Generation Ecstasy: Into The World of Techno and Rave Culture: SAB interviews Simon Reynolds
***1 - Can you further expand on the concept of -audio hallucinations ? Are these common, and what exactly are
they like? Are whole tracks totally recalled? It s a fascinating concept that I d never heard of before.
Audio hallucinations are just auditory hallucinations -- we tend to think of hallucinations as visual delusions,
but there are audio ones as well - people tripping, or schizophrenics, can hear voices, uncanny sounds, foreboding
hums etc. Certain drugs seem to expand the auditory threshold at both ends of the frequency spectrum,--ie bass
and treble-and heightening perceptual acuity means that you get the aural equivalent of
catching things out of the corner of your eye. All this can feed into outright audio hallucinations-sonic phantoms.
***2 - I can t remember where exactly, but I know that you ve used the concept of Potlatch to describe the goings-on
of the hardcore raver. Could you elaborate on what Potlatch is, and how you think it relates
to rave behaviour?
I think it was in the last interview I did with you re. The Sex Revolts. Potlatch refers to rituals of ruinous
gift-giving in tribal societies where one's rank is determined by how much wealth and resources one can waste,
give away etc etc. It's related to the idea of sacrifice, where you're getting rid of precious resources (food,
livestock, human life etc) to appease/please the God. Georges Bataille was very interested in potlatch
-- which is where rival chieftains or potentates would engage in gift-giving battles that escalated sometimes to
the point of total ruination. He theorised that there was an innate, aristocratic drive in human beings towards
extravagance, a sort of will to expenditure-without-return (ie the opposite of Protestant bourgeois ethics of investment,
prudence, thrift, providence etc).
The Situationists were also interested in potlach and other acts of exorbitant generosity because they broke with
the exchange and commodity relations of capitalism.
The link with rave culture is slightly farfetched, but i think there is something striking about how much money
people waste on getting wasted -the number of pills people consume in a night is staggering, as is all the other
substances on top --coke, weed, booze. With certain drugs, not only are you spending a lot of your
income on them (plus all the soft drinks and ancillary expenditiures of going to a rave/club), but the drugs are
also spending your energy --- I comment in the book on how Ecstasy depletes the brain's reserves of serotonin and
dopamine, so that overdoing E is like going on a spending spree with one's future happiness -- you'll feel depressed
for days, weeks, in some cases months afterwards. I'm sure there's an etymological connection between the idea
of getting wasted and ideas of waste -- wasting your time, your energy, your youth etc --
all the things that bourgeois society thinks should be productively invested in meaningful activity (career, family,
politics, education, social/charity work etc). The current UK concept of larging it -- or having it, having it
large, having it major -- also might have some link to largesse or the idea of extravagance -- a polydrug (and
drink) riot of consumption, flash clothes, living like a playa (rather than a worker).
In a sense, raving is totally unproductive activity, all this energy is expended with no goal apart from celebration.
You have this culture organised around ritual festivity, orgiastic celebration, a Bacchanalian explosion -- all
of which harks back to tribal, pagan folkways which were organised around sacrifice, extravagance. Rave culture
is riddled with tribal imagery.
3 - From football hooligans to ravers, do you think there s a barminess that is uniquely English, and how can you
explain it?
Well, American fratboys can behave pretty boorishly, so I'm not sure about this. But certainly, compared with Europeans,
the English -- or rather the British, as the Scottish/Welsh/etc also do this -- do tend to push it a bit further.
Maybe cos we're more repressed/inhibited/reserved, so when this stuff finds an outlet (football, raving etc) it's
really explosive.
***4 - What proportion of tracks in Energy Flash do you think were actually recorded on drugs? What are the most
noteworthy examples?
I've no idea. I don't think the creators necessarily need to be off their tits while working, but if you're living
a hardcore lifestyle, in the thick of the rave experience, and going out partying your socks off at the weekend,
then for the rest of the week you're still under the influence, in a sense -- the E-memories are very accessible
cos they're fresh, you can trigger them by playing music, it's quite easy to flash back into that mode. The midweek
comedown phase is quite close to being high, in so far as you're over-sensitized to stuff.
So i remember hardcore producers like Acen telling me how back in the day they would spend all weekend raving and
the experience would give them ideas for tracks - through being in the crowd, seeing what sounds and riffs sent
the crowd berserk, what noises gave you a rush when you were E'd up -- and then during the week they'd implement
the ideas into tracks which they might have on dubplate by the weekend and give
out to DJs, so they could actually hear if the track worked on the dancefloor. When they're in the thick of the
scene, hardcore producers are really only thinking a weekend or two ahead -- the next track, the next rave -- rather
than long term careers and artistic development. And in a sense they're off their tits all the time.
But who knows, maybe a lot of them did take E while producing. I know that Goldie did E's while mixing down the
final version of "Terminator", one of his trippiest and most radical early tunes, a track that helped
pioneer the darkside jungle sound. He told an interviewer that he took the E's cos you hear different things when
high, your perceptual limits are expanded, "you hear things that aren't there" is how i think
he put it - feeding back to that idea of audio hallucinations. I know that most of the No U Turn tracks are made
in a chronic state of being stoned on really strong weed. But I suspect most producers on the scene make music
while stoned, as pot smoking is a really normal, banal thing in the UK for a certain generation, like drinking
coffee.
***5 - What role does the evolution of weed play in the evolution of the book, and how important is it to styles
like darkcore and the paranoid inflections of US hip-hop? (As far as I can tell, weed isn’t
the same drug now as it was then -- it s a much heavier drug now, while few seem to recognize it as such.)
Weed is definitely shitloads stronger now than it was in the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties. I can remember the
first times I tried pot -- this would have been the early Eighties -- and I couldn't see what all the fuss was
about. It seemed as much placebo effect as anything, giggling neo-hippies following the ritual, behaving as they
thought they should under the influence. But the weed growers have bred stronger breeds and the THC content is
several times higher today than it was back then. When I re-encountered weed in the mid-Nineties I finally saw
the point of it, but I was also struck by how often as not you got a really paranoid buzz off it -- racing thoughts,
uncomfortably fast heartbeat, unpleasantly enhanced peripheral vision. Not Bob Marley mellow vibes, but a real
edgy and sometimes foreboding experience not unlike a mild version of a bad acid trip. Even when it's fun, the
enhancement of the senses, particularly sound, can be really intense -- mildly hallucinogenic . For the life of
me I cannot imagine how people can smoke this stuff every day, all day -- as a lot of people in the jungle, trip
hop, etc scenes do. No wonder the likes of the Wu Tang have an apocalyptic worldview. You can hear that stoned
mindstate in the sound of the music -- the emphasis on timbre and
texture, the loops that go nowhere, the subliminal Fx and details designed to catch the stoner's
peripheral hearing.
In terms of music, one noticeable thing was the shift from hardcore rave music into jungle and drum 'n' bass --
all the manic riffs and tingly textures in hardcore were designed to trigger the E-rush. But when people started
having bad experiences on too many pills, they switched to smoking spliff -- gradually the bass became more prominent
to please stoned ears, and the B-lines started to run at half-speed, reggae tempo,
under the fast breakbeats, so that those who weren't hyped up on E-nergy could dance to the skanking B-line. Other
people just dropped out of the rave scene and got into ambient and dub-influenced 'listening techno', which was
more suitable to getting stoned -- more textures and space, less dance energy. The hardcore people incorporated
the dub element within the hectic rave music, as an internal component; the 'intelligent' people
just opted wholesale for a Nineties dub sound.
6 - Rocketing -- The Prodigy and Chemical Brothers are marketed in a rock way. Bob Marley was marketed in a rock
way (I-Threes replacing the Wailers, guitar put forward in the mix). How did rock marketing
gain such a hegemony in America, and has electronic music had a genuine success in the music?
Don't really have an answer for this one except to allude to the hegemony of radio programmers and the way US radio
stations all compete for the middle ground rather than spreading across a wide spectrum of diversity. Obviously
Prodigy had to come with songs and a videogenic frontman and guitar-like riffs to succeed here, but let's not underestimate
their achievement: the beats on 'Firestarter' and 'Breathe' are jungle
breakbeats in essence. I think those two songs are two of the most radical pop productions of the decade, and remind
me oddly of The Young Gods, sampler-wielding punks from the late Eigthies.
***7 - I like the concept of -music as forcefield that you use to write about Beltram s Energy Flash. It s the
same sort of way I feel about Phil Spector tracks like Be My Baby. But I ve had trouble explaining this forcefield
concept recently. What do you think is going on in these tracks that makes them such
subjectivity-losing feelings?
In Spector and Beltram and similar things , I think there's a miasmic effect going on, through distortion and saturated
tones and overloaded frequencies -- it's like there's a loss of distinction between figure and ground (to use a
metaphor from painting), so that the normal sense of aural perspective that allows you to think of the music as
over there, at a safe remote distance, is diminished. With the Beltram stuff it's like the sound is swarming out,
and you're going to be subsumed in the swarm -- which can be a blissful sensation or threatening (hence my over
use of metaphors of marauding clouds of poison gas, killer bees etc!). With Spector, the figure (the vocalist)
is lost or almost lost in the ground (the wall of sound) and whether through the listener's identification with
the singer, or just through the overspill of sound coming out of the speakers, the listener also feels on the verge
of disappearing in the sonic deluge.
There's probably a sense in which all music is a forcefield -- unlike when we look at a visual work of art, we
are always 'inside' the music because the sound waves travel out, penetrate our bodies, surround us, reflect off
the walls. Acoustic phenomenon are much more intimate and visceral than optical ones -- probably closer to touch
and smell than sight; acoustic phenomema are also less under our control, we don't have earlids we can close, we
can't direct our ear's gaze in a specific direction or turn away. We're much more vulnerable to sound, hence music's
proximity to sensations of rapture, ravishment, being engulfed, overwhelmed. Whereas the eye is much more related
to feelings of mastery and being in command. The eye is phallic, the ear vulvic (?).
That said, certain kinds of music -- those with high definition in the production, precise borders in the mix between
the instruments, 'naturalistic' production with drum kit here, the guitar there, the voice in the middle -- diminish
the sense of music swarming out and surrounding you. They recreate the feeling of watching/listening to a band
on stage, of the listener's detachment as a spectator. Other styles of production --- from My Bloody Valentine
neo-psych blur to Eno's spatial ambience to dub's oceanic mesh-space to No U Turn's Gothic/industrial neo-Spector
blare -- heighten the sense of the listener's immersion, in different ways. Then there's that drum'n'bass style
of cinematic production where you're in the environment (usually Blade Runner/noir sci-fi-esque) but the music
somehow creates the sensation that you're the stalker within it, that you can direct your hearing like a rifle's
crosshairs and aurally focus on whatever you're surveilling.
Paranoid or panopticon hearing.
8 - Do you think there could be a dichotomy set up between the concepts of -scenius and -genius that follows something
like: social/antisocial, created-for-clubs/created-without-anything-but-the-inner-audience-in-mind,
etcetera? (I mostly ask this question to find my own place in this music -- I ve always been into the axis that
connects records from Sly Stone s There s A Riot to Maxinquaye to Keith Hudson s Pick A Dub -- music not to lose
yourself in a crowd to, but music in which you lose the crowd altogether.)
Yeah, that is pretty much the dichotomy I had in mind. Eno's idea of "scenius" really appealed to me
because it provided a way of understanding how rave music evolved without the traditional music historian's reflex
of fixating on specific individuals who changed the course of the music and precise places where the turning
points occurred. So in dance music histories, specifically jungle, people will harp on endlesslly about Goldie,
Fabio & Grooverider, the club Rage. The more hyperbolic acounts of jungle history will attribute the invention
of breakbeat-driven hardcore/jungle/drum & bass to Fabio & Grooverider. In fact the idea of speeding up
the breaks and chopping them up etc was occurring independently and simultaneously across the UK and in other countries
too all through the period; breakbeat science evolved in tiny increments on a
month by month basis; there were key people who made breakthroughs but no solitary geniuses who singlehandedly
opened up a whole new frontier; on the DJ level, it wasn't just F&G at Rage but scores of dJs at dozens of
clubs across London, the South East, the Midlands who were pushing the sound. A good example of scenius in action
is how 4 Hero, Doc Scott, Goldie and others sampled and resampled off each other's records The Mentasm sound originally
created by Joey Beltram -- a game of ping pong, as Goldie put it, that actually mutated the sound and intensified
it over a period of several months. When they went back to the original record to sample it after these several
months, it actually sounded weak -- it wasn't as dirty and raw and evil as the sound they had collectively evolved
through the back-and-forth sampling off each other. These guys were friends all affiliated to the Reinforced label,
but this kind of traffic was going on across
the entire scene, across the nation, between strangers -- there were producers who were more innovative than others,
but even the cloners and copyists played their part in mutating the sound and coming up with new twists.
Until 3 years or so ago i'd probably have shared your interest, at least in terms of my overt ideology, in the
individuals that stand out, who don't make their music to serve the crowd. But gradually I realised my fix wasn't
just to do with records in isolation, heard at home on your lonesome onesome, it was the whole subcultural matrix
-- music + crowd interaction + ritualised behavior + discourse. There a lot of records
that work brilliantly as components of the DJ's mix, and with MC-ing over the top, but sound flat when heard in
isolation. These days I'm more interested in how records feed into and sustain "vibe" (which i guessed
i'd define as the forcefield where tribal energy/identity meets music, technology and drugs to create a collective
mood in specific social spaces and geographic locales), and less interested in art as a quasi-autonomous realm
that's supposedly separate from the social, that's supposedly timeless and placeless. But there is
a diagonal that may actually be the most interesting one to follow -- a line where there's a tension between the
experimental/musical impulses of the auteur and the demands of the DJ/dancefloor. Some of my favorite stuff is
created on that line -- hardcore/jungle 1992-94, dub and roots reggae in the Seventies, hip hop as it begins to
move beyond party-rocking beats and gets adventurous-but-not-pretentious. Stuff that's either side of that
diagonal line is either too homogenous (scenius) or too quirkily non-functional (genius).
***9 - Do you think Ecstacy manifests a uniquely deep sense of loss? (Not having taken it, the descriptions of
the comedown strike me as heartbreak without even being left a memory of love to cling to.)
That's a very good description of what the E comedown is like -- and it figures into the book's idea of the essence
of E/raving as intransitive -- there's no object to the verb "rave", there's no love object for the state
of being loved-up. That's not totally true --people sort of fall in love with the scene, the experience, the culture
-- and specifically with the gang of people they go raving with. The posse, the crew. That's where you get
all that tight incestuous we-are-family type stuff amongst certain cliques in jungle, like the Metalheadz/Goldie/Kemistry&Storm/Fabio&Grooverider
click -- it's all E bonds. Then it becomes a sort of quasi-military cameraderie thing, people waxing nostalgic
about 'missions' they went on (really drug-binges and prolonged periods without sleep!). That song 'Let Be Your
Fantasy' is classic example of rave-and-E as being in love with nothing -- the lyrics are one long paean to the
state of being loved-up which is
incarnated as this fantasy-woman beseeching 'come and feel my energy, I've got what it takes to make you mine'.
***10 - Can you envisage anything like a deep conspiracy theory that directly connects the brewing industry to
the rave industry? (My take on it is that whevever there s money spiralling up, there s going to be someone at
the top squeezing to get more. Isn’t it possible that spiked drugs could have begun as a brewing industry ploy?)
When I think of the fact that the vast majority of pubs in England, which pose as charming locals, are actually
owned by huge companies, and when I think of the marketing of English football, where away jerseys
change every year, forcing supporters to make purchase after purchase, and the marketing of SkyTV -- well anyway,
what I’m getting at it is that it seems the tastes of England s lower and middle classes are
expertly exploited to the hilt, and I have a hard time imagining that the commercial elites haven t made a helluva
lot of money off of rave. Can you think of anything that would feed this notion?
I think they've made, or have recently come up with ways to make, lots of money out of it NOW. The clubbing and
dance record industries are hugely organised, professionalized things now. But conspiracy theories aren't really
required to explain how this came about.
11 - How much credit can the instruments (Roland 303, as the most obvious example) themselves take for the production
of the tracks? Would it be useful to see sampledelia (whether it s sampling your own records or someone else s)
as opening up a more genuine mode of artistic expression in electronic music, since it s not using an engineer
s presets, and since sounds can be morphed to such a higher degree?
Well the Roland 303 is only a tool, to get anything out of it you have to play a pattern of notes into and jiggle
the knobs around to tweak all the parameters. There's no presets, there's a basic sound (like there's a basic timbre
to a piano, but all these notes, pedals, ways you can plays it) --similarly with the 303 there's a huge range of
ways you can tweak it. I'd say the 303 is somewhere between an effects pedal like the wah wah and a proper instrument.
A lot of 'real' musicians prefer the 303 to a sampler cos of its hands-on nature.
Where I sort of agree with you is that the creativity of sampling is sometimes undervalued by these analog synth
bores who think that playing keyboard patterns manually is more 'musical' than chopping up samples and feeding
them through -FX on a screen using a mouse. Sampling has developed to such a microscopic and intensive level, with
tiny fragments being used and things being fed through so many warping processes/filters/FX, that it's almost irrelevant
that the original sound comes from someone
else's record. In some ways it's gone too far and the idiomatic 'quote machine' nature of the sampler's been lost
-- they might as well be using a synth, cos all the original 'aura' and 'grain' of the sample-source has gone,
it's a totally denatured, synthetic sound.
***12 - Do you think there s a structural difference to the record industry in America that makes scenes harder
to develop? (I’ve heardabout situations in England, where a record will come out one week,and be sampled by someone
else the next. But in North America, itseems to me that the industry moves so slowly that -response recordsbecome
impossible.)
It's not structural to the record industry but related to the sheer size of the country --organic scenes seem to
take much longer to build -- what can explode within months in the UK cos of the hothouse atmosphere of the music
press/industry, seems to take years, even decades, to reach critical mass in the USA. The record industry seems
fairly responsive in terms of signing stuff up -- there's been not one but *two* waves of USmajor labels going
crazy for UK rave music -- the first was in late 91-early 92 (the first time The Prodigy got signed -- then to
Elektra) in response to the spate of UK hardcore tune shitting the Top Ten in England -- acts like N-Joi, Bizarrre
Inc, Eon, Quadrophonia, Shamen, T99, all hadrecords out on US majors -- but the majors didn't know how to market
the groups -- the second wave of mass signing of course was 97's electronica frenzy, with some groups signed (Prodigy
for the second time, to Maverick -- although it's actually the third time if you count Mute as a major) and majors
also trying to make alliances with indie dance labels or form their own boutique electronica sub-labels -- that
too foundered on the problem of radio and MTV’s rapid retreat from dance music. In both cases the record industry
was ahead of public taste -- the youth were way behind the A&R guys (who areusually quite hip). A similar thing
happened in the late Eighties when bands like DinosaurJr, Husker Du, Throwing Muses, Pixies all got signed to majors
but failed in the marketplace -- it was three or four years too soon, and it was only with grunge that the public,
MTV and radio were ready for those kind of sounds/emotions/anti-fashion images. So thereal question is why does
it take so long for the demand to build up on a popular level? Why is the British youth market more volatile and
hungry for the new and prepared to switch allegiances where the American youth seem more inertia-bound and slow-moving?
Loyalty to styles, bands etc seems a bigger deal here.
***13 - When you introduce the concept of minor language in thecontext of the pirate DJ s, somehow it brought theatrics
to mind. Are subcultures more than anything else a place for youth to reinvent themselves, or moreover to outright
get out of themselves?
There's an element of that I think in the way MCs and DJs invent personaefor themselvesto hide behind -- Easy E,
Man Like Liam, A Guy Called Gerald, Dominator, etc... But the minor language concept is really about tribal identity
-- dissident folkways within thelarger culture. Maybe soon there will no longer be a mainstream culture, just a
profusion of specialised knowledges, tribal identities, idiolects and subcultures. (Marshall McLuhan had a big
riff about the resurgence of tribalism in the age of massmedia, regarding tribal consciousness as our natural state).
A lot of the rhetoric in the pirate culture is to do with knowing the score, knowing the code -- to do with initiation,
or fending off the uninitiated.-- and tribes function through rituals, initiation ceremonies etc
14 - Where do you see the state of drum n bass/jungle in 1998/99? I keep seeing hype-in-the-press about so-and-so,
who is going to break drum’n’bass -- like the press on the recent Grooverider LP, or elseLady Miss Kier’s upcoming
jungle album. It seems to me by this juncture, it’s all over. It can get consigned to its one night of the week
at the local club, just like all the other sub-genres. But people cling to it so heavily that I almost get the
impression they need it to be big for their own sense of validation.
I would concur here -- people routinely give respectful reviews to thelatest double-or-triple album by such-and-such
a drum & bass innovator, but these major label records -- 4 Hero, Grooverider, Peshay and Dillinja next year
-- are just glum relics of the year-before-last's A&R frenzy. There's few things sadder than watching these
records, bloated and overproduced, limp into the public eye long after the moment has passed. The vibe element
of jungle has long since migrated into London speed garage and two-step garage scene; what's left is a grim bunch
of pseudo-experimentalists who are now servicing a totally different audience to the one they started with -- now
their following is largelly white middle class students. Drum and bass has become the new techno; and as you say,
techno long ago went through this shift where one minute (1991-92) it was the word people used to describe the
whole culture, the next it was this specific purist genre within the culture, and an increasingly unpopular genre
at that. The same thing's happened to jungle -- it's just one of the genres rather than the leading edge.
15 - Now that movies like Modulations amongst other smaller ones have come out, and magazines like Wire and Urb
have entrenched themselves over the last few years -- how do we stop the discourse of electronica from becoming
as overbearing as the History of Rock n Roll? It’s grown so tiring to have all these people from Luigi Russolo,
to Stockhausen, to Pierre Henri, to Kraftwerk shoved at me, as if I m supposed to revere them. No magazine or movie
is specifically at fault for this, but still I can’t help thinking that once history is written, it seems that
the present and the future shrink. Do you think Energy Flash did anything to try to navigate this problem, to keep
discourse open, to write about the music without killing it?
You're right, that whole history of electronic explorers thing has gotten pretty terra cognita in the last few
years -- and an aura of dull'n'worthy has gathered around some of those figures, undeservedly in most cases --
usually as a result of the pious way they're written about. I tried to navigate this problem by avoiding the'experimental'
asa category as much as possible -- in Energy Flash/Generation Ecstasy, that sort ofModulations/The Wire type music
takes only a couple of chapters (the one on Ambient Techno/Intelligent Techno', and the one on the post-rave art-techno
fringe of Oval, Squarepusher, Spooky, etc). I decided to focus on the dancefloor, on that tension between experimental/auteurist
impulses and the imperatives of danceability/populism/functionalism. It's not that I don't like a lot of experimental
electronic music, but I realised that what really excited me was when those ideas impacted society -- that interaction
and friction between experimental/futuristic stuff and socio-political reality (class, race, gender, economics)
is what created the most interesting cultural phenomena. It also created the most 'vibe' -- it's where the fun
and the intensity was. 'Ardkore and jungle remain the model for me of this kind of interface between avant-gardism
and populism. I realised that the experimental-ness of jungle was only one of the things I loved about it, and
only one of the things that made it 'work' -- as a music and as a culture. I loved it cos it was danceable, druggable,
an amazing subculture with weird rituals, because it was multicultural and prophetic of a new British identity
that mixed up black and white. Because it was fun, because it was dangerous, because it gave me a rush. The experimentalism
and futurism of breakbeat science was maybe 20 percent of why I liked it, the bit that appealed to the intellect.
Any cultural phenomenon is going to be a mix of what Raymond Williams called 'residual' and 'emergent' -- ie. tradition
and progressive, or in jungle lingo "roots 'n'phuture". The "emergent", avant-garde elements
in jungle wouldn't have worked without the "residual" stuff: a specific example is that to have breakbeat
science, you need to have breakbeats (sweaty, human musicians playing live funk) in the first place. In the book
I tried to avoid a lot of the vague phuturistic rhetoric and discourse that surrounds technoculture -- instead
my interest is really in the now as the point where the future rubs against the past, and sparks fly.
16. In the final stages of the book, around the time you get to DJ Spooky, do you think the story, not just your
story but the story you re writing on, loses the plot? It seems like somewhere around 1997, nobody has a clue really
what s going on anymore. At least, that s how I feel, like I m getting caught in a flood.
Yeah, it's a state of confusion right now, a sense of a narrative unravelling and unspooling. The genre fragmentation
is partly to blame for this sense of disarray --it's really got out of hand. Also there's too much music being
made -- going into techno stores in New York is daunting, some of them have so many genre sections and label sections,
the stores are almost un-navigable. One in particular has so many records stuck up on the walls, they overlap so
you can't read most of the sleeves and identify what they are, or find what you're looking for -- that seems a
pretty potent metaphor for the self-confounding state of dance music in 1999. The temptation is to get micro-focused
and be expert in one narrow field -- as a survival strategy. You'd think trance as a separate genre would be fairly
unified but there's so many sub-genres of trance that someone who's an afficianodo of one(say, psychedelic/Goa
trance) might not have even heard of the major figures in another trance genre. Just to keep up with what's going
on in drum and bass, you have to spend several hours flicking through the new releases on headphones in the store
each week. Each of these worlds is getting smaller every day, even as they get more internally complicated. The
rot really began at the start of 92 when it went from a situation where people called all the music 'techno' (or
even 'house') and then it stratified into specific genres, DJs started narrow casting to appeal to precise audiences,
you stopped getting different kinds of DJs on the same bill. Suddenly you could choose situations where you'd be
totally assured of hearing only what you wanted to hear, and where you'd only mix with your own kind (subculturally/sociologically).
I feel lucky to have at least caught the tail end of the period when rave was a unified culture, when you had all
this diversity under one mantle -- a real melting pot, an unpredictable chaos. 7 years on you have this horrible
mix of disparateness and endless petty subdivision, combined with ennui, cultural overproduction and feelings of
'oh it was so much better in the old days'. (unfortunately, it *was* better). The experimental electronic thing
has become a ghetto where the price of freedom is inconsquentiality -- outfits releasing records in pressings of
200. At a certain point that just becomes hobbyism rather than cultural practice, a mere pasttime. But even the
populist hardcore scenes like jungle are in a bad way -- five years ago a good selling 12 inch was around 4000,
recently I read DJ Hype saying that one of his labels releases had done well cos it had sold 1500. That's after
drum and bass went global, so there's hipster D&B scenes in most cities in the world; the 4000 sales was from
a time when the scene was almost wholly just England and really mostly London-and-surrounding counties. It's difficult
to know how the whole cultural project can be brought back on track --this overpowering feeling of exhaustion and
banality pervades UK and US dance culture. My own fond fantasy, probably deluded, is some kind of return-but-with-a-twist
to hardcore ideas -- since that sound was historically the sound of rave at its utmost popular peak 1991-92 (it
was also big here in the States as the rave scene really kicked off). It was also a sound that amazingly combined
elements of pop and avant-gardism, accessibility and brutalism, white and black, melody and noise, attack and groove.
So it would probably have the best shot, of all rave styles, at actually happening on a mass scale. But I'm aware
this is only wishful thinking.
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From the Pulp Vaults:
(Previously unavailable online)
Bird People In China
The perfect time to take a nap is where the blue of the night meets the gold of the day, within the fleeting magic hour surrounding sunset...
The Institutionalization of Violence
It's the perfect setting. Somehow, as a city, L.A. is so now...
Broken Boulevards Still Dream of Havana
"We were going to outstrip Monte Carlo... the idea was to turn Havana into the world's biggest gambling paradise...
Listen Without Prejudice With Open Ears Volume 1
It's a sunny afternoon, and I'm on way from the Düsseldorf Hauptbahnof to St. Martins Studio...
How Deep Is The Ocean?
The Sinking of the Titanic, and the Burden of Recording
An interview with Christopher Doyle
Christopher Doyle, an Australian expatriate and one-time sailor, has done the cinematography for all but the first of Wong Kar-Wai’s movies...
What used to be paper, is now just skin
An open book with blank white paper makes the same shadow in the middle as two thighs pressed together.
Playing Once Upon A Time With Mercury Rev
Deserters songs, that’s what someone called the results of the basement sessions between the Band and Bob Dylan.
Sound without vision: Do soundtrack albums need movies?
In the last few years, one sentiment I've noticed often come from the mouths of musicians...
Chances Are: Bill Laswell’s Trip into the Vaults of Bob Marley and Miles Davis
It's impossible to write an introduction for Bill Laswell. He's been involved in over three hundred records since the early '70s, so I'm not going to even try.
Designers in the Attic
From the beginning I was convinced that an article about Attik wouldn't be entirely out of place in a magazine like SAB.
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The Often Beautiful Music of Richard Ashcroft
Former lead singer of the Verve, Richard Ashcroft, thinks out loud about his debut solo album, Alone With Everybody.
A Million Tiny Decisions Made By Alex Garland That Affect You and Me
"It surprises how much you can keep in your head while you're writing a book..."
Tezka Macoto's Hakuchi: Parallel Universes of the Mind
"I am powerless in the face of this pitiful reality," goes the voiceover of the main character Izawa, halfway through Hakuchi: the Innocent.
Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps
The swaying of Maggie Cheung's hips becomes something like a musical refrain in Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love.
After Life Directed By Kore-Eda Hirokazu -- To Die And Then Have Time
an edited version of a conversation from October 1998 with Japanese film director, Kore-eda Hirokazu, in which he talks about his 1998 film, After Life
Little Steven on Bruce Springsteen, Sun City, The Sopranos, and his friends in Bali
Jason Anderson's interview with Little Steven, a.k.a Steven Van Zandt
Palahniuk Has Entered The Produce Section … he's eating grapes
Jason Anderson talks to Chuck Palahniuk - the author of the Fight Club. His new novel, Choke, is being released in the Spring of 2001.
Scenes : One Particular Scene From The Limey directed by Stephen Soderbergh +++ some jumbled narrative techniques
Miike Takashi -- The City of Lost Souls
a Yakuza eats a blue Popsicle in the harbour, while bodies are packed into oil barrels.
The Angel : In The Realms of the Groove
It's more than likely that you haven't heard of her, but you have heard her. I could almost guarantee it.
Techno Animal Foam At The Mouth
An excerpt from an interview with Kevin Martin and Justin Broadrick - musical collaborators in the groups Techno Animal, Sidewinder, Ice, and various other side projects - all of which makes it a full-time job to keep track of them.
Older articles can be found in The Archives
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