"My purpose was simple: to catch the feel, the pulse of rock, as I had lived through it. What I was after was guts, and flash, and energy, and speed" - NIK COHN -
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "When the music was new and had no rules" -LUNA C
Refreshingly for a music history, the focus is not the far past but recent history that has barely ceased to be the present - dispatches from the frontline of a living subculture.
2017 was my flashpoint. From second wave British industrial techno acts like AnD and Bleaching Agent pushing “Reaktor’s most hard-lined techno concept” Unpolished into the red (in the same venue where Amsterdam gabberhouse hardened into hardcore); to hearing my first OG Rotterdam gabber set in the plush Koninklijke Schouwburg theatre in the Hague, of all places, during TodaysArt; to finally witnessing Dutch hardcore history unfold in a human-hive of Australians (tracksuits) and undercuts at the Jaarbeurs in Utrecht for the resurrection of Thunderdome: 2017 felt like a seismic year for hardcore, and I was at the epicentre, living in the Netherlands....
I had moved to the Dutch harbour city in May 2015... after escaping Berlin, where I consumed – and was consumed by – techno (and breakcore) for four strobing years. I experienced diehard club culture beneath the streets of Köpenickerstrasse in Kreuzberg and Gerichtstrasse in Wedding, spending every Friday to Monday – but usually starting on Wednesdays during Boiler Room Berlin stream days (where I interned) – shuffling between repurposed reinforced concrete wombs, feeling truly liberated in the crush of human bodies synched up to sound....
Talking about rave culture is much much easier than writing about it. And I really miss my radio shows with Red Light Radio and PRSPCT, which inspired the chatty informal style of the book. I hope when you read this, it feels like you are backstage at a rave with us, eavesdropping on the stories – or around the kitchen table at the inevitable after. This history of hardcore has taken years to complete, and it’s still not finished. It will never be finished because hardcore cannot be tamed to a page or forced into a single narrative. It’s too rich and rebellious for that...
Hardcore isn’t for everybody, but everybody is welcome in this enduring phuture rave movement. And once you’re in, you’re in all the way, diehard and dancing to the death. Dance or Die!
Funny that she says 2017 is the flashpoint, given its significance in the Acardipane cosmology...
While we're paying tribute to Max, this tune is oddly topical - reusing the "War Inna Babylon" rhythm
Would love to read something really probing on the Anti-Papacy subcurrents in Rasta 'n' roots culture.
Given that Rasta is essentially Afro-Protestant - a Caribbean cousin of the born-again, fundamentalist, Scripture-is-literal-truth offshoots of Calvinism in America - one explanation would be that it is simply sourced in the anti-Catholic paranoia that impregnates Protestantism from the start: the idea that the Church of Rome is an ungodly perversion of true Christianity. It taps into the same wellsprings that led to the anti-Catholic secret societies in 19th Century and early 20th Century America, the nativist newspapers with their fears of an influx of Catholic immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Poland, changing the fundamental make-up of the country. At its extreme edge, there were fevered fears of the Pope arriving at the head of a new Armada to conquer the USA.
But perhaps there are some uniquely Jamaican ingredients involved....
I seem to remember reading that at dancehall events to this day (or at least whenever it was I read the piece) you would get anti-Pope shout-outs from the deejay
Here's another Vatican-themed tune - Lee Perry, no Max - about the Conclave itself
Here's a really sharp piece of writing about Lee Perry - specifically his way with a kick drum, but also his whole sono-spiritual project - by Nick Coleman at his Substack. There's also some great outlandish quotes from Scratch from an interview Nick did some time ago.
That's the juiciest mix but this one has its a-peel
Still, pipped to the post by the original mix.
Skin Up had another entertaining cheesy-quaver moment
Is that the voice of Neil the Hippie in there?
Ha, something I only just noticed - Skin Up, aka Jason Laurence Cohen, went on to the Big Beat artist Laidback, who recorded for a label I was fond of for a moment - Bolshi
However I don't remember being that struck by the Laidback tunes - the outfits I liked most were Rasmus and Beachcomas
The latter did this fruit 'n veg themed oddity - possibly Gardeners Question Time sourced samples that go "peaches, shaped like doughnuts... split and juicy", "strawberries", "nuts.... and medleys"
Love it to the marrow. (Boom boom)
A Mekons sample too wouldyabelieve
One of my absolute favorites out of that late '90s harvest, the ripening bounty before all went to shit in the early 2000s
That's my video by the way, illustrated with idyllic images of the Chilterns (watch out for my mum) and Oxfordshire and Maryon Park, South London - the bulk of the pix first aired in this elegiac post
Another of those figures who moved through the UK rap scene and into hardcore rave and jungle.
"Can't beat the system, go with the flow" - source of the famous sample as used by (fellow former Britrap cru) The Criminal Minds, on "Baptised By Dub"
"Educated Snares" - you gotta love that title!
Associated with Suburban Base / Boogie Times - recording, with a partner, under the name e.kude
Sample from Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men there (or perhaps impersonation)
But before Suburban Base, MC Duke put out a couple of aliased records with Shut Up and Dance ("fast rap' turned breakbeat h-core)
Discogs bio:
Born Anthony Mark Hilaire / Kashif Adham
Died 21 April 2024, aged 58
MC Duke got his big break when the emcee who had won the DMC MC Battle got on stage at the DMC World Championships after party and announced that he would battle anybody in the house, MC Duke got up and beat him. Derek B saw what happened and as he had just signed to Music Of Life asked Duke to meet him at the label the next day. While waiting for Derek B, Duke met the owner Simon Harris, and rapped live as he didn't have a demo, needless to say the rest is history.
Later he joined the Shut Up And Dance label and released two 12 inches with DJ Leader 1 under the name I.C.3..
He then went on to produce for Boogie Times/Suburban Base label and set up the Harddisk and Bluntly Speaking Vinyl label
Messy playlist of MC Duke under various guises and in various eras
Interesting that despite being MC Duke, he graduated from rapping in the Britcore scene to producing in the Ardkore scene and running labels, as opposed to being a rave MC.
Check out the nifty little sample from Specials "Gangsters" - another example of the 2-Tone / Nuum connection
"Common Sensi", teehee
This E.KUD.CM stuff is good ruffstuff - clattery and jittery - and some classic vocal licks (“spread out and skiatter", "sekkle" etc)
It has taken me a ridiculous amount of time (well, a full half hour) to notice that the name E.KUD.C.M. is MC Duke backwards.
Fits the hardcore as hip hop turned inside out idea - hip hop but the MC is the occasional ancillary phrase bobbing about amid the beats, and the drums are doing all the real talking.
Sometimes - when I have a real binge of listening to old dance music, meaning mostly the '90s - I am overcome with affection for the culture.
Not just the obviously beloved Nuumy strands of it, but almost the whole worldwide width of it.
Particularly the first half of the '90s, nearly all of it tickles me, in nearly all aspects - the graphic language, the clothes, the dancing....
But above all the names.
The artist aliases, the track titles, the monikers of labels, promoters, raves, clubs...
Even if the track is shit, or lost to time, just a faint after-image of a function long since exhausted... the names endure.
Quite often, more mischief and creativity and spirit seems to have gone into the goofy throwaway title given to a remix than to the rather rote remix itself.
Belgian hardcore and gabber are particularly thick seams of nomenclative delight.
But most of the genres during this era come up with the goods - wordplay, puns, jokes, unlikely references, mockalyptic bombast....
I started scribbling them down on the back of a notepad, further data in support of A Theory of Names*.
It seems like the names and the titles - just like the record artwork and typography... the flyers.... the promo videos with their corny and dated FX.... all of this para-sonic stuff is equally as important as the music in constituting a massive surge of urge-to-newness.... that took off from the end of the '80s and carried on deep into the '90s...
An across-the-board push by the mostly-really-young to make an adventure out of their time. To jettison as much of the old and the still-lingering as they could, on all fronts - sound, dance, fashion, graphics, slang...
* A Theory of Names, aka Nameology.
I've mooted this before, based on ample empirical evidence that the shitness / non-shitness of a genre is in direct relation to the shitness / non-shitness of its artist names and track titles. (Same applies to the decline of a once-great genre - the canary in the coalmine is the enshittification of names, titles, graphics).
To me it makes sense - the names and titles would be a textual efflorescence of the music, reflecting and revealing its inner essence.
The milquetoast mildness of most postdubstep is given away at the pre-auditory stage from the aroma wafting off the artist aliases and the opaque titles they come up for their tunes.... Ditto broken beat, ditto downtempo, ditto all the other tasteful, "good music society", cosmopolitan / cosmigroovy sounds.
The you-won't-like-this-steer-clear of most contemporary music (not just dance, across the genrescape) alerts my antennae through the advance warning system of names (the album artwork is also a fairly reliable giveaway - has it ever been shitter than the present era?).
But that corny-yet-awesome spirit of the '90s survived in pockets into the 21st Century... flickering in bassline, in donk, in brostep, a little bit in deeptech.... UK drill too... and I daresay it is out there to be found even now.
** Rivals to rave?
The original "neophiliac" era, the 1960s - that would be the real rival. But it had older sonic forms embedded within it - blues, soul, folk, country.... Although FX, electrification, amplification, and studio tricknology increasingly come into play, the instrumental line-up is largely shared with earlier forms of popular music like jazz: drums, guitars, horns, bass. So not quite as a big a break as the digital 90s.
New Wave is another rival (especially with all the inorganic fabrics and hair-dyes... the angular graphic language and dance-moves... the quirky vocal styles and herky-jerky rhythms and melodies). But New Wave was largely based in rock's well-established instrumental template (gtr-bs-drms) and it had echoes and deliberate reach-backs to the Sixties in much of it. Rather than synths, New Wavers tended to use keyboards - 60s-style organs, Farfisa etc. So overall it doesn't match the tekno-rave era for full-bore futurism . The first half of the '90s had all these newness-enabling tools to work with (samplers, digital audio workstations).
Eighties synthpop, yes - but it is still tied to the Song, and to the impassioned human voice - to the idea of "soul" and to actual influences from soul music (think of all those fire-and-ice singer + synthesist duos).
Electro... yes, especially with the clothes and the dancing. But it was over a bit too quick. Perhaps it is like a preliminary stage, a dry run, for the '90s eruption (so many ravers had electro childhoods). Mantronix and Nitro Deluxe in particular seem like bridges between electro and the house-techno-rave moment.
Probably if you are reading this blog, you've already heard the news that the entire Moving Shadow back catalogue, or near enough, suddenly materialised on Spotify, Tidal, and other streamers! And as Matthew McKinnon notes in the comments, it's also digitally available in buyable form at Boomkat, Bleep et al.
I have been listening to it almost continuously since late last week and I've still only got to late 1995!
It's not completely complete - some very early stuff is missing, and as you go through on the Spotify playlist, tracks are sometimes listed but there's no audio - withholding of right by some artists? logistical delays?
Still, it's damn close to the entire discography.
I have a feeling my will to continue right to the end (which is some point in the late 2000s) will crumble, as the liquid funk bongos-a-ripplin' direction dominates, while the counter-direction would be all that Dom & Roland type stuff. (Update: 6/14 - got to somewhere near the end of '97 and the will to continue did in fact fade away).
But who knows? So far, I've turned up a fair few gems that I'd missed at the time. More on those below.
Update 6/14 - a nice trajectory through the discography steered by Rob Haigh himself. (Hat tip Matos)
Here's a few work-in-progress playlists of my own....
A YouTube list for the things not on Spotify / Tidal - as of yet mostly the earliest releases
Bliss-I- Missed-List(again this is being added to steadily as gems turn up even during the bongo-rippling days)
Moving Shadow Single Artist Albums(a massive bloc of listening, dominated by the prolific Omni Trio and E-Z Rollers - I honestly doubt I'll wade through this all the way to the end, but I do want to do right by Rob Haigh and the Rollers)
Now to gems uncovered
In '94 I would have been paying very close attention to the output of Moving Shadow - checking the releases in the shops every week (most of that year I was back living in London). Plus they had me on the mailing list and a steady stream of promos were arriving to my door. So imagine my surprise to come across a pair of releases that I never heard or heard of.... nor ever come across later in all my years of scouring record shops to scoop up old skool hardcore and jungle... those M&VE years of trading in CDs (brought over on the plane on my visits back to the homeland) for their exchange paper currency and then immediately converting that to old vinyl.
One of these Lost Gem releases involves an all-time fave producer too - DJ Trax
The common denominator in both releases is the excellent Dev Pandya (half of Mixrace with DJ Trax), but here going as Brown.
Then there's someone called Rhymeside.
The Brown & Rhymeside stuff is astonishing - like a demented drum solo.
I can't imagine either of these track getting much play from deejays, it's way too haywire for dancers. But I never even heard these once on a pirate, where the deejays were freed up to be more adventurous selectors.
The 12-inch by Trax & Brown is also clattery and battery but not quite as manic. Apparently this never got a release, there were only a handful of test pressings.
Ah, look, a version of it did come out the following year, on a label called Mob Handed
Actually, only the title has been kept - it's a different track!
Thatside track
Call me sick in the head but I would like to hear Track 3, "Acknowledgements" - even if it's just them reciting a list of allies and enablers through an echo chamber.
DJ Trax sometimes went as Dangerman - and here is a track by Brown & Dangerman on Stronghold
"Ideas for the Ear to Fear" - great title!
Now I could swear I reviewed something by Brown & Dangerman in my sporadic jungle 12 inch roundup column for Melody Maker's Stone Free section...
Ah, I did, in February 1995 - this very record!
BROWN & DANGERMAN-- "Dreams of Another World" (Stronghold) Superfast breaks surge through a whooshing wind-tunnel of aciiiiied frequency-modulations.
In this Guardianpiece aroundRaving, McKenzie Warkcites me as suggesting that the word "rave" might originate in Jamaican music culture.
And it's true - the word did have currency in early reggae and sound system culture. Bob Marley and the Wailer's "Midnight Ravers". Steel Pulse's "Ravers".
But I also say, in Energy Flash, that the all-night rave was a concept in psychedelia.
Then there's The Yardbirds's Having a Rave Up with the Yardbirds - the rave up as the part of a tune where the tempo jumps and the playing gets frenzied.
Not forgetting Buddy Holly's "Rave On!".
In fact in the U.K, the idea of being a raver or going to a rave dates back to the trad jazz era - the all-night dance parties of the late 1940s and 1950s: young people dancing wildly to bands playing a hyped-up version of New Orleans hot jazz.
Supposedly the introduction of these terms came from the musician Mick Mulligan, known as "The King of the Ravers".
But as I say in the earlier post, Mulligan didn't pick these words out of thin air. "Rave" has centuries worth of English language connotations to do with enthusiasm, madness, excessive excitement, intoxication, uncontrol, delirium, disinhibition, fervour, and half-a-dozen other shades of meaning applicable to the all-night, drug-fueled party.
But here's another British example of rave and raver as having currency in the 1960s: the pop magazine Rave, which was founded in 1964 and targeted at young women.
"Raver" at that time seemed to have a meaning specifically related to the idea of a young woman breaking free of inhibitions and social constraints - a suggestion of unbridled adventurousness and thrill-seeking. Abandon - and abandonment of the expected standards of appropriate feminine behaviour and sexual continence.
This "raver" is the archetype hymned in the Troggs's "Wild Thing", in John's Children's "Sara Crazy Child", Rolling Stones's "Ruby Tuesday". (Bowie's "Rebel Rebel" is simply an early '70s update, with appropriately Stonesy music, of this exaltation of the androgyne free spirit.)Not forgetting "She's Leaving Home".
A similar idea on the other side of the pond can be found in The Doors's "Wild Child" ("not your mother or your father's child / you're our child") and (with a gentler, mystical expression) in the convention-flouting heroines of The Byrds's "Why" and "She Don't Care About Time".
The instinctual insurrection of the screaming tweenage girls during Beatlemania and Stonesfrenzy... coming to a kind of consciousness in late adolescence and early twenties. From the raw eruption of eros to an erotic politics. From maenad to handmaiden of revolution. That is a shift tracked in the magazine Rave as it goes from a teenybop mag full of full-color pin-ups of everygirl's fave rave, to something nearer the counterculture.
This April 1968 issue of Rave presents London as the city of ravers.
This earlier "rave" scene had its own club scene - discotheques
And just like the '90s London rave scene, it was fueled by pirate radio (at least until the Labour government banned it towards the end of 1967)
Imagined scenarios involving young girls being preyed upon while under the influence of E and LSD circulated during the acid house tabloid scaremongering of 1988-89 - a flashback to the scenarios (often wholly invented) to do with acid in the 1960s.
Which were just like the stories circulated in the 1920s about flappers, cocaine, and hot jazz.
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