Ravestock
By Al Weisel
Rolling Stone Magazine,
published September 22, 1994
page 64
It's just past dawn when the earsplitting sound of a revving motorcycle
—followed by staccato bleeps that might be a UFO backfiring—
cut through the misty morning air.
The Orb are in the middle of their two-hour set of electronic music on the south stage of Woodstock '94,
at an event dubbed Ravestock, the last performers in a Friday-night lineup stretching from midnight to 6:30 a.m.
A hard-core group of a few hundred kids have stuck it out through the night to see the Orb;
earlier that evening many thousands more had gathered, an eclectic crowd of ravers—
teenagers with spiked-platform sneakers, someone wearing a Dr. Seuss T-shirt,
a guy with a black bodysuit cut out so that it resembled a Kiss of the Spider Woman costume—
mixed with curious hippies and shirtless college jocks drawn by the music, which ranged from Dee-Lite's soul-inflected pop techno
to Orbital's mega-bpm rave-ups to the Orb's ambient washes, which mix sound effects, beats and noise.
Aside from the mosh pit, Ravestock,
which was hastily put together and announced just two weeks in advance,
was probably the least nostalgic aspect of Woodstock '94.
While there might not have been any ecstasy or smart drinks at the first Woodstock, Ravestock -
with dancers waving arms as if tracing fractal patterns,
others staring at the kaleidoscopic patterns on the screens with we-live-as-we-dream-alone looks of anomie
- did evoke echoes of the past.
"Doses? Anybody got doses?" asked one person circulating through the crowd who already had the brands sussed.
"The white blotter is bad," he said. "The Beavis and Butt-heads are good. Stay away from the brown acid."
Whoa! Déjà vu all over again.
But not everyone was, well, ecstatic about Ravestock.
In the days before the event there were rumblings on the Internet that the organizers were out to commercialize and exploit techno,
charges that were reminiscent of those thrown at Woodstock '94 as a whole.
And Richard James, a k a Aphex Twin, claims that when promoters discovered he had affixed a fake name
to the contract he had signed five before going on, which reportedly gave PolyGram all rights to his performance,
they pulled the plug after only a half-hour. "That was the last live show I'm ever gonna do," James said.
But Paul Hartnoll of Orbital said, "It was just a really friendly, positive sort of atmosphere. I wasn't sure that was going to happen,
because it's a lot of people that hadn't seen that sort of thing."¦
Al Weisel is the co-author, with Larry Frascella,
of Live Fast, Die Young: The Wild Ride of Making Rebel Without a Cause,
being published in October 2005.
Tripping the Night Fantastic
By GUY GARCIA;SALLY B. DONNELLY/ LOS ANGELES AND M.E. SAROTTE/BONN
TIME MAGAZINE, published Monday, Aug. 17, 1992
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,976287,00.html
The skinhead's T shirt says SMILE -- IT'S THE APOCALYPSE. And judging from the scene around him, maybe it is.
Several hundred young hedonists join him in dancing wild tribal stomps as strobe lights flash and 50,000 watts of techno- house music
blast from the speakers of a New York City nightclub called the Shelter. On the fringes, others watch an upside-down projection of Flintstones
cartoons or sidle up to the nonalcoholic "smart bar" for bottled water or vitamin-enriched fruit juice. "It's a good crowd tonight," observes Moby,
a techno deejay with a loyal following. "I don't sense the usual nightclub aggression."
The high-decibel delirium is "Timecapsule One" of a weekly Friday-night event billed as "NASA" (Nocturnal Audio and Sensory Awakening),
an all-night techno "rave" that culminates with breakfast and bungee jumping from a Hudson River pier as the sun's first rays warm the spire of the Empire State Building.
"It's a love circle," explains Laze, a 26-year-old graffiti artist from the Bronx who has also attended raves in Philadelphia and Washington.
"It's like a 1960s scene -- all the races are together, dancing, having a communal experience.
We want to go to Woodstock and rave for a whole week."
Ravestock? It just might happen. This summer, from San Francisco to Berlin, Detroit to Paris,
a wave of raves is overtaking conventional night life with unbridled energy and a brash new sound.
Part funky fashion show, part techno music dance-a-thon, part politically correct flea market,
raves are loopy high-tech love-ins laced with a playful sense of the absurd (and with a dollop of illicit drugs).
Raves mirror the national disenchantment with the traditional, the conventional, the status quo --
whether in politics or pop music. Their appeal lies in their quirky spontaneity and vaults of rhythmic rapture.
By singing the body electric in a blizzard of refracted light and pumped-up sound, ravers embrace a collective catharsis
-- and sometimes one another -- in a cuddly bear hug.
"It's the disco of the '90s but with a harder edge and without the lyrics," says Eddie Hardesty, who runs Street Sounds,
a techno-music store on Los Angeles' trendy Melrose Avenue. "It's a form of release from everyday life."
At the pounding heart of every rave is the galvanizing, metronomic beat of techno, a term coined to describe an intensely synthetic,
hyperkinetic form of dance music that was born in Detroit during the mid-'80s.
A fusion of the futuristic computer-driven sound of European bands like Kraftwerk and the rhythmic possibilities of computer-controlled keyboards,
techno caught on first in Britain and Belgium, where it became the sound track for marathon "acid house" parties.
Raves can, and do, happen almost anywhere -- on moonlit beaches, in empty warehouses and in open fields
-- thanks to an underground networking system < and mobile electric generators that use telephones,
flyers and maps to get the word out with as little as 24 hours' notice.
Like the hit-and-run "outlaw" parties that took place in Los Angeles and New York during the mid-'80s,
raves are often illegal affairs that operate one step ahead of the authorities.
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,976287,00.html#ixzz0oJ58afvD
The controlled substance of choice for some technoites is Ecstasy,
a synthetic mood-elevating drug that is roughly akin to amphetamines in the long-lasting rush it provides.
It has been illegal since 1985 but is easily obtainable on the black market. Others frown on drug and alcohol use,
stressing that intoxication is extraneous to the rave experience. "The rave scene isn't about fashion or getting high," says DJ Disaster, 26,
who is co- producing "Psycho Splash '92," a rave taking place this week in an aquatic theme park outside St. Louis.
"It's about forgetting who's going to be President and having a good time."
That escapist streak is evident in rave clothing, which tends toward loud primary colors,
patterned wool caps and untucked shirts emblazoned with peace signs, happy faces and corporate logos.
A key part of the look is "trip toys," or out-of-kilter trinkets and prankish paraphernalia like op-art jewelry, prism eyeglasses and fluorescent body paint.
"A trip toy is something that will catch people's attention and make them smile," says Niles Peacock,
who attends raves with a ball-point pen that transforms into a tiny soap-bubble blower. "The whole purpose is amusement."
Ravers have recycled the hippie mantra "Do your own thing" and have given it an up-to-the-second spin.
A cross-country traveling rave called "The Moveable Feast" will tour with circus-like tents
at outdoor sites in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Detroit and Washington.
"There'll be booths where people can get information from groups like ACT UP and Rock the Vote," says promoter Philip Blaine, 24.
"It's a positive feeling. Where else can you get thousands of people together with no fights or racial tension?"
In Europe, where the techno movement took off during the late '80s, raves have reached mammoth proportions.
The so-called Worldwide House Nation gathered in Berlin last month for a megarave billed as "The Love Parade."
Accompanied by about 20 trucks laden with computers, techno deejays and powerful sound systems, 7,000 revelers danced down the city's main street,
then converged for an all-night rave. An even larger rave is planned in Mannheim on Aug. 29. And raves are still going strong in Belgium and England,
where some events have attracted as many as 20,000 people.
While techno has yet to produce a Top 10 pop hit, its audience is steadily growing.
In Los Angeles at least three radio stations are devoting significant airtime to the format
(one, MARS-FM, restored its all-techno format after cutbacks provoked a storm of listener protest).
Major labels like Sony and RCA are signing up groups and putting their marketing muscle behind techno music.
Techno compilation CDs recently released by Profile Records and Zoo Entertainment are selling briskly.
But not everyone is thrilled to see raves enter the mainstream. "It used to be elite, and now it's kind of common,"
complains Andrea, 20, a raver who got into the techno mode on the West Coast. "A lot of people are jumping on the bandwagon.
" The danger is that as the scene becomes larger and more commercial, it risks losing the cozy counterculture atmosphere that drew people to it in the first place.
To keep that from happening, ravers will have to find a way to maintain their subterranean spirit, even as they spread good vibes among the masses.
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,976287-2,00.html#ixzz0oJ5D9sGy
Pop Music
Just Don't Call Them Techno
Brothers Paul and Phil Hartnoll of Orbital put emotion
in their electronic music--and set '90s standards for the merger of dance and rock styles.
November 20, 1994|Ernest Hardy, Ernest Hardy is a free-lance writer based in Los Angeles.
'The field behind us was full of tents with people just sitting around, smoking a few joints and listening to the music,"
recalls Paul Hartnoll. "I've never seen such a huge crowd in my life."
Hartnoll, who with his older brother Phil makes up Orbital, the most compelling force in '90s British dance music,
is talking about the 10,000-strong Ravestock, the all-night dance party at Woodstock '94.
To some, Ravestock provided a symbolic merger of the once warring dance and rock cultures.
"The best part is that I don't think a lot of the audience at Woodstock had gone there for a rave or anything like that,"
Hartnoll says, "but we got a wonderful response from the crowd."
Deee-Lite, Aphex Twin, the Orb and a handful of big-name deejays spinning records were also at Ravestock,
but Orbital is the act that sets the standards in the '90s for the merger of dance and rock sensibilities--
and the one best equipped to reflect on it.
Orbital has been wowing adventurous music fans since 1990, when its debut single, "Chime,"
marked it as one of the most assured forces in the techno genre. A melding of sounds that featured a gorgeous melody,
shifting rhythms and a crisp, sparse groove, the single is now considered a dance classic.
"Chime" made the Hartnoll brothers darlings of the techno set, but they don't view themselves as techno artists.
Citing influences as diverse as arty electro-pop group Cabaret Voltaire, punk's Dead Kennedys,
industrial rock and '70s movie soundtracks, the twosome--who will perform at a rave on Saturday at the Long Beach Exhibit Hall--
insist they don't want to be identified with any single genre.
"Labeling our music as techno is really limiting," Paul Hartnoll says. "The only description I can ever really stomach is 'electronic music,'
and that only covers the technical side of how it is made. It's not really saying anything about what type of music it is."
The Hartnolls were born and reared in West Kent, a rural suburb of London, and had little formal training in music.
In fact, they took only a handful of piano lessons, the family piano ending up little more than a conversation piece.
"Our dad was a builder, and he always ended up bringing home the odd bit of furniture from when he worked in someone's home,"
says Phil, 30, who speaks with none of the aloofness often associated with the British rock scene.
"Once a year they got the piano tuned so it would be there if we wanted it."
Nonetheless, the home was always filled with music.
Their parents loved records, and their father was especially fond of film soundtracks.
"We used to get up on Sunday morning and our dad would be blaring the theme to 'Shaft,' " says Paul, 26.
"The Carpenters were another big favorite in our home."
As teen-agers, the brothers had varied tastes. In addition to the punk and industrial music that was all around them,
they fell in love with electro-pop and the faster, more electronic variation of disco known as HI-NRG (pronounced "high energy").
"The only real exposure HI-NRG got in England at the time was in gay clubs that we didn't know anything about," Paul says.
"We'd stumble over it in the record stores, and we thought we were the only people in England listening to the stuff.
That and the electro-pop is what finally pushed us into getting a drum machine, and that's how the whole thing started."
Paul eventually finished the equivalent of American high school, landing work doing odd jobs in a London recording studio when he was 18.
Phil dropped out of school when he was 16. Prodded by his father, he worked for a few years in construction.
"I hated every second of it," Phil says emphatically. "The attitudes and the bigotries (of many co-workers)
were totally against everything I stood for, and it was a horrible period in my life. I got away from that as soon as I could."
His escape came after he and Paul began experimenting at home with a cheap drum machine and a synthesizer.
Some early solo tracks Paul did for a compilation album led to a contract with FFRR Records.
With the release of "Chime," they not only changed the course of their own lives
but also helped take the entire techno dance movement to new heights.
On their 1992 debut album, "Orbital," and 1993's "Orbital 2," the Hartnolls were obviously influenced by both the sugary pop
and the sweeping film scores they'd grown up with. That lightness gains emotional weight when mixed with the current of darkness
culled from their punk and industrial roots. Balancing frenetic beats and samples from films and other records against minimalist grooves,
they created a standard for beauty and harshness that few others have been able to meet.
Says Neil Harris, director of artists and repertoire at FFRR Records, "What makes them stand out in the electronic music field is that there
is a lot more humanity in their music, both in the thought process that goes into it and in the way they interact with their machines."
With the recently released album "Snivilisation," on the FFRR/London label, those alternative backgrounds are more pronounced than ever.
Where the first two albums were essentially collections of independent tracks that the duo had already been working on,
they set out this time to write a cohesive album from start to finish.
What separates the new record from the earlier albums is its experimentation with more traditional rock song structures,
which helps emphasize the alternative-rock elements. There is also more emphasis on the non-sampled human voice,
courtesy of some ethereal female vocals that the Hartnolls see as a continuation of their trademark ambiguity
--the link between their new and older works.
"You can almost make up your own words," Phil says.
"I find that very appealing because it opens the album up not only across language barriers but even (among) fans that speak English.
By not being so linear, by not being so set in meaning, it's more inclusive."
Although many dance-oriented artists, especially those affiliated with the studio-bound creations of techno,
either dread performing live or are awkward in that situation,
the Hartnolls thrive on the exchange of energy that comes with playing before a crowd.
"We love performing live," says Phil, looking forward to the Long Beach date--one of just three shows on a brief North American swing.
"We get to improvise the songs, to play around with the structure and feed off the audience."
Adds his brother: "We hope to get a real mixture of types to come out. . . .
I don't like the elitist attitude that exists in the techno scene, the clinging to one area of music at the exclusion of any others.
We want to try to bring as many different people together as possible. That's our goal."
