The Darkside

 

Darkside before "darkside"...  

Writing about this next Derrick May tune in early '88 - in the middle of a piece on acid house - I was reminded of Joy Division, indeed describing as one of those "lost Joy Division B-sides". What can I have meant? The compelled-sounding feel of "She's Lost Control"? It certainly doesn't sound like "These Days", the great lost B-side of "Love Will Tear Us Apart". 

Listening to it again now, I can't really hear why it made me flash on Joy Division. If anything, it's closer to an incredibly reduced, emaciated take on "Everything's Gone Green".

Hearing postpunk echoes in postfunk sounds outta Detroit... this brings up the strangeness and drifty unfixability of temporality in music. For as much as these records seem "ahead of their time today" (they did in fact blueprint much of '90s techno), at the actual time of writing I said it reminded me of early '80s avant-funk. I even used the phrase "lost future" to describe these vibe-echoes of DAF and Liaisons Dangereuses audible in acid house and the darker side of Detroit (in particular Reese "Just Want Another Chance" and Phuture's "Your Only Friend")

Probably what I should have said is "interrupted future" - with the guitar-y main body of the Eighties representing a deliberate abstention from technology - sequencers, drum machines, MIDI. By main body, I really refer to the alternative rock sphere - the future carried on unfurling in  mainstream rock to some extent, as digital took over in studios. And I suppose there were corners of the alternative - industrial and Electronic Body Music - that embraced the latest tech. Still, with indie, the return of guitars, and the wistful casting-backwards-glances to the 1960s dominant, outright futurism dropped away in alternative music sufficiently for me to wield this trope of "the lost future" - referring to something that went into abeyance only five years earlier. 

Returning our ears to the May heyday, the thing that gets me in his tunes are those egg-whisk sounds - hi-hats, I think - whose scything rustle creates that distinctive nervous propulsion. Heard at their most sibilantly nagging here:

And to lesser degree here:

Also the melodies with their indefinable alloy of serene euphoria and lonely desolation.  

Also the basslines

Okay, the whole thing is consummate - but I do love the egg-whisk sounds. 

It's kind of ASMR-y, a delicious itch in the ear.

Is This Techno?

 

Or is the question "Is this Techno's Off Spring"

It's weird to me that 4 Hero - under an alter-ego, Is This - would do something so passively inspired.

It's not so much offspring (as that would suggest the idea of another genetic input shaping the outcome, if we're going with sexual reproduction as the metaphor here) as it is a clone of Detroit. 

(Then we get into all that kind of quasi-biologistic stuff about bastardy and "illegitimate offspring tend to lead more interesting lives"  - True People, hereditary proprietorship, pedigree versus mongrels, the dangers of inbreeding, recessive genes...)

Below, an unreleased Is This bit that is less shackled-to-the-Source-of-All-Things. Indeed it sounds more or less like a 4 Hero tune, with the breakbeaty shuffle. 

Ah, they put out a whole EP on Reflective in '93, the techno-phile sub-label of Reinforced

this one is nice

4 Hero's true Detroit-homaging alter-ego was Nu-Era  - whose '94 album was reissued last year... 

A latter effort that is mutating into broken beat

 

Now I got that first The Deepest Shade of Techno compilation on Reflective back in the day

Don't remember much about it, though

Both the first comp and Deepest II are playable here. 

There's a Gerald track on it (he could do some very Mayday-ish tunes)

My Brilliant Friend

I don't think Paul Oldfield spent much time in clubs. And I'm almost certain he never went to a rave. But for someone who never got "right on one, matey," it seems to me Paul got deeper into the essence of acid house, techno, etc, than anyone else covering that beat at that time in the music papers, style press, and what then passed for dance magazines. 

Below you will find near enough his complete works on the subject from that time, in approximately chronological sequence. Enjoy.

Slight diversion to another "brilliant friend" - P.O. in the review above refers to "all David Stubbs's metaphors", he is nodding to a recent review of the Jackmaster comp by DS:

Back to the 

Back to the P.O.-verdose

 

Paul Oldfield, Royal House, Melody Maker, autumn 1988

A GUY CALLED GERALD

ULU, LONDON
Melody Maker, 1990

by Paul Oldfield

Put A Guy Called Gerald beside the beatmasters, radical rap and survivalist electrodub that make up the rest of tonight's acts, and you'll see that he's somewhere else. Their urgency and agency, their in-your-face imperatives are replaced by his new narcosis and lotus-eating, becalmed passivity. It's all embodied in Gerald himself. There's none of the "front" or danger of the crews that precede him, just a familiar, somnolent Mancunian accent and patient behind-the-scenes programming. If it weren't for his singer up front, and the crowd downstairs setting up an incongruous terrace chant for ''Voo-doo Ray", it'd be more ambience than act.

That's appropriate. Gerald and his northern satellites launched New Age", aka "ambient" house, the phenomenon that emphasises the trance in trance dance, and should reconcile House music with "head" rock. Both musics can offer the same fix, or rather un-fixing of consciousness. Both can free you from the co-ordinates of the here and now, and let you attain oneness with the world and peace.

Gerald translates House music from urban night-life to paradisial, pacific (often literally Pacific, with a capital P) scenes. Tonight there's "Eyes Of Sorrow", with its rainforest percussion and pipes; or 'Voodoo Ray", with its slow-scanning ritual limbo from the tropics; or, as an encore, Gerald's own reading of the halcyon surf of "Pacific State". While rock, rap, dub have kept faith in Africa's heartland, the place of origins and history, House has escaped to the southern hemisphere's soporific, out-of-time innocence and unworldly primitivism.

That shows in the minimalist fluctuations and meander of "Subtopia", a serenity you can lose yourself in. Gerald's visual effects confirm this mesmerising tranquility at the heart of House too. They look as if they're influenced by the new model for the natural sciences, chaos theory (very much a buzz concept in club culture): instead of predictable forces and counter-forces (the grammar of "techno" music), there's indeterminacy and turbulence, back-projections of vapour, clouds, shoals of fish, self-ordering but unpredictable organic forms that fascinate.

But Gerald doesn't celebrate just nature or an Edenic past (none of rock's third-world heritage industry here). He's an unrepentant futurist. Just hear "Automanic", his preview of the forthcoming album: all print-out chatter, split-second samples and arc—light strobes on stage. Or "FX", an ascent through a Lloyds-building ziggurat of glass and steel. Think Tokyo, think Ridley Scott. It doesn't contradict his Pacific states, though. He's found tomorrow's paradise, where hi-tech achieves voodoo's instantaneity of communication, and where cities dematerialise into flows of light and information (think Kraftwerk), a mosaic of signals as mesmerising as the time-lapse record of city life in the film "Kooanisquatsi", but without that film's technophobic undertones.

Gerald's performance is "plastic", as his music's often been called. Plastic in the original sense, of course: adapting to all kinds of shapes, a hypnotic, becalming changeability. Go with the flow.