is where it all comes together in Europe as producers and musicians engage in a dialogue of dazzling speed.
Synthetic electronic sounds
Industrial rhythms all around
Musique nonstop
Techno pop
--Kraftwerk: "Techno Pop" (1986)
Kraftwerk stand at the bridge between the old, European avant-garde and today's Euro-American pop culture. Like many others of their generation, Florian Schneider and Ralf Hütter were presented with a blank slate in postwar Germany: as Hütter explains, "When we started, it was like shock, silence. Where do we stand? Nothing. We had no father figures, no continuous tradition of entertainment. Through the '50s and '60s, everything was Americanized, directed toward consumer behavior. We were part of this 1968 movement, where suddenly there were possibilities, then we started to establish some form of German industrial sound."
In the late '60s, there was a concerted attempt to create a distinctively German popular music. Liberated by the influence of Fluxus (LaMonte Young and Tony Conrad were frequent visitors to Germany during this period) and Anglo-American psychedelia, groups like Can and Amon Düül began to sing in German --the first step in countering pop's Anglo-American centrism. Another element in the mix was particularly European: electronic composers like Pierre Schaeffer and Karlheinz Stockhausen, who, like Fluxus, continued Russolo's fascination with the use of nonmusical instruments.
Classically trained, Hütter and Schneider avoided the excesses of their contemporaries, along with the guitar/bass/drums format. Their early records are full of long, moody electronic pieces, using noise and industrial elements --music being indivisible from everyday sounds. Allied to this was a strong sense of presentation (the group logo for their first three records was a traffic cone) which was part of a general move toward control over every aspect of the music and image-making process: in 1973-74, the group built their own studio in Düsseldorf, Kling Klang.
At the same time, Kraftwerk bought a Moog synthesizer, which enabled them to harness their long electronic pieces to a drum machine. The first fruit of this was "Autobahn," a 22-minute motorway journey, from the noises of a car starting up to the hum of cooling machinery. In 1975, an edited version of "Autobahn" was a top 10 hit. It wasn't the first synth hit --that honor belongs to Gershon Kingsley's hissing "Popcorn," performed by studio group Hot Butter-- but it wasn't a pure novelty either.
The breakthrough came with 1977's Trans-Europe Express: again, the concentration on speed, travel, pan-Europeanism. The album's center is the 13-minute sequence that simulates a rail journey: the click-clack of metal wheels on metal rails, the rise and fade of a whistle as the train passes, the creaking of coach bodies, the final screech of metal on metal as the train stops. If this wasn't astounding enough, 1978's Man Machine further developed ideas of an international language, of the synthesis between man and machine.
The influence of these two records --and 1981's Computer World, with its concentration on emerging computer technology --was immense. In England, a new generation of synth groups emerged from the entrails of punk: Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, the Normal all began as brutalist noise groups, for whom entropy and destruction were as important a part of technology as progress, but all of them were moving toward industrial dance rhythms by 1976-79.
The idea of electronic dance music was in the air from 1977 on. Released as disco 12" records in the U.S., cuts like "Trans-Europe Express" and "The Robots" coincided with Giorgio Moroder's electronic productions for Donna Summer, especially "I Feel Love." This in turn had a huge influence on Patrick Cowley's late '70s productions for Sylvester: synth cuts like "You Make Me Feel Mighty Real" and "Stars" were the start of gay disco. Before he died in 1982, Cowley made his own synthetic disco record, the dystopian "Mind Warp."
More surprisingly, Kraftwerk had an immediate impact on black dance music: as Afrika Bambaataa says in David Toop's Rap Attack, "I don't think they even knew how big they were among the black masses back in '77 when they came out with 'Trans-Europe Express.' When that came out, I thought that was one of the best and weirdest records I ever heard in my life." In 1981, Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force, together with producer Arthur Baker, paid tribute with "Planet Rock," which used the melody from "Trans-Europe Express" over the rhythm from "Numbers." In the process they created electro and moved rap out of the Sugarhill age.
The Techno Rebels are, whether they recognize it or not, agents of the Third Wave. They will not vanish but multiply in the years ahead. For they are as much part of the advance to a new stage of civilisation as our missions to Venus, our amazing computers, our biological discoveries, or our explorations of the oceanic depths.
--Alvin Toffler: The Third Wave (1980)
Music is prophecy: its styles and economic organisation are ahead of the rest of society because it explores, much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities in a given code. It makes audible the new world that will gradually become visible.
--Jacques Atalli: Noise (1977)
In the inevitable movement of musical ideas from the avant-garde to pop, from black to white and back again, it's easy to forget that blacks --who to many people in England must be the repository of qualities like soul and authenticity --are equally as capable, if not more, of being technological and futuristic as whites. A veiled racism is at work here. If you want black concepts and black futurism, you need go no further than the mid-'70s Parliafunkadelicment Thang, with its P-Funk language and extraterrestrial visitations.
Derrick May once described techno as "just like Detroit, a complete mistake. It's like George Clinton and Kraftwerk stuck in an elevator." "I've always been a music lover," says Juan Atkins. "Everything has a subconscious effect on what I do. In the 1970s I was into Parliament, Funkadelic; as far back as '69 they were making records like Maggot Brain, America Eats Its Young. But if you want the reason why that happened in Detroit, you have to look at a DJ called Electrifying Mojo: he had five hours every night, with no format restrictions. It was on his show that I first heard Kraftwerk."
In 1981, Atkins teamed up with a fellow Washtenaw Community College student, Vietnam veteran Richard Davies, who had decided to simply call himself 3070. "He was very isolated," Atkins says; "He had one of the first Roland sequencers, a Roland MSK-100. I was around when you had to get a bass player, a guitarist, a drummer to make records: you had all these egos flying around, it was hard to get a consistent thought. I wanted to make electronic music but thought you had to be a computer programmer to do it. I found out it wasn't as complicated as I thought. Our first record was 'Alleys of Your Mind.' It sold about 15,000 locally."
Atkins and 3070 called themselves Cybotron, a futuristic name in line with the ideas they had taken from science fiction, P-Funk, Kraftwerk, and Alvin Toffler's The Third Wave. "We had always been into futurism. We had a whole load of concepts for Cybotron: a whole techno-speak dictionary, an overall idea which we called the Grid. It was like a video game which you entered on different levels." By 1984-85, they had racked up some of the finest electronic records ever, produced in their home studio in Ypsilanti: tough, otherworldly yet warm cuts like "Clear," "R-9", and the song that launched the style, "Techno City."
Like Kraftwerk, Cybotron celebrated the romance of technology, of the city, of speed, using purely electronic instruments and sounds. One of their last records, "Night Drive," features a disembodied voice whispering details of rapid, nocturnal transit in an intimate, seductive tone --this set against a background of terminal industrial decay. After the riots of June 1967, Detroit went, as Ze'ev Chafets writes in Devil's Night, "in one generation from a wealthy white industrial giant to a poverty- stricken black metropolis." Starved of resources while the wealth remains in rich, white suburbs, the inner city has, largely, been left to rot.
Much has been made of Detroit's blasted state --and indeed, analogous environments can be found in England, in parts of London, Manchester, Sheffield, which may well account for techno's popularity there-- but Atkins remains optimistic. "You can look at the state of Detroit as a plus," says Atkins. "All right, you only take 15 minutes to get from one side of the city center to the other, and the main department store is boarded up, but we're at the forefron here. When the new technology came in, Detroit collapsed as an industrial city, but Detroit is techno city. It's getting better, it's coming back around."
By 1985, 3070 was gone, permanently damaged by Vietnam. Atkins hooked up with fellow Belleville High alumni Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson. The three of them began recording together and separately, under various names: Model 500 (Atkins), Reese (Saunderson), Mayday, R-Tyme, and Rhythim is Rhythim (May). All shared an attitude toward making records --using the latest in computer technology without letting machines do everything-- and a determination to overcome their environment; like May has said, " We can do nothing but look forward."
The trio put out a stream of records in the Detroit area on the Transmat and KMS labels: many of these, like "No UFO's," "Strings of Life," "Rock to the Beat," and "When He Used To Play," have the same tempo, about 120 bpm, and feature blank, otherworldly voices --which, paradoxically, communicate intense emotion. These records --now rereleased in Europe on compilations like Retro Techno Detroit Definitive (Network U.K.) or Model 500: Classics (R&S Belgium)-- were as good, if not better, as anything coming out of New York or even Chicago, but because of Detroit's isolation few people in the U.S. heard them at the time. It took English entrepreneurs to give them their correct place in the mainstream of dance culture.
Like many others, Neil Rushton was galvanized by the electronic music coming out of Chicago mid-decade, which was successfully codified in the English market under the trade name "house." A similar thing happened in Chicago as in Detroit: away from the musical mainstream on both coasts, DJs like Frankie Knuckles and Marshall Jefferson had revived a forgotten musical form, disco, and adapted it to the environment of gay clubs like the Warehouse. The result was a spacey, electronic sound, released on local labels like Trax and DJ International: funkier and more soulful than techno, but futuristic. As soon as it was marketed in the U.K. as house in early 1987, it because a national obsession with No. 1 hits like "Love Can't Turn Around" and "Jack Your Body."
House irrevocably turned around English pop music. After the successes of these early records by Steve "Silk" Hurley and Farley "Jackmaster" Funk (with disco diva Darryl Pandy), pop music was dance music, and, more often than not, futuristic black dance music at that. The apparent simplicity of these records coincided with the coming onstream of digital technology whereby, in Atkins's words, "you have the capability of storing a vast amount of information in a smaller place." The success of the original house records opened up more trends: acid house --featuring the Roland 303-- was followed by Italian house, and later, Belgian New Beat's slower, more industrial dance rhythms.
"The U.K. likes discovering trends," Rushton says. "Because of the way that the media works, dance culture happens very quickly. It's not hard to hype something up." House slotted right into the mainstream English pop taste for fast, four-on-the-floor black dance music that began with Tamla in the early '60s (for many English people the first black music they heard). In the '70s, obscure mid-'60s Detroit area records had been turned into a way of life, a religion even, in the style called "Northern Soul" by dance writer Dave Godin.
"I was always a Northern Soul freak," says Rushton. "When the first techno records came in, the early Model 500, Reese, and Derrick May material, I wanted to follow up the Detroit connection. I took a flyer and called up Transmat; I got Derrick May and we started to release his records in England. At that time, Derrick was recording on very primitive analog equipment: 'Nude Photo,' for instance, was done straight onto cassette, and that was the master. When you're using that equipment, you must keep the mixes very simple. You can't overdub, or drop too many things in; that's why it's so sparse.
"Derrick came over with a bag of tapes, some of which didn't have any name: tracks which are now classics, like 'Sinister' and 'Strings of Life.' Derrick then introduced us to Kevin Saunderson, and we quickly realized that there was a cohesive sound of these records, and that we could do a really good compilation album. We got backing from Virgin Records and flew to Detroit. We met Derrick, Kevin, and Juan and went out to dinner, trying to think of a name.
"At the time, everything was house, house house. We thought of Motor City House Music, that kind of thing, but Derrick, Kevin, and Juan kept on using the word techno. They had it in their heads without articulating it; it was already part of their language." Rushton's team returned to England with 12 tracks, which were released on an album called Techno! The New Dance School of Detroit, with a picture of the Detroit waterfront at night. At the time, it seemed like just another hype, but within a couple of months Kevin Saunderson had a huge U.K. hit with Inner City's pop oriented "Big Fun," and techno entered the language.
In the future, all pop music will bring everyone a little closer together --gay or straight, black or white, one nation under a groove.
--LFO: "Intro" (1991)
The sheer exponential expansion of dance music in Europe since house is attributable to several factors. First, the sheer quality of the records coming out of the U.S., whether swingbeat, rap, New York garage, house or techno. Secondly acid house --acid being a Chicago term for the wobbly bassline and trancey sounds that started to come in from 1987 on-- coincided with the widespread European use of the psychedelic Ecstasy. In Europe, acid house meant psychedelic house, and this drug-derived subculture has become the single largest fashion in England and across the continent; gatherings of up to 5000 people were common after 1988 and have become an important circuit for breaking hits.
Thirdly, the deceptively simple sound of the Detroit and Chicago records, together with the spread of digital technology like the Roland 808 sequencer [sic.], encouraged Europeans to make their own records cheaply, often in their own home studios, from the mid decade. The long delay between Kraftwerk's 1981 Computer World and 1986 Electric Cafe occurred in part because the group was converting its Kling Klang studio from analog to digital. The result is greater flexibility, more sto rage space, and more sonic possibilities --vital in an area of music as fast-moving and competitive as the dance economy.
The big English breakthrough came in 1988 with S'Express's no. 1 hit "Theme From S'Express" --a playful reworking of that old travel motif, with Karen Finley and hairspray samples for percussion. The acid sound development from the Roland 808 explorations of Phuture's "Acid Tracks" --the sound of buzzing bees discovered by accident from a synthesizer straight out of the shop. Squeezed, bent, oscillated, this buzz became the staple of the 1988-89 acid boom; you can hear an early English version on Baby Ford's proto-hardcore "Ooochy Koochy Fuck You Baby Yeah Yeah."
By 1990, the relentless demand for new dance music was such that, in Neil Rushton's words, "The Detroit innovators couldn't take it to the next stage. What did was that kids in the U.K. and Europe started learning how to make those techno records. They weren't as well-made, but they had the same energy. And, by 1990-91, things became more interesting, because instead of three people in Detroit, you suddenly had 23 people making techno, in Belgium, in Sheffield."
Beltram's "Energy Flash" released on the Belgian R&S Records in early 1991, defined the new mood. Inherent in the man/machine aesthetic is a certain brutality that goes right back to the macho posturings of the Futurist F.T. Marinetti: even in records as soulful as those made by Model 500, you'll find titles like "Off to Battle." With its in-your-face bass, speeded up industrial rhythms and whispered chants of "Ecstasy," "Energy Flash" caught the transition from Detroit techno to today's hardcore --the aesthetic laid out for all time on Human Resource's "Dominator:" "I'm bigger and bolder and rougher and tougher / In other words, sucker, there is no other / I wanna kiss myself."
"In Belgium we had all the influences," says R&S label owner Renaat Vandepapeliere. "We had new beat, which was slowed-down industrial music. Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle were very big in Belgium. Detroit techno and acid house came in and everything got mixed up together." Other Beltram cuts like "Sub-Bass Experience," with its sensuous psychedelic textures and rock samples, pointed the way forward to other R&S releases like the Aphex Twin's "Analogue Bubblebath," which spun techno off into yet another direction.
In England, the techno take-up came not in London or Manchester (which by then was busy with rock/dance groups like the Happy Mondays), but in Sheffield, an industrial city about 200 miles away from London, on the other side of the Pennine Hills from Manchester, which in the late '70s spawned its own electronic scene with Cabaret Voltaire and The Human League. "There are no live venues here in Sheffield," says WARP Records co-owner Rob Mitchell. "The only way to be in a band and be successful is to make dance records.
"All these industrial places influence the music that you make. Electronic music is relevant because of the subliminal influence of industrial sounds. You go around Sheffield and it's full of crap concrete architecture built in the '60's; you go down in to an area called the Canyon and you have these massive black factories belching out smoke, banging away. They don't sound a lot different from the music." You can hear this in early industrial cuts by Cabaret Voltaire, like 1978's "The Set Up," with its deep throbbing pulse.
In 1989, CV's Richard Kirk was looking for a new way to operate. "Cabaret Voltaire had just finished a period on a major label, EMI, and we weren't working together. I spent a lot of time going to clubs, and working in the studio with Parrot, a DJ who ran the city's main club night, Jive Turkey. We made a record, as Sweet Exorcist, called 'Test One,' which we made to play in the club. It was very, very minimal. WARP was a shop where everyone bought American imports, and they put it out. We started to move seriously in that direction."
WARP released "Test One" in mid 1990. By the end of the year they had two top 20 hits with LFO and Tricky Disco, both with eponymous dance cuts. The WARP material is less brutal than the Belgian techno: still using crunch industrial sounds, but more minimal, more playful. And then another change occurred as techno went hardcore in 1991. "I didn't like the hardcore stuff," says Mitchell. "It was too simplistic, crude and aggressive. We were getting sent lots of tracks that we couldn't sell on singles, so we thought, 'Let's just do an LP.' We got the title, Artificial Intelligence, and a concept: 'Electronic music for the mind created by trans-global electronic innovators who prove music is the one true universal language.'"
The cover of Artificial Intelligence is a computer-generated image: a robot lies back in an armchair, relaxing after a Sapporo and what looks like a joint. On the floor surrounding him are album sleeves: the first WARP compilation, featuring LFO and Sweet Exorcist among others, Kraftwerk's Autobahn, and Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. The music inside has slower beats, and is a ways away from the minimal funkiness of Detroit techno; cuts by the Dice Man, the Orb, and Musicology are nothing other than a modern, dance-oriented psychedelia.
Featured on the album was the then 17-year-old Richard James, who, under his most familiar pseudonym Aphex Twin, has become the star of what most people now call ambient techno --although it doesn't quite have a name yet. Coincidental to the Artificial Intelligence compilation, R&S released the Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works 85-92, which developed a huge underground reputation at the end of last year. With its minimal, archetypal graphics --a mutated boomerang shape on the sleeve-- the Ambient Works album trashed the boundaries between acid, techno, ambient, and psychedelic. It defined a new techno primitive romanticism.
When Richard James was finally found and interviewed, he came up with a story that has already become myth: how the by-now 19-year-old student from Cornwall (a remote part of the U.K.) recorded under a bewildering variety of pseudonyms --the Aphex Twin, Polygon Window, Dice Man, and Caustic Window, to name but a few-- how he built his own electronic machines to make the speaker-shredding noises you hear on his records; how he already has 20 albums recorded and ready to go. WARP plans to release his next ambient collection as a triple-CD set with a graphic novel.
The Aphex Twin's success comes at a moment when, in England and on the continent, one wing of techno is going toward ambience. The slowing pace is partly in response to the still-popular working class fashion of hardcore, which regularly throws up generic chart hits like those by Altern-8 and the Prodigy. At the same time as the drug supply in clubland has changed from Ecstasy to amphetamines, hardcore has gone far beyond the linear brutalities of "The Dominator" into a seamless dystopia of speeded up breakbeats, horror lyrics, and ur-punk vocal chants. Like gangsta rap, it's scary, and it's meant to be.
"Ninety per cent of the techno records you hear now are made for a fucked-up dance floor," says Renaat Vandepapeliere. "That's what I see now in a lot of clubs: no vibe, no motivation, aggression --the drugs have taken over. The majority don't understand it yet, but most of the guys who are really good, like Derrick May, don't take drugs. Techno was a sound but it is now an attitude, and that's to make records for drug-oriented people. There is another category, where people are making music for you to pay attention with your full mind, and we're trying to make something now that will last."
"I believe that the '70s are parallel for what's going on in the '90s," says WARP's Rob Mitchell. "Musical moods tend to be a reaction against what has just gone on; we've just had a very aggressive period. The original Detroit techno is very sophisticated. What we're putting out now --Wild Planet, F.U.S.E.-- has a similar level of sophistication. The real change for us since we started is the fact that this music is 99 per cent white, but the idea of raising techno to an artier level is really exciting."
If the '70s are back, then it's the early part of the decade: you can see 1970-71 in the long hair and loose clothes of R&S/WARP acts like the Aphex Twin, Source, C.J. Bolland; you can read it in their titles ("Neuromancer," "Aquadrive," "Hedphelym"); you can hear the hints of Terry Riley, German romanticists Cluster and Klaus Schulze, even Jean-Michel Jarre. The very idea of boy keyboard wizards goes back to that moment in the early '70s when Kraftwerk began their electronic experiments, when rock went progressive. Techno has moved into psychedelia with groups like Orbital; now it's gone prog.
It's hard to avoid the impression that ambient has come as a godsend to the music industry. The very success of the dance-music economy has thrown up problems, as Rob Mitchell explains: "There is virtually no artist loyalty in dance music; the record is more important than the artist. Dance is incredibly fast moving, which is good, but very difficult to build careers in." With ambient acts like the Aphex Twin, the music industry has something it recognizes and knows how to promote: the definable white rock artists, as opposed to the anonymous, often black, record. And ambient techno also slots directly into the music industry's most profitable form of hardware: the CD.
The term ambient was popularized by Brian Eno in the late '70s. The percussionless, subtle tonalities of records like Music for Airports were perfect for the CD format when it came onstream in the mid '80s. Ambient techno and its kitsch associate, New Age, are the modern equivalent of the exotic sound experience that developed to fit the technologies of the '50s. Just as mass distribution of the LP and the home hi-fi gave us film soundtracks and Martin Denny, the CD and the Discman have given us ambient techno.
Ambient could go horribly wrong, but hasn't yet. A cyberpunk/computer games aesthetic is always patched somewhere into the screen, but is not obtrusive. Inherent in the genre is a lightness of touch, and a rhythmic discipline that comes from its Detroit source. The best material, like Biosphere's Microgravity and Sandoz's Digital Lifeforms, also has a holistic spirituality that goes back to the Detroit records. As Sandoz's Richard Kirk says, "I've been making music for a long time. Much of it has been very cold, very aggressive, very stark. It's time to do something that makes you feel good, that makes you feel warm."
Recorded by a 27-year-old from Norway, Geir Jennsen (a/k/a Biosphere), Microgravity stands at the apex of ambient. Its nine cuts (sample title: "Cloudwater II") form a perfectly segued 45-minute whole that balances the utopian/dystopian pull inherent in the machine aesthetic. Their ebb and flow, between fast and slow, between playful and awful, between moon and sun, holds some of the queasy balance within which we live. At the end, a resolution: "Biosphere" merges the sound of technology --the thrum of heavy industry, an electric alarm-- into a bass pulse and atmospheric effects, warning but enclosing. The last sound is wind.
There's something in the air called objectivity.
There's something in the air like electricity.
There's something in the air, and it's in the air, the air.
There's something in the air that's pure silliness.
There's something in the air that you can't resist.
There's something in the air, and it's in the air,
And you can't get it out of the air.
--Theme song, Schiffer-Spoliansky revue: "Es Liegt in der Luft" (There's something in the air) (1928)
Techno, how far can you go? "A lot of it was kind of as we planned," says Juan Atkins, "but nobody knew it would be a global thing as it is now, from little Detroit." "We have played and been understood in Detroit and Japan," says Ralf Hütter; "That's the most fascinating thing that could happen. Electronic music is a kind of world music. It may be a couple of generations yet, but I think that the global village is coming."
The computer virus is loose. Right now, techno presents itself as a paradox of possibilities (and limitations, the most glaring being gender: where are the women in this boys' world?). In its many forms, techno shows that within technology there is emotion, that within information access there is overload, that within speed lies entropy, that within progress lies destruction, that within the materiality of inanimate objects can lie spirituality.
These tensions have been programmed into our art and culture since the turn of the century, and it is fitting that at the century's end, a form has come along which can synthesize the encroaching vortex of the millennium. You can do anything with techno, and people will. As our past, present, and future start to spin before our eyes, and our feet start to slip, the positivism inherent in techno remains a guide: like Juan Atkins says, "I'm very optimistic. This is a very good time to be alive right now."
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| 24/08/2010 | Ray Lema , la roue rythmique
par Patrice van Eersel
Nous sommes physiquement coupés du sens. Un grand musicien noir, à l'expérience exemplaire dont nous racontons l'histoire, nous dit comment cela se sent dans notre mouvement. Et notre danse.
Né en 1946 en pleine gare de Lufu-Toto, dans ce qui était encore le Congo belge, Ray Lema a grandi dans la grande ville de Kinshasa, un pied dans le monde africain, un pied dans le monde occidental. A onze ans, élève chez les pères blancs, il donne son premier concert : la Sonate au clair de lune de Beethoven. Les pères le trouvent si doué qu'ils lui offrent un régime spécial : au lieu de suivre les cours comme les autres, il pourra jouer de l'orgue autant qu'il voudra. Le voilà toute la journée plongé dans Bach. Il veut devenir prêtre... et devient musicien. Il joue dans les groupes à la mode de la capitale zaïroise, en particulier dans celui du célèbre Tabu Ley. Peu à peu, sa réputation se forge : au Zaïre, il devient "I'intello" des musiciens. Celui qui gamberge tellement que sa tête chauffe. Attention, parfois on dirait presque un blanc ! Mais on ne se moque pas, on admire.
Un jour, en 1974, "I'intello" est convoqué en haut lieu pour une mission de la plus haute importance. Dans les nations jeunes du Tiers-Monde, l'orchestre national est une entité importante, un symbole d'union. En Afrique, c'est même un instrument politique essentiel. Mais, au Zaïre, il y a un os : le pays est si grand, les tribus si éclatées et différentes qu'elles ne parviennent pas à jouer ensemble. Or, c'est précisément cela que l'on attend de cet orchestre : que plusieurs centaines de musiciens (et de danseurs) venus des quatre coins du pays jouent dans la même formation. Plusieurs chefs d'orchestre s'y sont déjà cassé le nez : rien à faire. En dernier recours, c'est donc à Rey Lema que le pouvoir fait appel.
Et Ray, comme les autres, commence par échouer. Chaque fois qu'il essaie de faire jouer ces citoyens ensemble, il y en a forcément un qui vient se plaindre : "Ça ne va pas, chef, il joue faux celui-là !" Au bout de quelques semaines, Ray comprend qu'il n'y arrivera pas. Leurs rythmes, leurs manières de jouer, bien qu'apparemment proches, sont organisés de telle sorte qu'il se trouve à son tour incapable de les diriger. Il faut trouver un truc, mais quoi ? Et bientôt une évidence s'impose à lui, assez vertigineuse : la seule solution serait qu'il aille sur place, dans la brousse, et jusqu'au fond de la profonde forêt où vivent les pygmées, pour y chercher des musiciens, mais surtout pour y apprendre à jouer les rythmes lui-même.
Commence alors un long voyage initiatique.
Ray Lema découvre d'abord que chaque village a sa "signature" rythmique. A l'évidence, celle-ci est systématiquement constituée, à la base, par le croisement de deux rythmes différents, très rapides, joués sur des percussions par des "petits", c'est-à-dire des enfants ou des adolescents - "car les enfants sont bavards et doivent se muscler". Ce jeu rythmique - dont le résultat est un battement d'interférences - résonne le plus clair du temps dans l'espace du village, par-delà la forêt et les champs, avec des moments creux dans la journée et des moments forts, chaque fois notamment qu'a lieu une fête, une cérémonie. Quand on joue de cette musique, les gens disent simplement : "Ça tourne" ; mais si Ray leur fait écouter un morceau de musique moderne, il y a toutes les chances qu'ils fassent une grimace : "Ça ne tourne pas !" Ray se demande ce que cela signifie : qu'est-ce qui "ne tourne pas" ?
Il découvre que dans le village, chacun, du plus petit gamin à la plus vieille grand-mère, a sa façon propre d'entrer dans ce jeu rythmique - le plus souvent en cognant contre un tambour, un tronc d'arbre creux, une boîte quelconque, en claquant de la langue, des doigts, ou en jouant de quelque autre instrument, à corde notamment, petites guimbardes résonnant dans la nuit très noire jusqu'au sommet des arbres géants. Comme si les deux "petits", qui donnent sa base au jeu rythmique, faisaient tourner une gigantesque corde à sauter et que tout le village s'amusait à sauter dans cette corde, chacun à son rythme propre, c'est-à-dire suivant son humeur, sa personnalité, son âge... "Suivant l'âge de son âme ! dit Ray ; plus l'âme est jeune, plus elle saute vite dans la corde." Les vieux maîtres du village ne sautent, c'est-à-dire ne frappent sur leurs tambours qu'un coup sur dix, ou sur quinze, ou sur cent...
Et, peu à peu, Ray bascule dans un monde qu'il ne soupçonnait pas. Un monde purement acoustique. Quand la nuit tombe et qu'il fait si sombre dans la forêt qu'on ne distingue plus ses propres mains, même en écarquillant les yeux, cela l'impressionne parfois terriblement : car les villageois semblent voir dans le noir et se reconnaître les uns les autres, de loin, rien qu'à la façon dont ils interviennent dans le faisceau rythmique. Mieux : à la façon dont tel ou tel joue, les autres, à distance, vous disent : "Il est fatigué aujourd'hui", ou : "Elle m'a l'air en colère", ou encore : "Quelle forme il tient, Machin ? Quelle blague nous a-t-il encore mijotée ?"
Ce qui frappe peut-être le plus l'Africain de la grande ville dans les pratiques rythmiques de la forêt, c'est combien elles interdisent le baratin, le mensonge social. Vous êtes qui vous êtes, votre rythme le dit, impossible de frimer. Si vous tentez de jouer un rythme qui ne vous correspond pas, en particulier s'il est trop sophistiqué pour vous (les ados s'y essayent tous un jour ou l'autre), eh bien vous ne tiendrez pas une nuit durant. Car ces gens-Ià jouent, au sens propre, des nuits durant ! Et Ray lui-même, pourtant entraîné, se casse souvent la figure au début. Jusqu'à ce qu'un jour un vieux lui dise : "Mais dis-donc, on dirait que tes mains sont devenues sèches ! Désormais, elles vont savoir faire parler le tambour !" Honneur suprême. Pour ces gens-Ià, nous tous qui n'avons pas l'habitude de taper sur des tam-tam pendant des heures (et même nos batteurs modernes), nous avons les mains "mouillées".
Bref, Ray a passé une première épreuve de la connaissance des secrets de la forêt.
Les vieux maîtres lui parlent davantage. Eux jouent les rythmes les plus lents, les plus sophistiqués justement. Mais ils peuvent aussi jouer tres vite, pour accompagner un plus jeune. Pour l'imiter, ou pour se moquer de lui. Les vieux maîtres savent jouer "à la manière de" n'importe lequel des villageois. Et quand un jeune fait trop le malin et se pavane par exemple devant les filles, ils savent aussi le taquiner et "couper" son rythme de telle sorte que le malheureux ait beau s'esquinter sur son tam-tam, personne ne l'entende.
Mais le pouvoir des vieux maîtres-tambour va beaucoup plus loin. Ils savent comment atteindre telle ou telle partie du corps de telle ou telle personne en train de danser au milieu de la place du village. Et redresser une épaule. Atteindre un estomac. Ou capturer un corps, pour libérer son esprit, et le mettre en transe. Les mois passent. Ray visite, une à une, près de deux cent cinquante ethnies différentes. Et voilà qu'il se met à conceptualiser toutes ces découvertes ; à comprendre par exemple pourquoi un vieux maître tambour à qui il venait de faire écouter du Miles Davis et du John Coltrane, avait ronchonné : "Ils sont drôlement doués ces petits, pourquoi ne leur donne-t-on pas un maître ?
- Comment ? s'était exclamé Ray, mais que trouves-tu à redire à cette musique ?
- Tu n'entends donc pas, avait répondu le vieux, ça ne tourne pas !"
Même le jazz ! Maintenant "I'intello" des musiciens de Kinshasa commence à comprendre : ce qui "tourne" ou "ne tourne pas", c'est une sorte de roue, - du moins visualise-t-il la chose ainsi. Une roue dans laquelle rebondissent les différents rythmes du village. Une roue qui est à la fois extérieure, englobant tous ces rythmes, et intérieure à chaque individu, courant dans son ventre, l'aspirant au-dehors jusqu'aux limites de son être réel, et le reliant aux autres dans un même mouvement. A la fin, les visualisations de Ray deviennent si claires qu'il parvient à les dessiner sous forme de roues géométriques. Et ça marche ! Muni de cet outil, il parvient enfin à expliquer à des centaines de musiciens venus de toutes les tribus comment jouer ensemble...
Et c'est ainsi qu'il fonde le "Ballet national du Zaïre". Grand moment de gloire pour "l'intello", dont s'empare bientôt une idée fixe : cette roue rythmique extraordinaire, il veut l'importer dans le monde moderne ! Car la forêt, tôt ou tard, va mourir. Et l'on a beau énormément danser dans les grandes villes africaines, et savoir faire son marché en balançant son corps de façon chaloupée, les secrets de la forêt vont irrémédiablement se perdre. Voilà pourquoi, vers 1976, on retrouve Ray Lema de l'autre côté du gigantesque fleuve, à Brazzaville, capitale du Congo, où il dirige une drôle de petite communauté baptisée "la Tribu du Verseau". Arts martiaux, méditation, techniques empruntées à toutes les grandes traditions, et au centre : une pratique quotidienne de la roue. Ray fait des expériences. Comme un fou. Vingt-quatre heures sur vingt-quatre. Mais il est trop pressé, trop autoritaire. Surcomprimés, les disciples de la communauté explosent.
Ray se trouve à la dérive...
Pendant ce temps, la création du Ballet national du Zaïre est remarquée à l'étranger, jusqu'à New York, où la fondation Rockfeller invite Ray à venir passer un an aux États-Unis, tous frais payés. Le musicien zaïrois est ravi.
Il pense qu'il va pouvoir expliquer ses découvertes et offrir au monde le plus beau cadeau de l'Afrique : comment réguler toute une société musicalement ! Dans les villages zaïrois qu'il a connus, la roue rythmique institue un véritable ordre social. Elle permet aux gens de se reconnaître, de se comparer, de se jauger, de se soigner, de prier, de voyager hors de son corps... tout ça par les rythmes, et avec un raffinement inouï.
Hélas l'Amérique, qui l'a si bien accueilli, se comporte avec lui comme avec un bon sauvage, et ne l'écoute pas. Ce sont plutôt eux, les jazzmen, qui prétendent enseigner la musique à ce brave-garçon de la brousse ! Il faut dire que, lorsque Ray met sur une platine de grand studio américain l'un des 33 tours enregistrés à la hâte au Zaïre, le résultat est très démoralisant. Le fondateur du Ballet national du Zaïre comprend alors qu'il lui faut percer un autre genre de grand secret : celui de la technologie des studios modernes, du son digitalisé. Aidé par quelques blancs, dont Jean-François Bizot d'Actuel, puis Chris Blackwell d'Island, il entame, en 1983, à Paris (où il vit avec sa femme Carol et ses trois enfants), une nouvelle longue marche, qu'il n'a pas encore achevée.
J'ai passé de nombreuses dizaines d'heures à discuter avec Ray. Extraits d'une de nos dernières discussions :
Ray éclate de rire : "Ça fait vingt-cinq ans que je fais danser des blancs ! Et crois- moi, quand tu fais danser des gens, il ne te faut pas longtemps pour voir à qui tu as à faire !" De sa main effilée, le musicien fait le geste de s'arracher un masque. Ses doigts claquent dans le vide puis se reposent tranquillement sur le bord de la table.
- "Tu veux dire qu'au fond nous dansons mal...
- Ah mais vraiment, rien à voir avec la technique !"
La voix du black claque comme un tissu au grand vent :
"Non, rien à voir avec la technique. Je connais des blancs, enfin, je veux dire des Occidentaux - parce que ce mal menace toutes les races ! - qui, techniquement, ne dansent pas mal du tout. Mais rarissimes sont ceux qui ne te donnent pas l'impression d'être complètement coupés.
- Coupés ?
- Coupés du monde. Coupés des autres. Coupés de tout ! Je crois que c'est le prix terrible qu'ils ont payé pour inventer l'individualisme, c'est-à-dire l'ère moderne. Et quand tu les fais danser, je t'assure que ça saute aux yeux : les blancs sont totalement coupés les uns des autres. Ils dansent chacun pour soi. Même quand ils sont deux !
- Excuse-moi, mais quand je danse le slow, ou même le rock d'ailleurs, le vrai rock, eh bien...
- Mais non, je t'assure... (il a un sourire d'un kilomètre de large). Il s'agit de quelque chose de... comment dire ? de très objectif. Et nous, Africains, nous mettons énormément de temps à réaliser que, cette chose, vous ne la voyez pas, vous ne la sentez pas. Ma position de musicien m'a un peu aidé à voir plus clair là-dedans. Imagine des gens qui diraient raffoler du surf, mais qui ne verraient pas les vagues ! Ils seraient là, dans l'eau à essayer de grimper sur leurs planches, mais chaque fois qu'une belle vague arriverait, ils ne la verraient pas. Et plaf ! ils la prendraient sur la tronche. Parfois, tout à fait par hasard, l'un d'eux saurait en prendre une au bon moment - et alors ZZZZZZZ ! il ferait enfin du vrai surf, et il crierait à la grâce divine et au "miracle" ! Et, à coup sûr, il écrirait un essai là-dessus ! Mais la plupart barboterait en désordre, chacun dans son coin !"
De nouveau son rire tonitruant éclate dans la nuit, puis il reprend : "Eh bien je t'assure, c'est e-xa-cte-ment l'impression que tu as quand tu fais danser des blancs. Comme si, pour gagner leurs indépendances individuelles, ces humains-Ià s'étaient mutilés de tout ce qui les liait au monde. Coupés les ailes ! Et là, pendant la danse, leurs mutilations apparaîtraient tout d'un coup au grand jour. Béantes ! Quelquefois, je te jure que ça fait de la peine.
- OK, mais quand c'est toute une foule qui se balance au même rythme, par exemple dans un grand concert rock, là, quand même ?..
- Là, tu sais ce qu'on sent ? La nostalgie des liens perdus. Une nostalgie assez épaisse. Quand tu y regardes de près, même dans les plus grands concerts rock (et bon sang, j'aime cette ambiance), eh bien derrière une écume d'excitation, la sensation réelle, individu par individu, de ce qui relie chacun au tout, cette sensation-là est vraiment faiblarde ! On a juste des milliers de petits "moi" agglutinés, qui passent un bon moment ensemble, d'accord c'est sympa, mais enfin bon... S'il en allait autrement, avec de pareilles masses de gens, t'aurais des transes carabinées, ah mais crois-moi ! (bien qu'en ce moment, dans la banlieue parisienne, se mijote chez les ados, beurs, blancs, africains, antillais, chinois, un mélange de cultures et de races comme nulle part ailleurs, qui les fait bouger de manière drôlement plus vivante, je dois l'avouer !)"
Il demeure un instant silencieux. Dehors, dans le silence de la banlieue Est, un chat huant hurle. On nous sert du thé. Et brusquement, comme si la conversation ne s'était pas arrêté une seconde, l'Africain reprend : "Mais si tu voyais ce que devient un individu de la forêt africaine quand la musique se met à tourner ! Ah mon vieux !"
Il ouvre les bras en croix et tire la langue la plus large possible. Un geste d'écartèlement, à la fois infini et assez laid. Je fais des yeux ronds :
"Quoi ? Il s'envole ?
- Ah tu parles ! Il n'existe plus, tu veux dire ! En Afrique profonde, quand la musique se met à tourner, c'est bien simple : l'individu n'existe plus. Terminé ! Il est tout entier fondu dans ces fameux "liens" dont nous parlions, et que vous, les blancs, vous ne sentez plus. Or ça, cher ami (les yeux soudain mi-clos, guettant avec un air de grand renard sérieux), nous n'en voulons pas non plus ! Nous ne désirons pas vos mutilations d'Occidentaux, mais ce n'est certainement pas pour revenir en arrière dans l'anéantissement de la forêt ! Ah ça non ! D'ailleurs, ça serait impossible ; même en Afrique, le mouvement de modernisation est irréversible, alors...
- Alors, tu veux quoi ?
- Le lait et l'argent du lait !" De nouveau, il rit, du rire le plus éclatant qui soit. Maintenant, je me sens moi-même pris d'une jubilation perplexe : "Tu me fais marrer : tu veux l'individualisme, mais sans la solitude, c'est ça ?
- Je veux - du moins si c'est la volonté du Très Haut - cette chose tranchante, aiguë, que vous avez affûtée à la limite de l'impossible, et qui s'appelle la lucidité, la conscience individuelle ; mais je ne veux pas pour autant perdre mes liens au monde et aux autres, ni devenir ce petit "moi" châtré et boursouflé, tout imbu de ses "droits de I'homme", qui passe devant la main tendue sans même la voir ! Cet être malade, que la vie va sérieusement mettre à l'épreuve dans les temps qui viennent, crois-moi.
- Tu réclames en somme à la fois l'état de la particule et celui de l'onde...
- Ha ha ! Voilà qui me dit quelque chose ! Ne m'as-tu pas raconté toi-même un jour que les physiciens modernes décrivaient la réalité matérielle sous ce double aspect inséparable ? !
- Oui, bon, la matière, mais imagine un peu : comment un être humain pourrait-il à la fois avoir des ailes et n'en avoir pas ? Tu veux être tout à la fois, libre de tes mouvements, indépendant de tous les autres et pris dans un cristal, en résonance avec le tout...
- Sais-tu que ça existe, ce que tu viens de décrire ?
- Quoi ?
- Cet état particulier, là, à la fois "un" comme le cristal et librement dispersé à la guise de chaque atome.
- Eh bien ?
- Cet état existe, c'est le cristal liquide ! Une substance en pleine expansion industrielle, à ce qu'on m'a dit ! (il rit). Et je me demande même s'il ne s'agirait pas d'un cristal liquide très particulier, dont nous sommes tous faits : l'eau ! D'ailleurs, tu sais, les danseurs blancs, si coupés les uns des autres, c'est peut-être ça que j'aimerais Ieur dire en premier : les gars, il faut que vous laissiez couler l'eau en vous ! Laissez couler l'eau ! Chaque cellule de votre corps est une gouttelette d'eau, laissez chacune de ces gouttelettes tomber de tout son poids. Et résonner au rythme de votre coeur."
Le reste de la nuit ne nous a pas suffit à définir l'impression particulière que ce bout de conversation avait éveillée en nous.
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| 24/08/2010 | History Of House Music
Let's Go Back In Time...
With the History of House Music
It's been ten years since the first identifiably house tracks were put on to vinyl, ten years which have changed the technology behind the electronic music revolution beyond recognition but left the basic structure of house intact. It's seven years since it was being said house couldn't last, that it was just hi-NRG, a fast blast that would wither as quickly as it had started. But then the music reinvented itself, and then again and again until it gradually dawned on people that house wasn't just another phase of club culture, it was club culture, the continuing future of dance music. The reason? It's simple. People like to dance to house.
The roots to 1985 Like it or not, house was first and foremost a direct descendant of disco. Disco had already been going for ten years when the first electronic drum tracks began to appear out of Chicago, and in that time it had already suffered the slings and arrows of merciless commercial exploitation, dilution and racial and sexual prejudice which culminated in the 'disco sucks' campaign. In one bizarrely extreme incident, people attending a baseball game in Chicago's Komishi Park were invited to bring all their unwanted disco records and after the game they were tossed onto a massive bonfire. Disco eventually collapsed under a heaving weight of crass disco versions of pop records and an ever-increasing volume of records that were simply no good. But the underground scene had already stepped off and was beginning to develop a new style that was deeper, rawer and more designed to make people dance. Disco had already produced the first records to be aimed specifically at DJs with extended 12" versions that included long percussion breaks for mixing purposes and the early eighties proved a vital turning point. Sinnamon's 'Thanks To You', D-Train's 'You're The One For Me' and The Peech Boys' 'Don't Make Me Wait', a record that's been continually sampled over the last decade, took things in a different direction with their sparse, synthesized sounds that introduced dub effects and drop-outs that had never been heard before. But it wasn't just American music laying the groundwork for house. European music, spanning English electronic pop like Depeche Mode and Soft Cell and the earlier, more disco based sounds of Giorgio Moroder, Klein & MBO and a thousand Italian productions were immensely popular in urban areas like New York and Chicago. One of the reasons for their popularity was two clubs that had simultaneously broken the barriers of race and sexual preference, two clubs that were to pass on into dance music legend - Chicago's Warehouse and New York's Paradise Garage. Up until then, and after, the norm was for Black, Hispanic, White, straight and gay to segregate themselves, but with the Warehouse, opened in 1977 and presided over by Frankie Knuckles and the Garage where Larry Levan spun, the emphasis was on the music. (Ironically, Levan was first choice for the Warehouse, but he didn't want to leave New York). And the music was as varied as the clienteles - r'n'b based Black dance music and disco peppered with things as diverse as The Clash's 'Magnificent Seven'. For most people, these were the places that acted as breeding grounds for the music that eventually came to be known after the clubs - house and garage.Right from the start there was a difference in approach between New York and Chicago. "All of the records coming out of New York had been either mid or down tempo, and the kids in Chicago wouldn't do that all night long, they needed more energy" commented Frankie Knuckles after his move to Chicago. The Windy City was seduced to a far greater extent by the European sound and when the records started to come, it showed. Whereas garage in New York evolved more smoothly from First Choice and the labels Salsoul, West End and Prelude, there was no such evolution in Chicago. Opinions still differ as to what the first house record was, but it was certainly made by Jessie Saunders and it was on the Mitchball label - probably Z Factor's 'Fantasy', but there was also another Z Factor tune which went by the name of 'I Like To Do It In Fast Cars'. 'Fantasy' sounds extremely dated now but ten years ago it was like a sound from another planet, with echoes of Kraftwerk's heavily synthesized string sounds, a Eurobeat bassline and a simple, insistent drum machine pattern. Suffice to say, the record remained obscure outside the close-knit urban Chicago scene.
"Those records didn't really motivate people" says Adonis, one of the early producers on the Chicago scene. "The first was Jamie Principle's 'Waiting On Your Angel'. See, before there were records there were cassettes, and that was the hottest thing in Chicago. It was so hot Jessie Saunders went in and recorded that track word for word, note for note, and put it out on Larry Sherman's label Precision. It was so influential that four or five records came out that took its sounds." Within a year though, others were fast joining. Saunders, who by then had come out with his Jes-Say label, with Farley Keith (or Farley 'Jackmaster' Funk) getting in on the act. Frankie Knuckles, who had already done some remixes for Salsoul was also beginning to work on his own productions. By 1985 it was clear that something big was beginning to stir. Ron Hardy, who was to become the backbone of the Chicago club scene by consistently breaking the new records, began playing at The Music Box around the same time as Frankie Knuckles left The Warehouse, and other DJs like Farley and the Hot Mix 5 who threw down the mix shows on the radio station WBMX were making names for themselves. But making a record wasn't the priority for most of the DJs at the time - they were making music specifically to play at the clubs and the parties that were beginning to spring up in the city. Larry Heard and Robert Owens, later to be known as Fingers Inc, and Steve Hurley were all experimenting with basic rhythm tracks long before they made the jump to vinyl.
"I started dabbling in making my own music." says Hurley. "Just making tracks to play as a DJ, not really thinking as far as producing - more to do with just having something to play that nobody else had. And one of these tracks, 'Music Is The Key', got such a good response that I decided to borrow some money and go in with another guy, who happened to be Rocky Jones, and put the record out."
That momentous occasion was the beginning of DJ International Records, one of the two labels that was to give all the aspiring producers in the city a chance to get their music on to vinyl. The other, Larry Sherman's Trax Records was already up and running, though to begin with Sherman was attempting to break into a more commercial market with Precision. 'Music Is The Key' (the first house record to include a rap, incidentally) took house on a step by incorporating more musical elements and a vocal, and by the time Chip E's 'Like This', also on DJ International, appeared house had discovered real vocals and the sampled stutter technique that's such an integral part of dub remixes today. "It took a little while for the sound to develop" remembers London DJ Jazzy M, who worked in a record shop at the time and was one of the very first to get house on the radio in Britain with his immensely popular Jackin' Zone show on London pirate station LWR. "When 'Like This' and Adonis' 'No Way Back' came out, that's when it picked up. At first it was just drum machine programs and they were called trax, like there was Chip E Trax and Kenny Jason Trax and that's what house was, with maybe a few dodgy samples. I can remember talking to Colin Faver, who was one of the first DJs here to get into it, about 'Like This' and we were both really excited by it."
Meanwhile, things were gathering pace over in New York though the development was a lot slower. Mixers like Larry Levan, Tony Humphries, Timmy Regisford and Boyd Jarvis, who came straight after Shep Pettibone and Jellybean Benitez were making ground as remixers, and fired by the raw club sound of Colonel Abrams, the deep, soulful club sound that became known as garage was taking shape with early releases on the Supertonics, Easy Street and Ace Beat labels. Paul Scott was one of the first with 'Off The Wall' in 1985 but before that there was Serious Intention's deep dub classic 'You Don't Know' and even before that was World Premiere's 'Share The Night'.
1986
While Frankie Knuckles had laid the groundwork for house at the Warehouse, it was to be another DJ from the gay scene that was really to create the environment for the house explosion - Ron Hardy. Where Knuckles' sound was still very much based in disco, Hardy was the DJ that went for the rawest, wildest rhythm tracks he could find and he made The Music Box the inspirational temple for pretty much every DJ and producer that was to come out of the Chicago scene. He was also the DJ to whom the producers took their very latest tracks so they could test the reaction on the dance floor. Larry Heard was one of those people.
"People would bring their tracks on tape and the DJ would play spin them in. It was part of the ritual, you'd take the tape and see the crowd reaction. I never got the chance to take my own stuff because Robert (Owens) would always get there first."
"The Music Box was underground " remembers Adonis. "You could go there in the middle of the winter and it'd be as hot as hell, people would be walking around with their shirts off. Ron Hardy had so much power people would be praising his name while he was playing, and I've got the tapes to prove it!
"The difference between Frankie and Ronnie was that people weren't making records when Frankie was playing, though all the guys who would become the next DJs were there checking him out. It was The Music Box that really inspired people. I went there one night and the next day I was in the studio making 'No Way Back' " In 1985 the records were few and far between. By 1986 the trickle had turned to a flood and it seemed like everybody in Chicago was making house music. The early players were joined by a rush of new talent which included the first real vocal talents of house - Liz Torres, Keith Nunally who worked with Steve Hurley, and Robert Owens who joined up with Larry Heard to form Fingers Inc, though the duo had already worked with Harri Dennis on The It's 'Donnie' -and key producers like Adonis, Mr Lee, K Alexi and a guy who was developing a deep, melodic sound that relied on big strings and pounding piano - Marshall Jefferson.
Marshall worked with a number of people like Harri Dennis and Vince Lawrence for projects like Jungle Wonz and Virgo, who made the stunning 'RU Hot Enough'. But it was 'Move Your Body' that became THE house record of 1986, so big that both Trax and DJ International found a way to release it, and it was no idle boast when the track was subtitled 'The House Music Anthem', because that's exactly what it was. Jefferson was to become the undisputed king of house, going on to make a string of brilliant records with Hercules and On The House and developing the quintessential deep house sound first with vocalist Curtis McClean and then with Ce Ce Rogers and Ten City. "I can remember clearing a floor with that record" laughs Jazzy M. "Though they'd started playing it in Manchester, most of London was still caught up in that rare groove and hip hop thing. A lot of people were saying to me 'why are you playing this hi- NRG' and it was hard work but people were starting to get into it." 'Move Your Body' was undoubtedly the record that really kicked off house in the UK, first played repeatedly by the established pirate radio stations in London, which at the time played right across the Black music spectrum, and then by club DJs like Mike Pickering, Colin Faver, Eddie Richards, Mark Moore and Noel and Maurice Watson, the latter two playing at the first club in London to really support house - Delirium.
Radio was the key to the explosion in Chicago. Farley Jackmaster Funk had secured a spot on the adventurous WBMX station, playing after midnight every day, and it wasn't long before he brought in the Hot Mix 5 which included Mickey Oliver, Ralphie Rosario, Mario Diaz and Julian Perez, and Steve Hurley, giving people who couldn't go to the parties the chance to hear the music. Then there was Lil Louis, who was throwing his own parties. By this time, house was moving out of the gay scene and on to wider acceptance, though in Chicago at least it was to remain very much a Black thing. Though a number of Hispanics were on the house scene, the number of White DJs and producers could be counted on one hand.
The labels were still mostly limited to the terrible twins that were to dominate Chicago house for the next two years Trax and DJ International. Between them they had nearly all the local talent sewn up and by popular consent they were just as dodgy as each other, with rumors and stories of rip-offs and generally dubious activity endlessly circulating. Everybody it seemed, was stealing from everybody else. One that remains largely untold involved Frankie Knuckles. "This was the story at the time" recalls Adonis. "Supposedly Frankie sold Jamie Principle's unreleased tapes to DJ International AND Trax at the same time. Then Jamie came out with a record called 'Knucklehead' dissing Frankie. After that Frankie went back to New York."
When Rocky Jones at DJ International became convinced by a larger- than-life character named Lewis Pitzele who was helping put a lot of the deals together at the time that Europe was the place to focus on, house poured into Britain with London Records putting the first compilation of early DJ International material out. As the press bandwagon rolled into action the 86 Chicago House Party featuring Adonis, Marshall Jefferson, Fingers Inc and Kevin Irving toured the UK's clubs. Trax took a little longer
Adonis: "Trax was meant to be a bullshit label for all the dirty, raggedy records Larry Sherman didn't give a shit about. You know, labels were always trying to do radio stuff, but Trax became popular after 'No Way Back' and 'Move Your Body' and all those tracks." It was DJ International and London who notched up the first house hits, first with Farley 'Jackmaster' Funk's 'Love Can't Turn Around', a cover of the old Isaac Hayes song with camp wailer Daryl Pandy on vocals which reached Number 10 in September 1986, and then a record that spent months gestating in the clubs before it was finally catapulted to Number One in January 1987 - Jim Silk's 'Jack Your Body'. The Americans were gob smacked. Their underground club music was going mainstream four thousand miles from its home. But it was no surprise that Steve Hurley was behind the track, which hit the top despite only having three words - the title. Even then he was the one with the commercial touch. It wasn't a terribly original record - the bassline was from First Choice's 'Let No Man Put Asunder', but it summed up the mood of jack fever. All of a sudden the word 'Jack', which originally described the form of dancing people did to house, was everywhere 'Jack The Box', 'Jack The House', 'Jack To The Sound' 'J-J-J-J-JJack-Jack-Jack-Jack'. It was the stutter sample on the 'J' that took the word into legend. Vaughan Mason's Raze, who'd quietly been doing stuff out of Washington DC burst into the clubs and then followed Jim Silk into the charts with 'Jack The Groove'. And garage? New York simply couldn't match the energy flowing out of Chicago but there was little doubt that the music was developing simultaneously. The Jersey garage sound, boosted by Tony Humphries (who'd also been on the radio since 1981) at Newark's Zanzibar Club, was beginning to take shape with Blaze but the New York club sound was defined at the time by Dhar Braxton's 'Jump Back' and Hanson & Davis' 'Hungry For Your Love' which borrowed heavily from the Latin freestyle sound but echoed the energy of house. And over in Brooklyn, producers like Tommy Musto working for the Underworld/Apexton label were developing a different style again, one that like Chicago seemed to take its roots as much from Eurobeat as from Black music, though the mood and tempo was strictly New York.
1987
While Chicago stole the thunder in 1986, other cities not only in the United States but across the world had either been absorbing house or working on their own thing, biding their time. One record from New York served a warning shot that the city was gearing up for some serious action - 'Do It Properly' by 2 Puerto Ricans, A Blackman and A Dominican. 'Do It Properly' was essentially a bootleg of Adonis' 'No Way Back' with loads of samples and a great electronic keyboard riff squeezed in to it and the first in a long, long line of New York sample house tracks. Its producers were one Robert Clivilles and David Cole, helped by another guy called David Morales. After that some kid in Brooklyn called Todd Terry made a couple of sample tracks with a freestyle groove for Fourth Floor Records by an act he called Masters At Work.
But the sound that was really taking shape in New York and New Jersey was a deep style of club music based on a heritage that had its roots firmly in r'n'b. Though there were some superb deep, emotive instrumentats like Jump St. Man's 'B-Cause', the emphasis was on songs, which came with Arnold Jarvis' 'Take Some Time', Touch's 'Without You', Exit's 'Let's Work It Out' and a record on Movln, a new label run from a record store in New Jersey's East Orange - Park Ave's 'Don't Turn Your Love'. Ironically, as the first garage hits began to appear, The Paradise Garage - Larry Levan had already left - closed, but the vibe carried on with Blaze, who recorded 'If You Should Need A Friend' and Jomanda, both of whom teamed up with new New York label Quark.
Echoing the need for vocals in house music, deep house began to take hold in Chicago. Following Marshall Jefferson's lush productions, the record that defined deep house was the Nightwriters' 'Let The Music Use You', mixed by Frankie Knuckles and sung by Ricky Dillard, a record that a year later was to become one of the anthems of the UK's Summer Of Love. And it didn't end there. Kym Mazelle launched her career with 'Taste My Love' and 'I'm A Lover', while Ralphie Rosario unleashed the monstrous 'You Used To Hold Me' featuring the wailing tonsils of Xavier Gold. Then there was Ragtyme's 'I Can't Stay Away', sung by a guy who sounded a a little like a new Smokey Robinson - Byron Stingily. Soon after, Ragtyme, who also made an extremely silly innuendo track called 'Mr Fixit Man', mutated into Ten Clty. But Chicago's excursion into songs wasn't only characterised by uplifting wailers. There was another side, led by the weird, melanchoty songs of Fingers Inc and beginning to show itself in other minimalist productions like MK II's 'Don't Stop The Muslc' and 2 House People's 'Move My Body'. By 1987, though house was no longer a tale of two cities. The virus was taklng hold elsewhere as clubbers, DJs and producers worldwide became exited by the new music.
It was obvious that Britain, which had already seen a massive boom in club culture in the mid-eighties as the increasingly racially integrated urban areas turned to Black music in favour of the indigeonous indie rock music, would eventually get in on the act. Though acts like Huddersfield's Hotline, The Beatmasters from London and a handful of others who included DJs Ian B and Eddie Richards had been trying to figure things out, the first British house track to really make any noise came from a partnership that included a DJ from Manchester's Hacienda, one of the very first clubs in Britain to devote whole nights to house music - Mike Pickering. With its funk bassline and Latin piano riffs, T-Coy's 'Carino' busted out all over, particularly in London at previously rap and funk clubs like Raw. But with the open nature of the UK pop charts compared to Billboard which was an impossibly tough nut to crack for small labels marketing new music, it was inevitable that the sound would be commercialised. 'Pump Up The Volume' by M/A/R/R/S was a rather lightweight record based on a house beat with a number of clever (at the time) samples but it worked like crazy on the dancefloor and it wasn't long before club support propelled it into the charts, where it held Number 1 for an incredible three weeks. Also in the top ten at the same time was another record that had broken out of Chicago - the House Master Boyz' 'House Nation'. The marketability of house - or pophouse - in the UK became gruesomely apparent with the advent of the 'Jack Mix' series, a number of hideous stars-on-45 style megamixes of all the house hits.
Things were progressing in a much more underground fashion back in the States. A few guys in particular who'd been noticed hanging out in Chicago and checking the scene came from a city just a couple of hundred miles away Detroit. One of them, Juan Atkins, had been making records since the early eighties under the moniker Cybotron which specialised in spacey electro-funk fired by the Euro rhythms of Kraftwerk. But progress had been slow and electro had already fused with rap. By 1985 Atkins' sound was beginning to change with records like Model 500's 'No UFO's', which bore more than a passing resemblance to the new sounds emanating from their neighbouring city. Two other guys who had been to school with Atkins, and who shared his passion for European music were also beginning to experiment with making tracks and heartened by what they heard coming out of Chicago, set to work Their first tracks, X-Ray's 'Let's Go', produced by Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson's 'Triangle Of Love' by Kreem weren't classics by any stretch of the imagination but it didn't tahe them long to hit full power. Kevin came out with 'Force Field' and 'Just Want Another Chance', and Juan pressed on with Model 500's 'Sound Of Stereo' but it was Derrick who really hit the button with Rhythim Is Rhythm's 'Nude Photo', 'Kaos' and 'The Dance', all of which were immediate hits on the Chicago scene, and the latter a record that was to be thieved and sampled again and again for years to come. The Belleville Three, as they became known after the college they attended, made an amusing trio with Kevin as the regular guy, Derrick as the fast-talking nutter and Juan as the laid-back smokehead, but there was more to techno than that. Two other producers who helped forge the different sound were Eddie Fowlkes and Blake Baxter. It was faster, more frantic, even more influenced by European electrobeat and severed the continium with disco and Philadelphia, taking only the space funk basslines of George Ctinton from Black music. They called it techno. But Chicago was also beginning to head off into another direction, the most frenetic form of house yet. It was started by two crazy tracks that Ron Hardy had been pumping at the Music Box and it was going to be perhaps the most important stage of house so far. It was acid.
1988
In truth, acid house had already started long before 1988. Amongst the scores of Chicagoans who were buying equipment and trying to learn how to make tracks was one DJ Pierre, who'd started out playing Italian imports at roller discos in the Chicago suburbs, and who had joined Lil Louis for his notorious parties.
"Phuture was me and two other guys, Spanky and Herbert J." remembers Pierre. "We had this Roland 303, which was a bassline machine, and we were trying to figure out how to use it. When we switched it on, that acid sound was already in it and we liked the sound of it so we decided to add some drums and make a track with it. We gave it to Ron Hardy who started playing it straight away. In fact, the first time he played it, he played it four times in one night! The first time people were like, 'what the fuck is this?' but by the the fourth they loved it. Then I started to hear that Ron was playing some new thing they were calling 'Ron Hardy's Acid Trax', and everybody thought it was something he'd made himself. Eventually we found out that it was our track so we called it 'Acid Trax'. I think we may have made it as early as 1985, but Ron was playing it for a long time before it came out."
Explanations for the name of 'acid' have been long and varied, but the most popular, and the one endorsed by a number of people who were there at the time was that they used to put acid in the water at the Music Box. Pierre though, stresses that Phuture was always anti- drugs, and cites a track about a cocaine nightmare, 'Your Only Friend' that was on the same EP as 'Acid Trax'. 'Acid Trax' came out in 1986 but made little impact outside Chicago, as was the case with another acid track, Sleazy D's 'I've Lost Control', which slapped a deranged laugh and some geezer repeating the title over the 303 squelching. 'I've Lost Control' was made by Adonis and Marshall Jefferson and was certainly the first acid track to make it to vinyl, though which was created first will possibly never be known for sure. It wasn't until well into 1987 that the acid sound began to infiltrate Britain, fuelled by another track that was getting a lot club play, and which fitted into the sound Bam Bam's 'Give It To Me', and a diversion of the regular acid track which put vocals into the equation, developed by Pierre's Phantasy Club with 'Fantasy Girl'. The house scene in Britain had faltered following the commercialisation of the poppier end of the spectrum, but towards the end of 1987 the underground was taking off with new LP compilation series like 'Jack Trax' and the opening in London of seminal clubs like Shoom and Spectrum and the move of Delirium to Heaven where the main dancefloor became exclusively house. Delirium's Deep House Convention atLeicester Square's Empire in February 1988 which featured a number of seminal Chicago artists like Kym Mazelle, Fingers Inc, Xavier Gold. Marshall Jefferson and Frankie Knuckles was a depressing event because of the poor turnout. But the people who did go were to be become the prime movers of London's house explosion. The next week a warehouse party called Hedonism was rammed and the soundtrack was acid. Acid house UK style had begun.
As acid tracks like Armando's '151' and 'Land Of Confusion', Bam Bam's 'Where's Your Child' and Adonis' 'The Poke' began to flow out out of Chicago, the scene grew at a rate of knots with Rip, Love, Future, Contusion and Trip opening in London, and the legendary Nude in Manchester. DJs suddenly discovered they had a year's worth of classic house which hitherto they'd been unable to play. When WBMX in Chicago closed down, signalling the end of radio play for the music in the city, it was clear that the emphasis had switched to the UK. Acid house became the biggest youth cult in Britain since punk rock a decade before as British house records like Bang The Party's 'Release Your Body', Jullan Jonah's 'Jealousy & Lies' (later used as the backbone of Electrlbe 101's 'Talking With Myself'), Baby Ford's 'Oochy Koochy', A Guy Called Gerald's Voodoo Ray, and Richie Rich's 'Salsa House' became huge club hits, before the chart UK house records emerged with S'Express' 'Theme From S'Express', D-Mob's 'We Call It Acid', which popularised the ridiculous but funny club chant of 'Aciiieeeeed!' and Jolly Roger's 'Acid Man'. Opinions differ as to the effect on the scene of the relatively new drug ecstasy, but there was little doubt that the sudden rise in availabilny of the drug was directly related to the growth of the club scene. Before the tabloids discovered what was going on with their inevitably lurid headlines about 'Acid House Parties' and drug barons, it was easy to see people openly imbibing the drug in any club.
Like Chicago radio was to prove crucial to spreading house in Britain. But this wasn't any kind of legitimate radio. Save for a few token shows, you couldn't hear Black music or dance music on legal radio, and eventually the demand turned into supply in the form of numerous pirate stations, mostly in and around London but also in a few other big cities. Most of them were on and off the air in months or even weeks, but the more organised stations managed to keep going, supplying hungry listeners with the music they wanted to hear - reggae, soul, jazz, hip hop - and house. Steve Jackson's House That Jack Built on Kiss and Jazzy M's 'Jacking Zone' on LWR pumped out the new music week in, week out.
"When LWR was what you call the boom, it was on half a million listeners." says Jazzy M. And we knew that because the surveys were actually being published in newspapers The Jacking Zone was getting 40-50 letters a week and I was broke because all my wages went on new tunes. Once that plane had landed with the imports, I was getting the new records on the show the same night. It was unbelievable."
1988 wasn't just acid it was the year that house first really began to diversify. For a start, there was the 'Balearic' business, an eclectic style of DJing which at the time encompassed dance mixes of pop artists like Mandy Smith and quasi-industrial music like Nitzer Ebb's 'Join In The Chant' Championed by Danny Rampling, Nicky Holloway, Paul Oakenfold and Johnny Walker who'd all been to Ibiza, Balearic was an integral part of the club scene at the time, but after the gushing media overkill it all became a little farcical as people attempted to make Balearic records There was, of course no such thing
Then there were the anthems. A year's worth of inspirational Chicago deep house, which went back to the Nightwriters and took in Joe Smooth's 'Promised Land' and Sterling Void's 'It's Alright' along the way became some of the biggest club records of the year, while Marshall Jefferson took the music to new highs with Ten City's 'Devotion' and Ce Ce Rogers 'Someday'. Marshall was on a roll in 88, picking up remixes and linking up with Kym Mazelle for 'Useless' It was the deep house that spawned the first two house LP's, which naturally came out in Britain first - Fingers Inc's benchmark 'Another Side' and Liz Torres With Master C & J's excellent 'Can't Get Enough'.
Ten City were an important stage in the development of house. With self-conviction unusually high for the time, they snubbed the Chicago labels which by that time were losing their artists more quickly than they could sign them, and headed for Atlantic records in New York where Merlin Bobb promptly snapped them up. Where nearly all the house that had gone before them was strictly producer created, Ten City were an act, and they could be marketed as such. Plus, they returned some of the soul vision to house, a tradition that went all the way back to the Philly sound it was no coincidence that 'Devotion' was one of the first records from Chicago to really do well on the East Coast, which always had much stronger r'n'b roots in its club music. After another huge club hit with 'Right Back To You', they broached the UK top Ten in January 1989 with 'That's The Way Love Is' Even Detroit was discovering songs. Though the new techno sound was by now at full tilt with Rhythm Is Rhythm's anthem 'Strings 0f Life' Model 500's 'Off To Battle' and Reese & Santonio's 'Rock To The Beat', it was Inner City's 'Big Fun' a techno song with vocals by Chicagoan Paris Grey that was to propel Kevin Saunderson into the big time. Originally a track recorded for Virgin's groundbreaking 'Techno! The New Dance Sound Of Detroit' LP, 'Big Fun' was just too commercial to hold back, and Saunderson suddenly found himself in a virtually full-time pop duo making videos, follow-up singles and EPs like any other pop act.
Chicago however was still finding new things to do with house, though the next trend wasn't to be anything like as significant. There had already been raps put down to house tracks as early as 1985 with 'Music Is The Key' and more recently with M-Doc's 'It's Percussion', The Beatmasters' 'Rok Da House' and New York's KC Flight with 'Let's Get Jazzy'. But it was Tyree Cooper (who'd already had a big club record with 'Acid Over') and rapper Kool Rock Steady who defined the hip-house style with 'Turn Up The Bass', a galloping track which somehow combined Kool's rap with the classic Chicago piano sound and Tyree's trademark 909 roll. It wasn't long before Fast Eddie, also at DJ International, expanded it with 'Yo Yo Get Funky'.
But the biggest new producer of 1988 was someone who didn't come from Chicago at all. Or Detroit. New York was beginning to flex its muscles, the city that had always regarded itself the world's capital for dance music wanted some of the limelight back. But it wasn't an established figure in the New York or New Jersey dance scene that broke through, it was a kid from Brooklyn who was showing an incredible alacrity for the new form of sampling that had been co- developing with house - Todd Terry. First it was those Masters At Work tracks, but after that Todd hit house in a big way with 'Bango' (at which Kevin Saunderson was highly miffed, because it heavily sampled one of his records), 'Just Wanna Dance', Swan Lake's 'In The Name Of Love', Black Riot's 'A Day In The Life' and 'Warlock' and the one that was almost certainly the biggest club record of the year - Royal House's 'Can You Party!'. Though in New York Todd's sample tracks were firmly categorized with the Latin freestyle house sound that the Hispanics were developing, in the UK Todd became the toast of the house scene. In a by now familiar scenario, 'Can You Party' hit the Top 20 in October on a wave of club support, closely followed by another track on the new Big Beat label out of New York, Kraze's 'The Party'.
As it became more and more apparent that Chicago was grinding to a halt, New York was getting it together, with more labels like Cutting (who'd already released Nitro Deluxe's classic 'Let's Get Brutal' in 1987) and Warlock turning to house and new labels starting up. One of these was to prove more important than all the rest - Nu Groove.
1989
By now the UK and its trend-hungry music press had become the local point of the dance music world. After acid had slumped into fatuousness with the adopted logo of acid, the smiley, appearing on t- shirts racked up in every high street and the mainstream press (including the 'qualities') scuttling after every whiff of a half-arsed drug story, they discovered new beat from Belgium. The trouble was that save for one or two genuinely good records like A Split Second's 'Flesh', nearly everyone outside Belgium hated new beat, a sort of sluggish cross between acid, techno and heavy industrial Euro music and the media hype dissolved into a number of red faces. Then they discovered garage. 'Garage' as a term had already long been in use on the house scene to differentiate the smooth, soulful songs flowing from New York and New Jersey from the more energetic, uplifting deep house out of Chicago. But the hype on this supposedly new music did allow a lot of very good acts a chance of exposure that otherwise they wouldn't have had. The Americans were confused. To most New Yorkers and Jerseyites, garage was what was played at the Paradise' Garage, which had closed two years earlier. What they were making was club music or dance music, and house was all that track stuff from Chicago. But they were happy that someone somewhere was getting off on their sound. Tony Humphries, who'd been on New York's Kiss FM since 1981 and at the Zanzibar in New Jersey since 1982, was to become instrumental in exposing the Jersey sound. Though he was one of more open-minded DJ's In the New York area, his was the style that married real r'n'b based dance to house. "I really saw house start with the Virgo 1 record, which had that 'Love Is The Message' skip beat, and I was using that and a lot of other Chicago stuff as filler between the vocals, so if I was to play Jean Carne I would use the Virgo drum track before it. Vocals was always very much my thing, and I would say the people from Chicago we really respected in Jersey were Marshall Jefferson, Frankie Knuckles and JM Silk. A lot of it was really Philly elements, it was like Philly living on forever, and that was our flavor. "I became known for breaking new stuff, and to stay ahead of everyone I had to come up with more and more demos. I wanted to help all the people around me in Jersey, so around 88-89 I did a huge showcase with all the acts at Zanzibar first on my birthday and then at the New Music Seminar. Suddenly everyone was talking about the Jersey sound."
Blaze were the forerunners of the new soul vision, followed by their protégés Phase II, who struck big with the optimism anthem 'Reachin', and Hippie Torrales' Turntable Orchestra with 'You're Gonna Miss Me'. Then there were the girls - Vicky Martin with 'Not Gonna Do It' and of course, Adeva, behind whom was the talented Smack Productions team. ' In And Out 0f My Life' had already been released by Easy Street a year before, but when Cooltempo signed the Jersey wailer up on the basis of her cover of Aretha Franklin's 'Respect', mainstream success was more than on the cards - it was a dead cert. 'Respect' entered the Top 40 in January and hung around for two months, by which time Chanelle's 'One Man' and then her own collaboration with Paul Simpson, 'Musical Freedom' had followed the example. It didn't end there. Jomanda, who shared the billing with Tony Humphries at a massive event stage in Brixton's Academy were next with 'Make My Body Rock', and though they were to become successful in the States, their sound never crossed over in the UK.
New York was stepping up the pace in grand fashion and there was a lot more going on than just the Jersey sound. Following Todd Terry's success, the New York sample track was breaking out like wildfire, particularly with Frankie Bones, Tommy Musto and Lenny Dee at Fourth Floor, Breakln' Bones and Nu Groove records. Nu Groove, built on the foundation of the Burrell twins who'd escaped from an abortive r'n'b career with Virgin Records, was fast becoming the hippest house label. Nu Groove had started the year before with records like Bas Noir's 'My Love Is Magic' and Aphrodisiac's 'Your Love' and by 1989 they were on a roll. Nu Groove never had a sound - with producers as disparate as the Burrells, Bobby Konders and Frankie Bones that wasn't conceivable - and they never really had one big record, but the concept of the label went from strength to strength. Among their producers was Kenny 'Dope' Gonzalez, yet to hook up with Little Louie Vega, who was moving into house with his Freestyle Orchestra project. Nu Groove's first competitor was to come in the form of Strictly Rhythm, who opened up in 1989, though their first breakthrough wasn't to come until the following year. Two other New York producers who were also beginning to make a lot of noise were Clivilles and Cole with Seduction's 'Seduction' and their excellent deep, dubby mix of Sandee's 'Notice Me'. Their break into the mainstream came with a mix of Natalie Cole's 'Pink Cadillac'. Another guy who was also beginning to make a name for himself as a house remixer was David Morales.
But one of the biggest records on the burgeoning UK rave scene was a record that made very little impact in its native New York - the 2 In A Room LP on Cutting Records, a follow-up to 2 In A Room's 'Somebody In The House Say Yeah' that included a clutch of firing sample tracks from Todd Terry, Louie Vega, George Morel and a few other producers known only on the Latin freestyle scene in New York.
By Summer 89 the acid house scene had grown into the rave scene which was becoming so big that promoters came up with the idea of putting on huge events in the countryside outside London - events that could not only hold thousands of people but which could go on all night. Although the scene was later to degenerate with an increasingly narrow musical policy, ludicrously numerous DJ line-ups and suffer from gangster style promoters who saw how much money could be made, at the time it was incredibly broad. Alongside the regular house movers, records like Corporation Of One's 'Real Life', Karlya's 'Let Me Love You For Tonight' and 808 State's 'Pacific' became the open air anthems.
Several of those anthems came from a label that had started up in Canada the year before. Toronto's Big Shot Records was the brainchild of producers Andrew Komis and Nick Fiorucci, and they were startled when Amy Jackson's 'Let It Loose', Index's 'Give Me A Sign', Jillian Mendez's 'Get Up' and Dionne's 'Come Get My Lovin' became huge club records in the UK.
"I was dumbfounded about England. To me it was soccer players and the Queen, but if it wasn't for the dance stores in London and Record Mirror I'd probably be working in a hardware store." Andrew Komis. Again, the scene was largely fueled by radio. Though the original pirates had come off the air in an attempt to gain licenses (Kiss eventually managed it in 1990) and the penalties had been sharply increased, a new generation of pirates were on the air - Sunrise, Center force, Fantasy, Dance and countless others. Young, loud and incredibly unprofessional, they pumped out an endless diet of underground house music round the clock and shamelessly promoted all the raves.
Another set of incredibly successful records came from a country only marginally more likely than Canada. House records from the Continent were becoming more and more common, though most of them were sub-standard covers of US and UK records, and when Italy's Cappella crashed the charts with 'Helyom Halib' it was really only because it was based on a huge club record from Chicago which had never managed to crossover - LNR's 'Work It To The Bone'. Then came Starlight with 'Numero Uno' and Black Box with 'Ride On Time', both the work of production team Groove Groove Melody. 'Ride On Time' was a brilliant concept, taking the vocals from Loleatta Holloway's 'Love Sensation' and putting them to a sizzling piano anthem. There was no holding it back. As the record flew up the charts on its way to becoming the first house Number 1 since 'Jack Your Body', the floodgates opened. Italo-house was a happy, uplifting lightweight sound nurtured in the hedonistic clubs of the Adriatic resorts Rimini and Riccioni, and it gatecrashed everything from the large raves to the hippest clubs. Those that argued that there was no substance behind it (a lot of the records WERE extremely corny) were foiled when a more mature sound emerged with Sueno Latino's 'Sueno Latino' and Soft House Company's 'What You Need.' Despite their initial insistence that 'Ride On Time' wasn't all sampled, Black Box managed to record a very good album, though they promptly pulled a similar stunt on Martha Wash, who wasn't at all amused. The Italians would go on to become an integral part of house music, with one of the most consistent labels, Irma, proving acceptance in New York by opening up shop there.
Even in 1989, when house music had become the property of the world, Chicago still had a few tricks up its sleeve. Led by people like Steve Poindexter and Armando, the new underground of the city was returning to its roots with a new, minimalist style even rougher and rawer than the original drum tracks, a sound that was to join acid and techno in forming the roots of the hardcore scene. Another producer who'd led the way with crazy tracks like 'War Games' and 'Video Clash' was Lil Louis. While his spinning partner DJ Pierre became entangled in a fruitless contract with Jive Records (a fate that also befell Liz Torres), who'd opened up in Chicago, Louis' time came in 1989 with a track that slowed down to a complete halt and had as a vocal only a senes a female love moans - 'French Kiss'. 'French Kiss' was a huge club record and eventually it climbed to Number 2 in the charts and landed Louis an album deal with Epic in the States and ffrr in the UK. Though the style had started three years earlier with Jackmaster Dick's 'Sensuous Woman Goes Disco' and Raze's 'Break 4 Love' the previous year, 'French Kiss' began a sex track phenomenon that was to last a long time.
Another group that broke out of Chicago was Da Posse, formed by Hula, K Fingers, Martell and Maurice. Their early tracks like 'In The Life' were mostly based on old Rhythm Is Rhythm records, but 'Searchin Hard', a deep house song on Dance Mania records led them to a deal with Dave Lee's Republic Records, for whom they eventually recorded an excellent album. Later they formed their own label, Clubhouse Records.
Two other house originals also teamed up in 1989 - Frankie Knuckles and Robert Owens, who recorded 'Tears' with Japanese keyboardist Satoshi Tomiie. 'Tears' was a great record but mystifyingly, even in the year of house hits, it failed to make the charts. Though Kevin Saunderson, Derrick May and Juan Atkins had become very popular with the majors as remixers, Detroit had become very quiet, and the only club that supported techno, the Music Institute, had closed down. But a resurgence was on the horizon with new producers like Carl Craig and a young protégé of Saunderson who had just made his first record for KMS - Marc Kinchen.
Despite the studied apathy of the American music business and repeated attempts to replace house in Britain with just about anything - Soul II Soul and their numerous imitators proved more of a hiccup than anything else the 4/4 bass kick entered the new decade stronger than ever, underground dance scenes developing in new cities and new countries with every month that passed. Even Spain underwent its own acid house craze in 89, and threw up the talented Barcelona producer Raul Orellana, who created a style all of his own by merging flamenco with house. A comment made in 1988 by Robert Owens on the UK TV documentary 'Club Culture' was proving truer and truer.
"It's not just boom boom boom. They're telling me something here. Something I can dance to and learn from. I can see house music becoming universal one day. It'll just take time for people to receive it."
written by Phil Cheeseman for DJ magazine
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