Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (69 page)

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Authors: Simon Reynolds

BOOK: Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture
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The disappearance of his father from the primal scene is all part of the mythos of Spooky as anti-Oedipal prophet of the post-human aeon, wherein the self is just a ‘mindscreen’ for all the switching centres of influence; Spooky as polymorphously perverse psychonaut surging through and merging with the digital cosmos; Spooky adrift in the womb-like cocoon of ‘bloodmusic’ and liquifacient information. Or as he himself put it in the
Village Voice
piece: ‘I, the Ghostface, the Ripple in the Flux, am a kid who has gotten the picture but lost the frame, and life for me is one big video-game.’
Spooky’s career began in the late eighties with a college radio show called Dr Seuss’s Eclectic Jungle. ‘I was playing really mutated dance music – four turntables all going at the same time, turntable feedback, four CD players, two tape decks.’ Then came a club called Club Retaliation, based in his hometown Washington, DC. Here Spooky enjoyed an acid revelation while DJ-ing: ‘I took a ridiculous amount of liquid LSD and it radically ruptured my sense of the turntable. Most people dwell on the surface of their records, but with acid and more tactile drugs you feel like you’re actually inside a moving text, the music becomes like fluid architecture . . . I started to feel very unstable, I was feeling the bass in a way I’d never done before. The immersive quality of music on acid was a revelation.’
In New York, Spooky gradually found aesthetic kinsmen in DJs and bands like Olive, Byzar, SubDub, We and Circuit Bible. Soon he had a career on his hands, playing at spaces like Chiaroscuro, Jupiter, Abstrakt and The Soundlab. Unlike the UK’s marijuana-infused ambient culture, New York’s ‘illbient’ scene is less about wombing soundbaths and vegetative bliss, more about creating audio-sculptures and environmental soundscapes. As such it harks back to a downtown bohemian tradition of multimedia events and Zen-Dada-LSD inspired happenings: Fluxus, Phil Niblock, John Cage, La Monte Young’s Theater of Eternal Music, David Tudor. Illbient’s reference points extend even further back (the Italian Futurists’ Art of Noises, Erik Satie’s ‘furniture music’) and further afield (Spooky cites Javanese gamelan and ‘West African thumb-piano played at ceremonies’).
Despite this gamut of illustrious ancestors, ‘illbient’ is mostly defined by its contemporary coordinates: it’s a uneasy merger of post-rave ambience and abstract hip hop (freed of the figurative role of the rapper). The ‘ill’ indicates an allegiance to B-boy culture (it’s basically a vernacular and more flava-full synonym for ‘avant-garde’), but the music’s non-verbal atmospherics (the ‘bient) involves cutting loose from the hip hop street and all its struggles, drifting off into ‘space’. The opposite of ‘space’ is ‘compression’, Spooky’s great bugbear. He rails against the ‘spiritual compression’ of hardcore rap, which he attributes to the gangsta cult of ‘realness’ and psychic armature. Like the British trip hoppers and nouveau electro outfits, Spooky locates his B-boy roots in the ‘old skool’ era, when hip hop was oriented around the DJ-and-turntable rather than the producer-and-studio. Like Mo’ Wax’s DJ Shadow and Ninja Tune’s DJ Vadim, Spooky belongs to a tradition of mostly instrumental collage (Steinski, Davy DMX, The 45 King, Mantronix) that disappeared when rhyming skills, storytelling and the rapper’s charismatic persona took over hip hop. But whereas the old skool nostalgia of Mo’ Wax and Ninja Tune is a product of British B-boys geographical and cultural distance from rap’s sociocultural context, Spooky’s alienation from hardcore rap is class-based: he’s black but from an upper-middle-class, highbrow background. ‘Illbient’ is a bohemian initiative to liberate hip hop from the thrall of the ‘real’.
This explains why Spooky’s own music – tracks like ‘Journey (Paraspace Mix)’ and ‘Heterotopian Trace’ on the compilation
Necropolis: The Dialogic Project
, ‘Nasty Data Burst (Why Ask Why)’ on the Bill Laswell organized anthology
Valis 1: Destruction of Syntax
– sound less like contemporary hip hop, more like the neo-Dada collages of British experimental units such as :zoviet*france and Nurse With Wound. ‘Nasty Data Burst’, for instance, is an aleatory haze of deteriorated sound-sources, featuring some eighty overlapping beats set up, says Spooky, ‘to be deliberately randomized and clashing’. His debut solo album
Songs of A Dead Dreamer
is marginally more groove-oriented (trip hop with no return ticket?) but it’s still hard to imagine any American B-boy recognizing this music.
Spooky’s warped and warping relationship with hip hop stems from the core attitude that he shares with the rest of the international art-tekno fraternity: cultural nomadism, a reluctance to be shackled by roots, a commitment to not being committed. ‘I pass through so many different scenes, each with their different uniforms and dialects. One night I’ll be at a dub party, the next in an academic environment. I think people need to be comfortable with difference. Hip hop isn’t, it says “You gotta be down with us,” be like us.’ One of Spooky’s most frequent complaints is ‘I’m stretched real thin at the moment’. This is partly the over-worked lament of a
fin de millennium
Renaissance man whose non-musical fronts of activity include critical journalism, science fiction, making paintings and sculptures, and participating in academic conferences. But it’s also a side effect of his interest in ‘schizophrenia, the idea of inhabiting all these different personae.’ Stretching his self to the point of snapping, Spooky is a renegade against identity politics, an (un)real Everywhere-and-Nowhere Man.
My Funk Is Useless
 
The central tenets of the post-everything vanguard are: severing ties to a particular scene or community creates the freedom to drift; fusion opens up ‘infinite possibilities’, whereas purism is blinkered tunnel-vision. Although some remarkable music has been created under the border-crossing banner, it’s also important to understand the limitations of this approach: namely, that the dissolution of the boundaries between genres tends to erode precisely what makes them distinct and distinctive, and that it disables the very functionalist elements that makes specific styles
work
for specific audiences. In that respect, Alec Empire’s humorously (and accurately) titled ‘My Funk Is Useless’ on
Hypermodern Jazz
could serve as an art for art’s sake motto for everyone from Squarepusher to Spooky.
In purist or ‘hardcore’ dance genres – jungle, hip hop, house, ragga, gabba, swingbeat – sparks fly from the productive friction between innovation and conservatism, between the auteur’s impulse to explore and the dancefloor’s requirements. These genres evolve through the pressure of the audience’s apparently contradictory demands: tracks must be ‘fresh’, but they must also reinforce and sustain tradition. To an outsider, the soundtrack at hardcore dance events often seems ‘samey’. But this predictability isn’t caused by cowardice so much as a desire to create a
vibe
: a meaningful and
feeling
-full mood that materially embodies a certain kind of worldview and life-stance. As you get deeper inside a scene, the apparent homogeneity gradually reveals itself as Amiri Baraka’s ‘changing same’; you begin to appreciate the subtle play of sameness and difference, thrill to the small but significant permutations and divagations of the genre.
Freestyle or ‘eclectro’ events, by comparison, are usually devoid of vibe. Partly this is because of the absence of the drug-and-class energy that makes hardcore scenes so charged (the electricity can also be race or sexual-preference fuelled, as with the gay house scene). Partly, it’s because the style-hopping freestyle menu attracts a rather uncommitted consumer: the chin-scratching connoisseur who’s more likely to stand at the back headnodding than dance, who’d rather pride himself on being an ‘individual’ than merge with the crowd.
While hardcore underground scenes like jungle, gabba and East Coast rap are ‘populist’, in a global sense they seldom achieve more than ‘semi-popular’ status. If these subcultures constitute the classic ‘margins around a collapsed centre’, this makes the post-everything artists marginal even to the margins. Imagine the pop mainstream as a planet around which orbit a number of moons (the hardcore undergrounds). The post-everything perimeter is like one of Saturn’s Rings: a band of pop-cultural detritus which touches the hardcore satellites but has little impact upon them. Furthermore, the perimeter-zone itself is constituted, in a very real sense, out of the dust and debris scattered by larger and ultimately more significant bodies in the musical firmament.
In this respect, the post-everything boffins belong to a time-honoured tradition. Artists like Brian Eno and Miles Davis borrowed ideas from populist genres like dub and funk, which tend to be driven by a vital blend of mercenary and spiritual motives. Sometimes, it works the other way round: Byrne and Eno’s
My Life In The Bush of Ghosts
was a big influence on Public Enemy producer Hank Shocklee, for instance. But mostly the cross-town traffic is one-way. ‘Parasitic’ is the right word to describe this downwardly mobile dependence on ‘street sounds’ for stylistic rejuvenation; for instance, it’s highly unlikely that the idea of accelerating and chopping up breakbeats would ever have independently occurred to Plug/Squarepusher/AFX without jungle’s prior example.
If you simply equate radicalism with the ostentatious absence of use-value, then the dys-funk-tional convolutions of Squarepusher et al are conceivably more ‘advanced’ than most jungle. Actually, technically speaking, nothing these weirdy-beardy types have done with breaks has beaten drum and bass insiders like Dillinja and 4 Hero at their own game. What the post-rave boffins have done is hijack the metaphor of ‘science’ from jungle and hip hop, and transform it into a sampladelic era synonym for old-fashioned ‘virtuosity’. Prog rock style, they take pride in taking dance music and rendering it undanceable. The trouble with real-world science is that for every Onco-mouse with a human ear grafted into its body or groovy new device for mass destruction, there’s a myriad of non-conclusive experiments: fault-ridden machines, test-tubes full of useless precipitates and cloudy suspensions. Much the same applies to the output of sound-laboratories. In the case of breakbeat science, there’s way too many examples of fiddly, funkless, up-its-own-arse programming (although to be fair, many ‘real’ junglists are getting as anal as the drill and bass posse).
The vogue for the word ‘science’ also suggests that a disembodied and dispassionate detachment is the right way to approach music. What the Squarepusher type artists have responded to and exaggerated
ad absurdum
is only one aspect of jungle: the music’s complexity. They’ve ignored the feelings the music induces, and the subcultural reasons the sound and the scene came into being. As a result, no matter how superficially startling their form-and-norm-bending mischief sounds, their music
feels
pale and purposeless compared with music created by the jungle fundamentalists. It is vitiated by being divorced from the context that originally imbued those sounds with resonance. Worse, the whiff of stylistic oneupmanship can be offputting. Plug has been celebrated for ‘fucking with sounds that say “Don’t fuck with me.” ’ Exhibiting astonishing temerity and arrogance, Squarepusher’s Tom Jenkinson described his relationship with jungle in terms of the difference between ‘people who pioneer and lead, and people who form groups’. But this is nothing compared with the brinksmanship of Oval, who set themselves above and against
all electronic music
(yet are dependent on its distribution network and receptive audience).
No amount of wilful eccentricity can impart the lustre of meaning to music; that comes only when a community takes a sound and makes it part of a way of life. So while I marvel at the art-tekno boffins’ efforts, often I feel curiously unmoved, physically or emotionally. Fascinated but uninvolved, I find myself wondering whether anti-purism is just another ghetto, and whether ‘freedom’ is just another word for ‘nothing much at stake’.
SEVENTEEN
 
IN OUR ANGELHOOD
 
RAVE CULTURE AS
SPIRITUAL
REVOLUTION
 
By the late nineties, the British media had woken up to the fact that the nation contained two societies: the traditional leisure culture of alcohol and entertainment (spectactor sports, TV) versus the more participatory, effusive culture of all-night dancing and Ecstasy. The clash between old Britain and young Britain was dramatized to hilarious effect in an episode of
Inspector Morse
entitled ‘Cherubim and Seraphics’. The plot – basically Morse versus ’ardkore – concerns a series of mysterious teenage deaths which appear to be connected to a new drug called Seraphic. Despite its overt ‘just say no’ slant, the episode mostly works as an exhilarating advert for Ecstasy culture. (
Literally
, in so far as Morse’s remark to his detective partner – ‘It’s a rave, Lewis!’ – was sampled and used as a soundbite by a pirate station.)
‘What’s the great attraction?’ Morse beseeches the air, as he and Lewis join a convoy of vehicles heading to an illegal rave, their car radio tuned to a pirate station. Yet Morse perceptively notes that hardcore is ‘eclectic, a collage, magpie music’; earlier, listening to a track, the fusty classical buff had been horrified to recognize samples from ‘The Hallelujah Chorus – conducted by Sir Adrian Bolt!’ Old music, the dead wood of English culture, is vitalized by sampling, funked up by programmed rhythm.
This collision of old and new Englands reaches its peak when the detective duo arrive at the stately home where the rave, called Cherub, is taking place. Morse drones on about the noble history of the building; inside, the kids have transformed it into a future wonderland. For a TV programme, the recreation of rave’s sexless bacchanalia is remarkably convincing and intoxicating. Sure, the crooked lab researcher responsible for the Seraphic drug gets his comeuppance; fleeing the rave, he crashes his car into a tree and dies. But the episode ends by allowing the sixteen-year-old girlfriend of one Seraphic casualty to utter a paean to Ecstasy: ‘You love everyone in the world, you want to touch everyone and tell them you love them.’ And the ‘just say no’ message is utterly subverted when it is revealed that the teenagers didn’t kill themselves because the drug unbalanced their minds; rather, having glimpsed heaven-on-earth, they decided that returning to reality would be too much of a comedown. Who wouldn’t want to give E a try after that? And who would possibly side with decrepit Morse, with his booze and classical CDs, against the shiny happy people of Generation E?

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