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Authors: Simon Reynolds

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BOOK: Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture
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The Paradise Garage opened in January 1977, and was named after its location: an indoor parking lot in SoHo. Like Chicago’s Warehouse, the Saturday night clientele was gay (the club’s Friday night was mixed straight and gay). Philly and Salsoul were the soundtrack, with the songs gospel-derived exhortations to freedom and fraternity creating a sort of pleasure-principled religious atmosphere. John Iozia described the Garage as both pagan (‘an anthropologist’s wet dream . . . tribal and totally anti-Western’) and ecclesiastical (the dancefloor was a fervent congregation of ‘space-age Baptists’). Just as regulars used to call The Gallery ‘Saturday Mass’, and Salvation was styled as a cathedral, so Garage veterans regarded the club as ‘their church’. The young Larry had in fact been an altar boy at an Episcopalian Church, while the Bozak DJ-mixer he used at the Garage was modelled on an audio-mixer that the manufacturer had originally developed for church sound-systems.
Levan was one of the very first examples of the DJ-as-shaman, a techno-mystic who developed a science of total sound in order to create spiritual experiences for his followers. Working in tandem with engineer Richard Long, he custom-built the Garage’s sound-system, developing his own speakers and a special low-end intensive subwoofer known as Larry’s Horn. Later, during his all-night DJ-ing stints he would progressively upgrade the cartridges on his three turntables, so that the sensory experience would peak around 5 a.m. And during the week, he would spend hours adjusting the positioning of speakers and making sure the sensurround sound was physically overwhelming yet crystal clear. Garage veterans testify that the sheer sonic impact of the system seemed to wreak sub-molecular changes in your body.
Alongside pioneering the DJ-as-shaman’s ‘technologies of ectsasy’, Levan was also an early DJ – producer. He remixed classics like Taana Gardner’s ‘Heartbeat’ and Class Action’s ‘Weekend’, and co-founded The Peech Boys with synth-player Michael deBenedictus and singer Bernard Fowler. The band’s ambient-tinged post-disco epics like ‘Don’t Make Me Wait’ and ‘Life Is Something Special’ are notable for their cavernous reverberance and dub-deep bass. Peech Boys were on the cutting edge of the early eighties New York electro-funk sound, alongside acts like D-Train, Vicky D, Rocker’s Revenge, Frances Joli and Sharon Redd, labels like West End and Prelude, and producers such as Arthur Baker, John Robie, Francois Kevorkian, and John ‘Jellybean’ Benitez.
Another figure who played a key role in building a bridge between electro-funk and garage was Arthur Russell. An avant-garde composer and cellist who once drummed for Laurie Anderson and nearly became a member of Talking Heads, Russell experienced an epiphany at Siano’s Gallery, where he was struck by the parallels between disco repetition and the New York downtown minimalism of Philip Glass et al, and was overwhelmed by the immersive quality of music transmitted over a gigantic sound-system. Thereafter his career straddled two sides of New York’s downtown: avant-garde minimalism and disco-funk. Russell’s 1980 Loose Joints track ‘Is It All Over My Face’ was a Paradise Garage favourite. In 1982, he co-founded the Sleeping Bag label with Will Socolov, and released the surrealistic and dub-spacious ‘Go Bang #5’ as Dinosaur L. Infatuated with the ocean (he sometimes used the tag Killer Whale as a writing credit, and as Indian Ocean, he released brilliant proto-house tracks like ‘Schoolbells’ and ‘Treehouse’), Russell was obsessed with echo. His major complaint about most dancefloor fodder was its ‘dryness’ (its lack of reverb), and he recorded an album of cello-and-slurred-vocal ballads called
The World of Echo
. But his all-time masterpiece of oceanic mysticism was the polyrhythmically perverse ‘Let’s Go Swimming’.
If one word could sum up the garage aesthetic, it’s ‘deep’; hence tracks like Hardrive’s ‘Deep Inside’, and band names like Deep Dish. ‘Deep’ captures the most progressive aspect of garage (its immersive, dub-inflected production) but also its traditionalism (its fetish for songs and classy diva vocals, its allegiance to soul and R & B, its aura of adult-oriented maturity). Of all the post-house, post-techno styles, garage places the most premium on conventional notions of musicality. Garage has little truck with the rhetoric of futurism; samplers and synthesizers are used for economic reasons, as a way of emulating the opulent production values and sumptuous orchestral arrangements of Philly, Salsoul and classic disco.
After the Garage’s demise in late 1987 and Larry Levan’s decline into drug abuse and ill-health, the spirit of garage was preserved at clubs like The Sound Factory, Better Days and Zanzibar, by DJs like Junior Vasquez, Bruce Forrest, Tee Scott, and Tony Humphries. In the nineties, DJ – producers like Vasquez, Masters At Work, Roger Sanchez, David Morales, Benji Candelario, Danny Tenaglia, Erick Morillo and Armand Van Helden kept the flame alive. In Britain, garage thrived as a kind of back-to-basics scene for sophisticates who’d either outgrown rave or had always recoiled aghast from its juvenile rowdyism. In South London, the Ministry of Sound modelled itself on the Paradise Garage, creating an ambience of upwardly mobile exclusivity and priding itself on having the best sound-system in the world (a claim that has not gone undisputed).
In the late eighties, the two labels that did most to define the nascent garage sound were Nu Groove and Strictly Rhythm. Started in August 1988 by Frank and Karen Mendez (respectively an ex-DJ and a music researcher on radio station Hot 103), Nu Groove’s slinky, jazz-inflected house was infused with a subtle artiness and an absurdist sense of humour, reflected in the band names and song titles: NY Housin’ Authority’s ‘The Projects’ and its sequel ‘The Apartments’, Lake Eerie’s ‘Sex 4 Daze’. Many important New York house producers recorded for Nu Groove: Lenny Dee and Victor Simonelli (as Critical Rhythm), Joey Beltram (as Code 6 and Lost Entity), Ronnie and Rheji Burrell, Kenny Gonzalez.
Strictly Rhythm was where DJ Pierre ended up working as an A & R director and developed his ‘fractal’ Wild Pitch production style – based around tweaking EQ levels, using filtering effects and constantly adjusting levels in the mix – as heard on classics like Photon Inc’s ‘Generate Power’ and Phuture’s ‘Rise From Your Grave’. With its sultry percussion, skipping, syncopated snares and surging, butt-coercive basslines, the Strictly Rhythm sound – as shaped by producers like Roger Sanchez and Kenny ‘Dope’ Gonzalez & ‘Little’ Louie Vega – was more hard driving and feverish than Nu Groove’s (whose tracks were often so refined sounding they verged on
pent
-house muzak). Early Strictly Rhythm is also notable for the brimming, aqueous production on tracks like House 2 House’s ‘Hypnotize Me (Trance Mix)’, all gulf-stream currents of blood-temperature synth and bubble trails of mermaid-diva vocal. The atmosphere on ‘Hypnotize Me’ and similar tracks like After Hours’ ‘Waterfalls (3 a.m. Mix)’ is condensation-stippled post-coital languor, a balmy plateau of serene sensuality. Combined with the humidity of a club environment, the effect is subaquatic or intra-uterine.
Working together as Masters At Work and Sole Fusion, and separately under a plethora of pseudonyms, Kenny ‘Dope’ Gonzalez and ‘Little’ Louie Vega went on to become probably the most famous of the New York house production teams. The Masters of Work name was a gift from Todd Terry, who’d used it for his early tracks ‘Alright Alright’ and ‘Dum Dum Cry’. Terry is most famous for developing a strain of New York ‘hard house’ that was far tougher and rawer than garage. Instead of symphonic disco, this sound was rooted in electro, old skool hip hop and the brash, crashing electro-funk style known as Latin Freestyle.
Alongside Terry, the pioneers of this New York hardcore house style were Nitro Deluxe. Their 1987 track ‘This Brutal House’ had a huge impact in Britain, and eventually made the Top Thirty in early 1988 as a remix, ‘Let’s Get Brutal’. Glassy and glacial, ‘This Brutal House’ is the missing link between the mid-eighties New York electro of Man Parrish and the early nineties British rave style ‘bleep-and-bass’. The track is a vast drumscape of seething Latin percussion and distant snare-crashes on the horizon of the mix, underpinned by sub-bass that has the floor juddering impact of dub reggae. The only element that connects ‘This Brutal House’ to the sounds coming out of Chicago is the eerie vocal effects: a human cry is played on the sampling keyboard like a jittery trumpet ostinato, then arpeggiated into what sounds like Tweety Bird singing scat. Nitro Deluxe’s follow-up ‘On A Mission’ is even more despotic in its vivisection of the human voice. The ‘Say Your Love’ mix puts the word ‘say’ through a digital mangler, shattering it into a pandemonium of pitch-bent whimpers, hiccups, bleats and oinks; the ‘Closet Mission’ mix multitracks and varispeeds the syllable into a cyclonic swirl of phoneme-particles that sounds like an aviary on fire, then rapid-fires a stream of 94 r.p.m. micro-syllables like electrons from a cathode ray tube.
Todd Terry’s own style was a bridge between the cut-up collage tracks of Mantronix and the sample-heavy house soon to emerge from Britain. Terry is a no-nonsense, whack-’em-out, I-wanna-get-paid-in-full kind of guy; he’s described himself as ‘more of a trackmaster . . . I’m not a writer of songs, they’re too much trouble. Plus you make twice the money off of tracks, [because] they’re quicker.’ Lacking both the artistic pretensions of the Detroit aesthetes and the soul-affiliated spirituality of the deep house and garage producers, Terry has proved that mercenary motives can result in great popular art like Royal House’s ‘Can You Party’ and ‘Party People’, Orange Lemon’s ‘Dreams of Santa Anna’, Black Riot’s ‘A Day In The Life’ and CLS’s ‘Can You Feel It?’
Terry’s roots in hip hop block parties come through in early tracks like Black Riot’s ‘A Day In The Life’ and the pre-Vega/Gonzalez Masters At Work outings ‘Dum Dum Cry’ and ‘Alright Alright’: the sound is all jagged edits and stabs, scratch FX, toytown melody-riffs, sampler-vocal riffs
à la
The Art of Noise, blaring bursts of abstract sound, depth-charge bass and breakbeats. That rough-and-ready, thrown-together quality also characterizes Royal House’s ‘Can You Party’, a UK Number Fourteen hit in October 1988. With its ‘Can you feel it?’ invocations, sirens, and bursts of mob uproar (cunningly designed to trigger a feedback loop of excitement in the crowd), ‘Can You Party’ anticipates the rabble-rousing hardcore rave anthems of the early nineties. Basically a rewrite of ‘Can You Party’, ‘Party People’ intensifies the palsied atmosphere until the very air seems to be trembling with some intangible fever. The track turns around a Morse Code riff seemingly made out of heavily reverbed piano or audience hubbub, a riff that seems to possess your nervous system like digital epilepsy, inducing strangely geometric convulsions. Like much of Terry’s work, the track is jarring because it’s like a series of crescendos and detonations, a frenzy of context-less intensities without rhyme or reason.
With their jagged edges and lo-fi grit, Terry’s cut-and-paste tracks were a world away from garage’s polished production and smooth plateaux of pleasure. On the Royal House album, Terry used funky breakbeats and jittery electro beat-box rhythms as well as house’s four-to-the-floor kick drum. Terry’s sound was hip house, a hybrid subgenre that was simultaneously being reached by Chicago producers Tyree and DJ Fast Eddie. Tyree told me in early 1988 that he was already working on a fusion of house and rap: ‘At my parties, I mix house tracks with hip hop records on 45 r.p.m. – it makes LL Cool J sound like a chipmunk!’ In early 1989, the first recorded examples of this hybrid came through. Some tracks simply layered rather feeble rapping over a house track. Others, like Fast Eddie’s ‘Hip House’ and ‘Yo Yo get Funky’, combined house rhythms and 303 acid-pulses with James Brown samples, sound effects, and breakbeats. Perhaps the best of the bunch was Tyree’s ‘Hardcore Hip House’, with its weird blend of funky drummer shuffle beats, house piano vamps, and Tyree rapping about how ‘hip house is soon to be / the giant in the industry’. It wasn’t, but the hybrid sound and the chant ‘I’m comin’ hardcore’ were prophetic of the breakbeat house/hardcore sound that would become the staple of the British rave scene in the early nineties.
By 1989, then, Black America had generated four distinct and full-formed genres of electronic dance music: Detroit techno; the deep house/garage sound of Chicago and New York; acid house and minimal jack tracks; breakbeat-and-sample based hip house. Transplanted to the other side of the Atlantic, each of these sounds would mutate – beyond all recognition, and
through
a kind of creative misrecognition on the part of the British and Europeans.
TWO
 
LIVING A DREAM
 
ACID HOUSE AND
UK RAVE
,
1988 – 89
 
In 1987, London clubland was as crippled by cool as ever. The Soho craze for rare groove (early seventies, sub-James Brown funk) represented the fag-end of eighties style culture, what with its elitist obscurantism (rare groove DJs covered up the labels with Tipp-Ex to prevent their rivals identifying the tracks) and its deference to a bygone, outdated notion of ‘blackness’.
House music seemed to be a fad that had been and gone, at least as far as London clubland was concerned. ‘House never kicked off the way we thought,’ remembers Mark Moore, one of the few DJs who played Chicago and Detroit tracks. ‘I remember spinning Derrick May’s “Strings of Life” at the Mud Club and clearing the entire floor.’ House did have a toe-hold in the gay scene, at clubs like Jungle and Pyramid, where Moore spun alongside other house crusaders like Colin Faver and Eddie Richards. But most gay clubbers still preferred Eurobeat and Hi-NRG, says Moore, and reckoned the arty Pyramid crowd were ‘weirdos’.
Ironically, straight audiences regarded house suspiciously as ‘queers’ music’. The only straight club that regularly played it was Delirium, run by Noel and Maurice Watson and modelled on New York’s Paradise Garage. But most of the club’s following were rare groove and hip hop kids who, according to Moore, ‘hated it when it went into house. They had to have a cage built around the DJ box so they wouldn’t get bottled by hip hop kids when they played house! The Watson brothers made a brave effort to make it kick off, but it just didn’t happen.’
BOOK: Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture
8.55Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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