Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (49 page)

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Authors: Simon Reynolds

BOOK: Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture
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These rock and techno instances of man-machine interface fantasy have a 1957 blueprint in ‘The White Negro’, the essay in which Norman Mailer imagines the building of a new nervous system by the use of intoxicants and by the conscious cultivation of the psychopath within your soul. And all find their culmination in hardcore techno’s kinaesthetics of rush and crash. The rush is when your nervous-system’s circuitry is plugged into the machine, supercharged with artifical energy, turned to
speed-flesh
; the crash is when the all-too-human body can’t handle the pace any more. Back in 1992, the hardcore rave DJ would sometimes abruptly switch the turntable off: the nauseous, vertiginous sound of the record slowing from 150 b.p.m. to Zero was a hideously voluptuous preview of the drug comedown, the inevitable crash, only a few hours ahead. Then, woosh!, the DJ would flick the Technics’ switch, and the force-field would repossess the dancer’s body.
For today’s digital-Dionysian, the gabbanaut, release doesn’t take the form of Mailer’s ‘Apocalyptic Orgasm’, but the orgasmic apocalypse, the Wargasm. Hence a band like Ultraviolence, who fuse thrash metal and gabba, and whose
Psycho Drama
LP is trailed with the promise: ‘10,000 Nagasakis in your head!’ For the modern militarized libido, the equivalent of serene post-coital
tristesse
is the aftermath: post-apocalyptic wastelands, razed cities, the empty horizon, entropy-as-nirvana. Hence titles like Jack Lucifer’s ‘After All Wars’.
‘Imagine surveying earth after nuclear destruction and enjoying what you see, that’s how it feels when you listen to it,’ The Mover told
Alien Underground
. PCP has been exploring such post-rave endzones for years, from The Mover’s ‘Frontal Sickness’/‘Final Sickness’ trilogy to the ‘gloomcore’ output of their sister label Cold Rush (a perfect phrase for the Ecstasy buzz when the empathetic warm glow has burned out). With their glacial, sorrowful synths, down-swooping drones and trudging, cavernously echoed beats, these tekno-dirges – Cypher’s ‘Marching Into Madness’ (on the ‘Doomed Bunkerloops’ EP), Rave Creator’s ‘Thru Eternal Fog’, Reign’s ‘Skeletons March’ (from ‘The Zombie-Leader Is Approaching’ EP), Renegade Legion’s ‘Torsion’ – conjure mind’s eye visions of barren craterscapes or vast ice catacombs carved beneath the Arctic surface. (Cold Rush sleeves bear the legend: ‘created somewhere in the lost zones’.) From burn-baby-burn to burn-out, hardcore rave’s psychic economy fits Bataille’s model of sacrificial violence and expenditure-without-return. The goal is to get wasted.
Slaves to the Rave
 
At Nightmare in Arnhem, I hear a track that seems to sum up gabba’s weird fusion of will-to-power and impotence. Beneath a piteous melody that seems to waver and wilt in mid-air, a robot voice chants a fatigued, fatalistic chorus: ‘We are slaves / to the rave.’ Recorded by The Inferno Bros. for PCP offshoot Dance Ecstasy 2001, this withering piss take of the hardcore rave mentality had evidently become an irony-free anthem of entrapment and zombiehood.
A few days earlier Loftgroover had told me of going to a gabba club in Paris ‘where they handed out straitjackets to the audience!’ It’s a nice joke, the perfect culmination of gabba’s imagery of bedlam and psychosis, but it has a sinister undercurrent. A gabba rave
is
an asylum. It’s a haven from an intolerable reality, a world that kids find at once numbingly tedious and worryingly unstable. But it’s also a place of confinement where the nutters rage harmlessly; where kids vent all their anger out of their systems, instead of aiming it against the System.
TWELVE
 
AMERICA THE RAVE
 
US RAVE CULTURE
,
1990 – 97
 
‘Techno is the Devil’s Music!
Beware
the hypnotic voodoo rhythm, a reckless dance down the Devil’s road of sin and self-destruction, leading youth to eternal damnation in the fiery depths of hell!’
– Drop Bass Network flyer for Even Furthur, May 1996.
 
 
 
Despite the ritual burning of a wicker man, it’s hard to take Even Furthur seriously as ‘an epic pagan gathering of the tribes of Evil’. The vibe is closer to a Scout retreat (which is actually what the site, Eagle Cave in rural Wisconsin, is usually hired out for). After sundown, kids sit around bonfires on the hill slope, toasting marshmallows and barbecuing burgers. The atmosphere is a peculiar blend of innocent outdoor fun and hardcore decadence. For if this is a scout camp, it’s one awash with hallucinogens.
Under a disco glitterball suspended from a tree, a gaggle of amateur dealers trade illegal substances. ‘Are you buying
more acid
, Craig?’ asks one kid, incredulous at his buddy’s intake. The vendor is offering five doses for $20. ‘Weird Pyramids ain’t
nuthin’
compared to these,’ he boasts, then extemporizes to the tune of Johnny Nash’s soul smash: ‘I can see Furthur now the rain has gone / I can see all the mud and freaks at play.’ Conversation turns to bad trip casualties, like the guy who went berserk, smashed in several windscreens with a log, and was carted off by the local sheriff. The LSD dealer rants about ‘rich kid crybabies’ who can’t handle their drugs. He’s also offering some G (the steroid-like GHB) and ‘Sweet Tart’ XTC. ‘They’re
mushy
,’ he hard-sells, ‘but there’s a speed buzz, they won’t smack you out – there’s no heroin in them.’ Later, we hear rumours of kids injecting Ecstasy – not for its putative heroin content, but ’cos of sheer impatience to feel the rush.
The scary thing is how young these kids are – hardened drug veterans before they’re legally able to drink at age twenty-one. I overhear another boy enthusing about how great it is to ‘hear the
old
music, like Donna Summer,’ and I realize with a shock that ‘I Feel Love’ came out before this kid was
even born
. In Even Furthur’s main tent, Chicago DJ Boo Williams is playing a set of voluptuous, curvaceous house informed by this golden era of disco, tracks like Gusto’s ‘Disco’s Revenge’.
Then San Francisco legend Scott Hardkiss pumps out feathery, floaty soft-core (including his awesomely eerie remix of Elton John’s ‘Rocket Man’) sending silvery rivulets of rapture rippling down every raver’s flesh. My wife points out a boy who’s dancing with a folding deck chair strapped to his back, a sort of portable chill-out zone. A space-cadet girl sits cross-legged beside the DJ booth, eyes closed, rocking and writhing in X-T-C. Earlier she’d been handing out leaflets about aliens called ‘the Greys’, who she claims are from Zeta Riticuli in the constellation Orion and are in league with US military intelligence. Abduction stories and UFO sightings are common at American raves, doubtless because of the prodigious consumption of hallucinogens. Loads of kids wear T-shirts featuring slant-eyed ET-type humanoids.
Wisconsin belongs to America’s conservative heartland. There’s a certain folksy charm to its small town ways: when we tell a curious storekeeper we’re in town for ‘a music festival’, she quaintly replies ‘Cool beans!’ (meaning ‘Good for you!’). But there’s also the unnerving underside of traditionalism, like the grotesque graveyard of tiny crosses by the roadside – a memorial to aborted foetuses put up by Pro-Life evangelists. All in all, this agrarian backwater is the last place you’d expect to find a psychedelic freak-out. But the wilds of Wisconsin is where the Furthur series of three-day raves have taken place since 1994. On the rave’s flyers, the trippy typography harks back to the posters for acid rock bands in Haight-Ashbury, while the misspelled ‘Furthur’ originates in the destination posted on the front of the bus driven by the Merry Pranksters, Ken Kesey’s troupe of acid evangelists.
During the first Furthur ‘techno campout’ – at Hixton, Wisconsin, 29 April – 1 May 1994 – one of the promoters (David J. Prince, editor of Chicago rave-zine
Reactor
) got so blissed he danced naked on a speaker stack. On the final Sunday, several organizers were arrested by the local sheriff. At the third annual rave, there’s no trouble from the law. But Even Furthur
is
a lawless zone. Although you have to pay for admission, the atmosphere is closer to England’s illegal free parties than to a commercial rave. In fact, Even Furthur reminds me most of Castlemorton, the huge ‘teknival’ catalysed by Spiral Tribe in 1992, which coincidentally occurred almost four years ago to the day.
The Even Furthur kids aren’t crusty-traveller types, though – they’re much more fashion-conscious and middle class, as American ravers tend to be. The guys sport sock hats and B-boyish silver chains that dangle in a loop from the waist to the knee. Girls have the Bjork-meets-Princess Leia space-pixie look of futuristic innocence; their shiny synthetic fabrics, bright kindergarten colours, bunched pigtails, cutesy backpacks and cuddly toys make them look even younger than they really are (mostly sixteen to twenty-two). Everyone wears absurdly baggy jeans (the hallmark of the US raver), the flared bottoms soaked in mud because continual downpour has transformed the camp site into a swamp.
Like Castlemorton, Even Furthur is a chaotic sprawl of cars, RV caravans, trailers and tents. There’s no security and no lighting; you have to stumble through the mud by the fitful illumination of other people’s flashlights and the glint of bonfires dotting the hill slope. All this gets to be a gas, although it’s slightly perturbing that there’s no on-site paramedics to deal with acid freak-outs, like the shoeless, shirtless, mud-spattered boy who keeps howling single words over and over – ‘Friends! Friends!’, ‘Worms! Worms! Worms!’, ‘Dead!’ – while other kids try to restrain him from fleeing into the woods. In England, the main reason to have paramedics is to help Ecstasy over-indulgers. But at Even Furthur, boiling alive in your own blood is not really a hazard. It’s cold and wet, and over-exertion is difficult, because dancing is a struggle: the second tent is a puddle-strewn marsh (take a wrong step and you’ll slide into a sinkhole), while the main tent’s floor is slippery and sloping.
Over three days, some hundred DJs and bands perform, spanning a broad spectrum of rave music. There’s a surprising amount of jungle on offer: Mixmaster Morris spins crisp ’n’ mellow drum and bass in a small hillside tent, while Phantom 45 rinses out tearin’ hardstep in the big marquee. Not everybody’s happy about the jungle influx, though: sitting outside on a car bonnet, a gabba fan whines ‘Why do breakbeats make me puke?’ What really fires the pleasure centres of this mostly Mid-Western, Minneapolis/Chicago/Milwaukee crowd is the stomping four-to-the-floor kick drums of hard acid, as purveyed by Brooklyn’s Frankie Bones and Minnesota’s Woody McBride (whose Communiqué label co-promoted Furthur in tandem with Drop Bass Network and David Prince). Saturday’s big hit, though, is French duo Daft Punk and their sinuous, sine-wavey brand of raw-but-kitschadelic house.
Unlike your regular commercial rave, Even Furthur has hardly any concessions selling food or drink. In search of liquid, we trek up the treacherously moist slope out of the camp towards the site owner’s hut, where there are toilets and a soft drinks machine. It’s pitch black as we trudge up the dirt road, but every so often we pass a tiny bonfire; clutches of burned-out kids huddled together on muddy ledges carved into the hillside, chatting and smoking weed. When we return down the hill, the pale roseate dawn is peeking through the trees, caressing our sore eyes. But as we get closer, our sore ears are assaulted by a 200 b.p.m. jackhammer pummel: the DJs aren’t chilling-out the night’s survivors but blasting ten thousand volts of gabba. At 7 a.m., gabba-phobe Mixmaster Morris retaliates with an impromptu ambient set in the second tent. At the start, he’s playing quite happily to an audience of exactly zero. ‘I’ve been here since Wednesday,’ Morris tells me. ‘That’s why I smell so bad!’ He plays on in that tent for
six hours
.
On Sunday evening, it’s stopped raining at last, the mud has dried, and the slightly reduced crowd consists of the hardcore of party people who just don’t wanna go home. The Drop Bass Network crew pose for a photo like end-of-year college students. I chat to their leader, Kurt Eckes, who tells me over 3000 people turned up. ‘We’ve seen licence plates from California, Florida, Arizona, Colorado, New York, Washington DC.’
Thinking of the teenage acid-casualty the previous night, I suggest to Kurt that some of the kids here look kinda young. Do their parents know what they’re up to? ‘I suspect they
don’t
,’ he says, adding blithely that ‘A couple of parents called here threatening to call the police for having fourteen-year-old, fifteen-year-old kids here without parental permission.’ Eckes’s nonchalance stems from Drop Bass Network’s militantly underground attitude. ‘There are no rules here at all,’ he grins.
DBN is all about representing the rave scene’s dark side. ‘Within the rave scene, there’s definitely some things going on which to most people seem wrong,’ Eckes told
Urb
magazine. ‘They seem right to us. We’re just pushing those things to the limit.’ DBN’s version of rave might be called called
psycho
-delic rather than psychedelic.
Distancing himself from the Summer of Love idyllicism of 1988, Eckes once declared: ‘I don’t see myself going to a party, taking E, hugging people, and screaming peace and love. I’m more . . . a person who’d rather go to a party, take a lot of acid, and hug speakers.’ As Eckes and I chat, the nearest sound-system is pumping out Test’s ‘Overdub’, a classic Roland 303-meets-gabba blitzkrieg unleashed in 1992 by Dance Ecstasy 2001, sister-label of Frankfurt’s ultra-dark PCP. As well as a party promoter, DBN is a record label specializing in PCP-STYLE industrial-strength hardcore and mindfucker acid; the label’s third release was titled ‘Bad Acid – No Such Thing’. But DBN’s most punishing output is released via a sub-label called SixSixtySix. The Satanic allusion is a clue to Eckes’s subcultural strategy – turning heavy metal kids on to techno (Milwaukee is a big town for thrash and ‘black’ metal).

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