BuzzWorkers Acid Tribe

Futuresound: Techno Music and Mediation

(Abridged, text-only version of an HTML document of the same name)
Ethnomusicology Senior Project, completed on December 16, 1996
University of Washington, Seattle
Author: Morgan Lang, mhl21@columbia.edu
Project Sponsor: Aaron Fox


Contents:

Introduction: (a) "A Note on the Internet," and (b) "(Sonic)
Facts Regarding Techno and the Author's Orientation to it."

Part 1: Techno City: an Overview of the History and
Diversification of Techno.

Part 2: Techno Tribe: Utopian-Futurist and Future-Primitive
Ideals and their expressions in Rave Culture.

Part 3: Techno Logo: The Mediation of Techno.


We feel affinities not only with the past, but also with the futures
that didn't materialise, and with the other variations of the
present that we suspect run parallel to the one we have agreed to
live in.

--Brian Eno


Whether they're real or imaginary, animate or inanimate, one must
form one's mediators. It's a series: If you don't belong to a
series, even a completely imaginary one, you're lost. I need my
mediators to express myself, and they'd never express themselves
without me: one is always working in a group, even when it doesn't
appear to be the case.

--Gilles
Deleuze

Introduction


To some, it is the "heavy metal of dance music," this music
which has occasionally been disparaged as sounding like
"car alarms set to disco," this typically beat-heavy,
bass-thumping dance music which has, in fact, derived some
of its sound symbology from disco, as well as from funk,
rap, and numerous lesser-known genres. Techno music, the
term I use as a top-level rubric for an ever-increasing
variety of postmodern dance music (Hilker and Behlendorf)
is, of course, more varied in its scope than either of the
above mentioned descriptions would lead one to believe.
Techno, depending on whom one asks, has existed for
approximately ten yearsit is not new music when compared
with some music genres of the '90s: Lo-fi, Neo-Lounge, and
Grunge, but it is music which has diversified and evolved
considerably since its beginnings in the mid '80's. The
music appears fresh and compelling because of its frequent
use of the newest and most powerful recording and
sound-processing technology, and because of its role in
the development of what is commonly termed "rave culture,"(with
its concomitant argot, fashions, and utopian-futurist
philosophies, its self-conscious marketing devices which
simultaneously appeal to, contradict, and exploit music
consumers' desire for the new and the rarethe "underground"
stuff), and it can terefore be stated that Techno is perhaps
the most compelling and cutting-edge of contemporary popular
music genres. That relatively little academic attention
has been devoted to electronic dance music is somewhat
surprising, considering Techno's popularity, creative
dynamism, and relevance toand reflection ofthe processes
of cultural formation and mediation in information-age
capitalist society. Those interested in learning more about
contemporary dance music culture should read Sarah Thornton's
excellent book, Club Cultures, which discusses in detail
the cultural processes I only have enough space to allude
to here.

My purposes in developing this HTML document are as follows:
(1) to provide a basic narrative of Techno's history and
process of diversification, (2) to analyze representations
of Techno's supposed transcendent/ utopian "meanings" by
its devotees and its detractors as exemplified in aural,
textual, and experiential/performance media, and (3) to
examine Techno's role as a commoditized cultural focal
point. I do not pretend to offer a comprehensive look at
every aspect of Techno; rather, I want to suggest to the
reader that there is much yet to be studied, and that Techno
music and rave culture are appropriate and promising subjects
for Ethnomusicologists and anyone interested in popular
culture. The HTML format appears to be one of the most
suitable for my purposes since it allows me to make examples
of the music I will be discussing readily available to the
reader. Words and phrases in bold type denote links to
sound files I have provided; readers should click on these
links in order to hear brief excepts of the music being
discussed. Footnotes are available as hypertext links;
simply click on footnote markers in order to view them.

By using the WWW and the NEXIS-LEXIS databases in researching
my "paper," and by presenting what would ordinarily be a
"paper" as an HTML document I am, to a limited extent,
ironically engaging the tropes of computer and communications
technology as appropriately contradictory media for a
general critical discussion of Techno music and its embedded
processes of cultural mediation. When this project is made
available over the World Wide Web, it will in turn contribute
to the swirl of ever-changing perceptions regarding Techno,
and will therefore become a mediator itself.

A note on the Internet: Many documents used as source
material for this project were obtained via the WWW, which
has proved to be an invaluable resource for documents which
describe people's deepest and most personal thoughts
regarding music. It is obvious that the WWW is in some ways
an ideal research tool in that it allows people residing
in countries with well-developed communications networks
to express their thoughts in coherent, tidy, and easily
obtainable texts. It is also obvious that people who
communicate via the WWW tend to be educated, middle-class
white people, people who hardly constitute a representative
sampling of any cultural affiliation other than that of a
global association of individuals whose commonality originates
in their ability to obtain and wield telecommunications
technology. Texts which one may view via the Internet are
carefully mediated, inherently contrived, and may or may
not accurately describe what we may suppose to be "reality;"
that is, in the case of Techno music, what we might observe
on an experiential level at a dance club or rave. For these
reasons, the Internet is usually not an appropriate research
medium for ethnographers, even though it easily allows one
to "meet"and conduct detailed interviews withpeople who in
person would appear to be likely subjects for an ethnography.

It is important for the reader to recognize that the WWW
material I use does not and cannot act as a substitute for
an ethnography of a broad category of Techno listeners;
rather, it is representative of one segment of a broad
category, a sample of people whose ideation concerning
Techno and technology may be shaped in a circular and
self-reinforcing fashion by their use of technology. In
short: although the people who contribute to newsgroups
like alt.rave are an important part of the Techno listenership,
they are by no means representative of the entire spectrum.

(Sonic) facts regarding Techno and the author's orientation to it:



Overall, Techno is denoted by its slavish devotion to the beat, the use of
rhythm as a hypnotic tool. It is also distinguished by being primarily,
and in most cases entirely, created by electronic means. It is also noted
for its lack of vocals in most cases. Techno usually falls in the realm of
115-160 BPM There are of course exceptions to every one of these rules,
but these guidelines seem to survive the "what about" test most of the
time (Hilker and Behlendorf).



Here is an example of an archetypal Techno beat: consisting
of a single looped drum machine sample, it features a
perfectly constant tempo of about 140 BPM with equally
heavy emphasis on every pulse. This is perhaps the single
most "generic" sound in modern dance music, and one which
has been frequently used in Techno.

It should be stated at the outset that I am an enthusiastic
but discriminating fan of many Techno artists across a wide
range of genres. To point out another apparent link with
Heavy Metal, I am, like Robert Walser and his interviewees
in Running With the Devil (who are attracted by Heavy
Metal's power in the form of distortion and sonic intensity),
drawn to Techno mostly by its aural expressions of
powerexpressions which in Techno are most often heard as
over-accentuated bass frequencies, prominent drum and
percussion samples, and an extreme aural density across
the bandwidth. One may think of aural density as describing
the proportion of silence to sound apparent in a musical
event: if there is little apparent silence, the music thus
has a high aural density. In positing the preceding
description of what I believe to be the fundamental sounds
of Techno, I am fully aware that there are, as always,
exceptions which must be noted; for example, below the
reader will find a discussion of Ambient Techno, a style
of Techno in which all three of the aforementioned traits
are frequently absent.



Part 1: Techno City: an overview of the history and
diversification of Techno.



In August 1996, the Metropolitan Detroit Convention and
Visitor's Bureau began a campaign to change Detroit's
official slogan from the industrial-era "Detroit: the Motor
City" to something which would evoke the city's eventual
transformation into the postindustrial, service oriented
city it is slowly and painfully becoming. Upon soliciting
suggestions for a new slogan from its readers, the Detroit
News reported that a popular suggestion was that Detroit
be known to the world as "The Techno City," or "Techno
Town," quoting one respondent as writing that "Techno Town
is an ideal slogan because Techno music was created in
Detroit" ('From Autos').

There are a few differing accounts of the "origin myth" of
Techno, just as there are differing views of how Rock &
Roll and Rap came to be; however, most accounts place the
origin of Techno in Detroit in the early- to mid- 1980's.
During an innovative period concomitant with the development
of disco-influenced and vocal-laden House music in Chicago,
musicians in Detroit developed a style of music based on
more or less equal parts of European synthpop or "Euro
Disco" like Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream, and domestic
music such as Parliament/Funkadelic, Afrikaa Bambataa, and
Detroit's Cybertron, who were making heavily funk-influenced,
electronics-based music called, variously, "Electro-Funk"
or "Electro," and who had also been influenced by the purely
electronic bands of Europe. One of Cybertron's members,
Juan Atkins, is frequently credited with being the sole
inventor of both the term and the music "Techno," although
it is known that Atkins was in constant contact with other
Detroit musicians who were developing electronic dance
music and who shared similar musical influences (Sicko 60).
However, it is understandable that Atkins is seen as the
music's great progenitor, as he did create the single
"Techno City" in 1984, an independently-produced electronic
dance composition which became a huge hit in Europe,
particularly in London and Berlin, where it had the effect
of sonically reconfiguring Kraftwerk's music and broadening
electronic music's listenership; as a result, Europeans
began producing their own "Techno," adding their own
stylistic preferences to the palette they had been handed
by Atkins and his now popular co-inventors in Detroit, all
of whom shared the critical attention of the Europeans. It
is interesting that European accounts of the Techno origin
myth place the development of the genre at a later date in
Manchester, England, where, in 1990, the group 808 State
released the single Cubik. It is perhaps too easy to suppose
that Techno never would have happened had it not been for
the Detroit school, and it is important to recognize that
the process of diversification has almost entirely occurred
in Europe, particularly in London, Manchester, and Berlin,
large cities which already had a well-developed array of
dance clubs by the time Techno "arrived," and in which the
first Techno-only clubs were opened.

One may take a long view of the trans-Atlantic "waves"
which crossed and re-crossed the spatial and conceptual
European and U.S. scenes: Techno, having been originally
produced in Detroit, influenced numerous European artists
like 808 State, whose influence finally began reaching the
vast American music consumership through the distribution
of CD compilations which purported to provide a sampling
of "underground" European dance music. The Record reported
on this trend in 1992 by writing that "the techno represented
by big sellers such as the Movement and 2 Unlimited has
been tamed and is boffo in the [U.S.] 'burbs" ('The Masses').
The cyclical production-consumption-production process
seems to have begun again, as Detroit is again producing
"good product" and is experiencing something of a Techno
renaissance: American and European music consumers may now
purchase CD compilations of the newest Detroit "underground"
dance music-- music which reifies the authenticity of the
original Detroit Techno. Like the appellation denoting the
Motor/Techno City's previous musical identity, "Motown,"
this referencing of the locality of production cleverly
authenticates the music and thus the entire musical product.
This is a very common marketing technique which frequently
results in the back-formation of new musical genres; for
example, Goa, which now refers to music which has its own
original and distinctive musical characteristics, originally
referred only to music which happened to be played at beach
parties in Goa, India. The strategy in marketing the word
Goa is to sell the desirability of being at Goa attending
a beach party.

One of the effects of the Detroit renaissance is a renewed
interest in the city's original Techno: a documentary film,
"The Architects of Techno," is being produced (Allen and
Banks), and there is a sense that an attempt is being made
by listeners to re-authenticate their interest in Techno
music by familiarizing themselves, a mere decade after the
release of "Techno City," with what is seen by many as
being a kind of "roots music."

In the late 1980's Techno had arrived in Europe and had
begun its transformation into the variety of genres existing
today. In Berlin, radio DJ Monica Deitl began broadcasting
the new Motown sound, which immediately became desirable
as a music product and which created demand for Detroit
Techno at dance clubs. In response, DJ's such as Kid Paul
and Dr. Motte began specializing in Techno, playing records
in Berlin's first Techno club, UFO (Levy). In Britain,
pirate radio stations like KISS FM began broadcasting the
Techno that public and commercial radio stations refused
to touch. (Later KISS would be granted a commercial radio
license, thus negating its importance as a subcultural
focal point in the minds of many listeners) (Thornton
146-51). These stations also disseminated notices regarding
warehouse- and outdoor parties where Techno as well as the
vocal-oriented Chicago genre House, promoted in Europe as
Acid House, could be heard. These parties in unconventional
locales were directly influenced by the beach-party culture
of the Spanish Balearic islands, particularly Ibiza, where
young vacationing Britons danced to Reggae and House.
Following the re-emergence of the archaic appetite suppressant
MDMA (methylene dioxymethamphetamine) as the drug "Ecstasy"
in Dallas nightclubs in the mid 1980's, the drug began
circulating among people attending Techno clubs and the
parties which were now gaining popular notoriety as "raves"
(Hilker and Behlendorf), events where, in the public mind,
decadent and sexually promiscuous throngs of teenagers
danced all night in a drug-crazed frenzy. The mass-mediation
of this misconception both served to attract more young
people to what was now being viewed as a "movement" and to
form and cohere the subcultural status of "ravers," who
then began reinterpreting their image in a complex series
of processes to be discussed in the final section of this
work.

Among Techno's most well-liked genres in 1996 are Jungle
and its derivative Drum & Bass, as well as Ambient and
various eclectic forms which are in the process of becoming
identified/ marketed as genres, most notably those musics
which are currently being referred to using the optimistic
label Progressive or the somewhat more skeptical Ethno-Techno.

Jungle refers to music which came about as a result of the
club- and rave DJ's artistry and skill at the on-the-spot
creation of aural bricolage: consisting of a very wide
range of stylistic "cuts" (Hebdige) placed in apposition
to a "foreground" of altered hip-hop rhythm samples, Jungle
sounds like 160 BPM funk combined with a very wide array
of samples, turntable "scratches," and digital effects.
The most common forms of music one finds sampled in Jungle
are generally classic Reggae, Ragamuffin, Dub, Funk, and
Rap, whose BPM rates are usually calibrated to be exactly
half of the "foreground" beat, thus creating an effect
which may be heard as "two songs to dance toone aggressive
and fast, the other slower and relaxed. [One] can choose
which beat to pay attention to when dancing" (O' Malley).
Jungle used to be subsumed under the broader category
Breakbeat, along with another style, Darkside (a style
developed by DJ's in London dance clubs which uses "minor
keys to create an eerie feeling" [Hilker and Behlendorf],
but is otherwise similar to Jungle), but it has since been
promoted and accepted as a genre in its own right, spawning
in turn the creation of its own subgenre, Drum & Bass,
which is now in the process of transformation into a genre
from which further subdivisions shall depend.

Drum & Bass is, as its name implies, a style of music
dominated by drum and bass samples; in fact, it is really
just a stripped-down version of Jungle, often using many
of the same elements as Jungle, including scratching, but
far more sparingly, which results in a sound often lacking
the aforementioned "layering" effect. Drum & Bass has become
very popular in the United States during the past two years,
and many clubs now feature entire evenings devoted solely
to it.

Perhaps partly as a reaction to more frenetic musics like
Jungle, there now seems to be a countercurrent trend in
cities: Ambient is slow and subdued where most Techno is
fast and "in your face." Clubs and parties which feature
Ambient do not do so with the expectation that people will
attend in order to dance, although a great deal of Ambient
Techno is quite danceable. It is not a utilitarian sort of
music in the way that a great deal of Techno ishaving been
designed to do something to; i.e: dancebut rather it is
frequently used to help bring peoples' interactions into
the foreground, to provide a complimentary backdrop to
conversation and even the playing of board games (Strauss).
When compared to most varieties of Techno, Ambient seems
anachronistic in that it recalls the environmental "art
happenings" of the 1960's, the "Furniture Music" of Erik
Satie, and, most clearly, the work of Brian Eno, who is
alleged to have created the term "Ambient" in the mid-1970's
in a deliberate attempt to create a new music genre, one
which would not draw attention to itself while being played
and which would have the effect of relaxing the listener.
In clubs one finds Ambient, the "exotic" music of non-industrial
cultures, environmental recordings of forests (sans chainsaws,
of course), as well as what might be termed Eno's "classic
Ambient" being played in "chill rooms" adjacent to the main
floors where faster Techno is played as a main event. In
this context, chill rooms function as places where "aural
antidotes" to faster, more intense Techno can be absorbed
in a deliberately relaxed atmosphere. In a way, this music
is as pragmatically functional as dance-oriented Techno in
that its function is often to counterbalance the apparent
psychological and physiological effects of the volume,
speed, and aural density of dance-oriented Techno. Recorded
Ambient music often takes the form of a sound collage or
bricolage, and frequently features compositions which are
far longer than most Techno "songs" (that is, edited versions
of long mixes and remixes), and which require more time to
develop musical motifs and gestures than other genres which
usually state and restate a small number of themes. In a
club or rave context, of course, there is a continuous mix
of music which may gradually shift from one to another
emphasis, but, because of the vast differences between
Ambient and other genres, Ambient is emerging from the
chill rooms not into the main rooms, but rather into its
own parallel scene at parties and cub nights devoted solely
to Ambient.

Among global industrial cultures there exists a well-documented
process of "exoticizing" musics by infusing them with the
music of romanticized "tribal" peoples (preferably from
places far away from the actual site of cultural and economic
production): the strongest recent manifestation of this
tradition can be seen in the "world beat" and "world music"
trends beginning in the 1980's and increasing in strength
to the present day (Feld 266-8). In Techno we see this
trend appearing most blatantly in the style sometimes called
"Progressive" (although this term is sometimes also used
to describe Techno which uses "real," non-digital instruments
in live performances, and is also used as a term which
modifies preexisting genres: i.e. "progressive Trance") or
"Ethno Techno," a name sometimes used derisively. Here I
use the term simply because it more plainly evokes the
music's real content than the term "Progressive," which is
becoming more vague as it is used more frequently as a term
which ameliorates "hard" styles; for example, a recent
trend has combined two very different, very widely listened
to, and very profitable stylesDrum & Bass and Ambient. This
seemingly improbable mixture has been promoted under the
(assumed) name "Progressive Drum & Bass"that is, Drum &
Bass which features washes and patinas of chord colors,
"ethnic" sounds, and an overall lower aural density than
typical Drum & Bass.

That all of this labeling is "inorganic" and is intended
to aid the process of the commoditization of art is a 20th
century truismone which shall be more thoroughly discussed
in the Mediation section of this work. It should be pointed
out that "Ethno Techno" is also a term very frequently used
by the mass media and by industry journals such as Billboard;
therefore, it is definitely not a term which one would find
commonly used among Techno's self-defined subcultures,
except in order to indicate an ironic metacommentary on
the mediation process.

Ethno-Techno has a tendency to sonically associate the
concept of primitivity with that of environmental righteousness,
and to express these associations in compositions which
place "ethnic" sounds in aural conjunction with "environmental"
soundsthat is, real or imaginary soundscapes (see Schafer
77: 3-4) which feature a conspicuous lack of industrial or
"first world" sounds (and increasingly this is indeed an
imaginary soundscape). This conjunction equates romantic
notions of pre-industrialism with a sort of lost innocence
or a mythical idealized past now viewed as being represented
in the lives and musics of "indigenous peoples." This is
an interesting and contradictory facet of the Techno ethos:
that a connection to a primitive, pre-technological (and
therefore completely ahistorical) past may be created by
"quoting" contemporary "ethnic" musics within a composition,
frequently using the most advanced recording and production
technology as well as the network of the global capitalist
market as a medium of communication.

Part 2: Techno Tribe: Utopian-Futurist and Future-Primitive
Ideals in Rave Culture.


For me, raving is probably one of the single most
influential and important things in my life. It
brings me up when I'm down, opens my mind to new
people and lifestyles, promotes general feelings
of happiness and grooviness, and provides a place
where people from all walks of life can forget
their problems and differences and dance and have
a good time. It has introduced me to some of the
most creative, intelligent, funny, caring, soulful,
friendlypeople on the planet. And I know I'm not
alone.

So I wonder, if raving can bring this about in me
and others, what can it do for the world? Obviously
not everyone is going to like house and techno.
That's not the point I'm trying to makeIf raves
cansmash the walls of isolation and ignorance, it
stands as a perfect example of how the world could
be. The potential, energy, and technology are here
to bring about sweeping global change. The age-old
dream of one world, united inpeace, may not be far
above the horizon[and] consistently I can turn to
the music,the dance, and the vibe, [which]
consistentlylift my spirits and renew my hope. If
it can do it for me, it can do it for the world.

--excerpt from an alt.rave posting by Noah Raford.





We all know that PART of what makes our scene
extremely special and sacred is the fact that there
is no emphasis whatsoever on sex, sexuality, race,
religion, etc. When we gather at parties we become
ONEthere is no gay/straight, man/woman, white/black,
old/young, rich/poorwe simply see each other as
beautiful people and ultimately we can become one
pure energy mass of love.

--excerpt from an alt.rave posting by John Kawamoto.





For me, Techno is the most lyrical, most evocative
music I have yet found. It has inspired my passions
and thoughts, and has connected me with my emotions
like no other music. In its beat, I feel rhythm,
patterns, a cycle like life or the beat of our
hearts. The vocal samples, in their endless loops,
hold for me such poignancy and longingthey are
impossible, infinite, inhuman. Voices removed from
meaningsave that which we listeners bring to [the
experience of hearing] themtheir digitized humanity
is so plaintive, electronically cut off from context,
made "mute" in the face of technology, that they
become paradoxically human and inhuman

--excerpt from an alt.rave posting by Rhea Gossett.





Spirituality has fuck all to do with the rave scene.
It's just people getting off their heads and thinking
they're having a spiritual experience, when they've
probably never had one in their livesI live in
Manchester, England, and we probably have the
biggest club scene in the world, but there's no
fuckin' spirituality, just people having a good
timeas for cultures using drugs for religionfair
enough, maybe, but you can't compare it to people
paying to go in a club or going to a rave in a
field and listening to stomping house or techno.

--excerpt from an alt.rave posting by "Krispy."



Rave culture developed out of an appreciation for Techno
and House music in the late 1980's. When I use the term
"rave culture," I am referring to the entire global group
of people who listen and dance primarily to Techno music,
but who may not consider themselves to be members of a
coherent and self-aware structure, whether it is a culture
or subculture. In addition, by using the term "culture" as
opposed to "subculture" I adopt the terminology overwhelmingly
preferred by those ravers who provide, via the WWW, poetic
narratives (Fox 1991, 1995) which attempt to describe what
it means to be a "raver." Some of the individuals who
participate in these discussions may not be aware of the
academic connotations and denotations of the word "subculture,"
but they intuitively believe that theirs is a "true" culture,
one which, although it generally defines itself and is
naturalized as a reaction or countermovement to a perceived
hegemonic structure, ignores fine qualitative distinctions
by simply accepting the label "culture." As will be discussed
in the final section of this work, there is a continuum
which flows between mediated representations of rave
culture or subculture and self-defining poetic narratives
produced by supposed members of these groups. The ethos of
"rave culture" has been a very common subject of popular-
and niche market press articles, Internet newsgroups, and
involved, multi-participant "virtual" and "live" discussions
among ravers.

Most of those who comment on the subject agree that "raving"
(outwardly manifested simply as dancing and enjoying the
company of other people at raves) inspires and encourages
the expression of feelings of unity and purpose among those
who attend ravesparties which, amid all the hype and
poorly-informed media representations, perhaps may best be
generally defined as being public or invitation-only events
taking place at one or more geographic or (increasingly)
electronic locations where one can listen to Techno (although
other forms of music are frequently presented as well,
including live performances by non-Techno groups) (see
'Rave America'). The exact nature and purpose of the
aforementioned feelings of cohesion among ravers is, however,
a serious point of contention for those participants who
are concerned about definitions and representations of what
they believe to be "their" culture.

Some of the issues which inform and shape discussions regarding
the cultural ties between individual ravers are: whether the "spirit"
of raving should be confined to the time and locale of a rave or
whether it should extend into other social contexts in the "real"
world as a social and political agenda or ethical bias; whether
sexuality and gender are significant aspects of raving; how technology
aids or detracts from rave culture; whether ravers actually constitute
a coherent movement and whether that movement is political, musical,
spiritual, or a larger amalgam; whether spirituality associated
with raving should be inclusive or exclusive of "organized" religion,
and so forth. In short, people who listen to Techno and who consider
themselves to be part of a "rave culture" are attempting to define
that culture in a variety of ways which often have the effect of
instilling and reinforcing a sense of cultural membership, a process
which in turn generates more press articles, poetic narratives,
and discussions regarding the nature of this membership.

Most people who consider themselves to be ravers appear to be
convinced that raving promotes feelings of unity among people from
varying sexual orientations, national, and ethnic origins, and
classes who gather in order to dance in an atmosphere of cooperation
and mutual enjoyment. The rave scene is supposed to be accepting
of difference, yet we find that its identity is contradictory, for
how can it remain as a distinguishable cultural entity if it
indiscriminately accepts everyone? A rave is actually an elitist
scene which depends on the systematic rejection of what it perceives
as the "mainstream" in order to maintain a sense of belonging
(Thornton 5).

The ideals of non-discrimination, total inclusiveness, and "tribal"
unity are continually belied by several important aspects of rave
culture: the actual nature of the music production and dissemination
process; the actual content of a great deal of Techno music; the
actual exclusiveness of the Internet as a communications medium,
the actual difficulty (for outsiders who wish to affiliate themselves
with rave culture) of obtaining information regarding the times
and places where a rave is to occur; and the actual door policies
of clubs, about which Thornton writes:



It is a classic paradox that an institution so adept at segregation
at the nightly accommodation of different crowds, should be repeatedly
steeped in an ideology of social mixing. The discotheque/ disco/
club/ rave regularly re-invented itself to maintain an eternal
youth and to obfuscate dated relations to class culture (56).







Thornton continues by discussing the gender politics of
rave culture, citing Barbara Bradby's work. Bradby portrays
the utopian promise of rave culture as contradicting the
"ground zero" gender relations experienced at clubs and
raves, where residual male orientations toward the ownership
and control of technology still obtain, where most DJ's
and Techno musicians are still male, and where Techno music
is most often heard via media and venues which are owned
or controlled by men. Bradby describes the club scene as
a place where one can hear and dance to music mostly produced
by men which features mostly female vocal samples, a
"powerful restatement of traditional gender divisionsthe
association of men with culture, language, and technology,
and of women with emotion, the body, and sexuality" (168).
Thus rave culture is able to refer to ideals it would
perhaps like to see put into practice, but this mostly
serves only to differentiate ravers from the racist, sexist,
homophobic, and class- bound industrialized societies they
place themselves in apposition to.



Part 3: Techno Logo: the Mediation of Techno.





Communications media are inextricably involved in the meaning and
organization of youth subcultures. Youth subcultures are not organic,
unmediated social formations, nor are they autonomous, grassroots
cultures which only meet the media upon recuperative "selling out"On
the contrary, the media do not just represent but participate in
the assembly, demarcation and development of music cultures (Thornton
160).





Listening to Techno music, attending clubs and raves, and
discussing the nature of rave culture via the WWW are all
leisure activities which are, for the most part, engaged
in by individuals who live in industrialized nations and
who have a surplus of both time and money. How did Techno
music, once considered simply to be fun music to dance to,
become the focal point of today's rave culture, which
considers Techno to be a sort of cultural Great Attractor,
creating "worldwide" networks of "cybertribes" (Beltane 3)
and giving a sense of identity to its listeners, some of
whom consider themselves to be harbingers of "sweeping
global change" (Raford).

During the late 1980's and early 1990's Techno music and
the rave scene began gaining momentum just as personal
computers and digital sound processing equipment began to
be both affordable and widely availablemarketing innovations
made possible by the increased globalization of manufacturing
and distribution networks as well as by the cumulative
effects of increased automation and computerization at all
levels of commerce. At the same time, the Internet began
a process of naturalization as a communication medium with
the increased availability of online services. The combined
effect of these processes was to give people who listened
to Techno the tools to create and maintain cultural
affiliations very quickly and easily. With cheap digital
sampling and recording devices, individuals could creatively
respond to Techno's "arrival" by producing their own
recordings and distributing them directly to DJ's and
specialized record shops (Langlois 232). With the popularization
of the Internet, individuals could develop (more or less)
substantive relationships with other people interested in
Techno without being hindered by spatial separation;
therefore, technology is the mode of resistance by which
Techno- listeners were able to differentiate themselves
from "the masses" and cohere into "rave culture" in a
classic subcultural gesture.

What complicates matters when examining this model is that
the political and spiritual overtones of the missives
contributed to alt.techno are really only useful as gestures,
not as incitements of worldwide revolutionary consciousness.
The use of political and spiritual rhetoric by ravers
functions mostly as what Thornton refers to as "subcultural
capital" (11), a signifier of difference and uniqueness
with regard to perceived hegemonic structures and as a
token of subcultural membership, regardless of whether
the rhetoric is actually intended to produce social change.
Apparently believing that youth subcultures without exception
merely profess political concerns, Thornton takes a more
severe view than I do, writing that



These issues are clouded by the fondness that youth
subcultures have for appropriating political rhetorics and
frequently referring to 'rights' and 'freedoms,' 'equality
and unity.' This can be seen as a strategy by which political
issues are enlisted in order to give youthful leisure
activities that extra punch, that added je ne sais quois,
a sense of independence, even dangerThis is not evidence
of the politicization of youth as much as testimony to the
aestheticization of politics (167).





This "aestheticization of politics" is continually re-mediated by
the independent and major-label recording industries as well as by
rave promoters, club publicists, Techno musicians, DJ's, and ravers,
all of whomwith the exception of the lasthave a financial stake in
promoting the idea that there is actually such a coherent entity
as a rave culture. Individuals may purchase CD compilations of
Techno or attend raves which display the allure of revolutionary
spirit as an act of symbolic rebellion which, after all, may only
serve to reinforce hegemonic structures by allowing individual
"rebels" to derive meaning and satisfaction from the hegemonic
relationship (for more on symbolic rebellion see Willis 1977).
Techno is, finally, a thoroughly mediated music, from its continually
recombinant musical genres and its constant (re)generation of new
categories, labels, and self- definitions, to its circular processes
of both resistance and acceptance.



Works Cited



Allen, Derek and Banks, Carl. "The Architects of
Techno." (http://users.aol.com/dafilms/film.html).

Beltane Communique. "Cybertribe Rising."
(http://hyperreal.com/raves/spirit/politics/CyberTribe_Rising.html).

Bradby, Barbara. "Sampling Sexuality: Gender,
Technology and the Body in Dance Music."
Popular Music 12/2 (1993): 155-176.

Deleuze, Gilles. "Mediators." Zone 6: Incorporations.
New York: ZONE, 1992. 285.

Feld, Steven. "From Schizophonia to Schizmogenesis."
Music Grooves.Chicago: University of Chicago
Presss, 1994. 265-70.

Eno, Brian. Quoted in Hilker and Behlendorf, listed
below.

Fox, Aaron. "The Jukebox of History: Narratives of
Loss and Desire in the Discourse of Country
Music." Popular Music (vol. not available) 1991.
53-71.

Fox, Aaron. "Ain't it Funny How Time Slips Away:
Talk, Trash, and Technology in a Texas
'Redneck' Bar (copy of author's manuscript).

Gossett, Rhea. "Techno Music." Posting to alt.rave
newsgroup.

Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: the Meaning of Style.
London: Methuen. 1979.

Hilker, Chris and Behlendorf, Brian. "The Official
alt.rave FAQ."
(http://www.hyperreal.com/raves/altraveFAQ.html#intro).

"Jamie's Dance Music Genre Guide."
(http://www.maths.ex.ac.uk~james/tekno/genre.html).

Kawamoto, John. Posting to alt.rave newsgroup.

Krispy. "Utter Shite." Posting to alt.rave newsgroup.

Langlois, Tony. "Can You Feel it? Djs and House
Music Culture in the UK. Popular Music 11/2.
1992. 229-241.

Levy, Owen. "Techno Thrives in Unified Berlin."
Billboard November 6 1993 (original pagination
not available from NEXIS-LEXIS).

O'Malley, Soren. Personal communication.

Porcello, Tom. "The Ethics of Digital Audio Sampling:
Engineers' Discourse. Popular Music 10/1. 1991.
69-84.

Raford, Noah. "Dance for Tomorrow." Posting to
alt.rave newsgroup.

"Rave America Produces Sold Out Rave Party." PR
Newswire report. January 1, 1993.

Sanjek, David. "The Cultural Economy of Sound in
Contemporary Music." Paper given at the Preconference
Symposium on Music Technoculture at the 1995 annual
meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology. Los
Angeles, October 18, 1995.

Schafer, R. Murray. The Tuning of the World. New
York: Knopf, 1977.

Sicko, Dan. "Techno Rebels: Detroit's Agents of
Change." Urb Aug-Sep 1996. 60.

Strauss, Neil. "At the Clubs, Murmers and Ambient
Music." New York Times March 8, 1996. C1.

Thornton, Sarah. Club Cultures: Music, Media, and
Subcultural Capital. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan. 1996.

Walser, Robert. Running with the Devil: Power,
Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music.
Hanover, NH: Wesleyan. 1993.

by Jon Savage

[This article originally appeared in The Village Voice Summer 1993 "Rock & Roll Quarterly" insert.]

Oooh oooh Techno city
Hope you enjoy your stay
Welcome to Techno city
You will never want to go away
--Cybotron, "Techno City" (1984)

"The 'soul' of the machines has always been a part of our music. Trance always belongs to repetition, and everybody is looking for trance in life... in sex, in the emotional, in pleasure, in anything... so, the machines produce an absolutely perfec t trance."
--Ralf Hütter, 1991, quoted in Kraftwerk: Man Machine and Music, Pascal Bussy

"It's like a cry for survival," a panicked male voice calls out. The beat pauses, but the dancers do not. Then Orbital throw us back into the maelstrom: into a blasting Terry Riley sample, into the relentless machine rhythm, into a total environment of light and sound. We forget about the fact that we're tired, that the person in front of us is invading our space with his flailing arms. Then, suddenly, we're there: locked into the trance, the higher energy. It does happen, just like everybody always says: along with thousands of others, we lift off.

The Brixton Academy is a 3500-capacity venue in South London. Built at the turn of the century in the style of a Moorish temple, it may look beautiful but it's hard to enliven: groups as diverse as the Beastie Boys and Pavement have disappeared into its dark, grimy corners. Tonight, however, it is full of white light and movement: the whole stage is a mass of projections, strobes and dry ice, in front of which a raised dance floor has been put in. Above us is stretched white cloth: at the sides of the building, the alcoves are lit up and flanked by projections of pulsating globules.

The whole scene reminds me of the place I wanted to be when I was 18, the same age as most of this audience: the Avalon Ballroom. Never mind that most of the dancers were born long after the San Francisco scene had passed: they're busy chasing that everlasting present. The sound is techno but psychedelic references abound: in the light shows, the fashions (everything ranging form beatnik to short-hair to late '60s long-hair), the T-shirts that read "Feed Your Head" (that climactic line from Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit"), the polydrug use that is going on all around us.

This event is called Midi Circus: an ambitious attempt by the London promoters Megadog to make dance music performance work. It's obvious from the lightness of the atmosphere that time and energy have been spent on the staging. The acts selected --the Orb, Orbital, the Aphex Twin-- are the most interesting working in the techno/psych crossover that has moved into areas formerly associated with rock: large public events, raves, festivals. It's here you will find the millenarian subculture of techno primitives, half in electronic noise, half in earth-centered paganism.

Orbital's name is taken from the M25 Orbital motorway that circles London; it comes from the period, three years ago, when huge raves were held around the capital's outer limits. They've had a couple of hits, and have just released a fine second LP (due out in the U.S. next month). Tonight, they stand behind their synths wearing helmets with two beams roughly where their eyes would be. When the dry ice and the strobes are in full effect, they look like trolls from Star Wars, or, perhaps more unsettling, coal miners. And then, as machine noise swirls around us, it hits me. This is industrial displacement. Now that England has lost most of its heavy industry, its children are simulating an industrial experience for their entertainment and transcendence.

At first the art of music sought and achieved purity, limpidity and sweetness of sound. Then different sounds were amalgamated, care being taken, however, to caress the ear with gentle harmonies. Today music, as it becomes continually more complicated, strives to amalgamate the most dissonant, strange and harsh sounds. In this way we come ever closer to noise-sound.
--Luigi Russolo: "The Art of Noises" (1913)

Punk rock, new wave, and soul
Pop music, salsa, rock & roll
Calypso, reggae, rhythm and blues
Master mix those number one blues.
--G.L.O.B.E. and Whiz Kid: "Play That Beat Mr. DJ" (1983)

Techno is everywhere in England this year. Beginning as a term applying to a specific form of dance music --the minimal, electronic cuts that Detroiters like Derrick May, Juan Atkins, and Kevin Saunderson were making in the mid '80s-- techno has become a catchall pop buzzword: this year's grunge. When an unabashed Europop record like 2 Unlimited's "No Limit" --think Snap, think Black Box-- blithely includes a rap that goes "Techno techno techno techno," you know that you're living within a major pop phenomenon.

My experience of it has been colored by my recent circumstances: frequent travel, usually by car. Techno is the perfect travelling music, being all about speed: its repetitive rhythms, minimal melodies, and textural modulations are perfect for the constantly shifting perspectives offered by high-speed travel. Alternatively, the fizzing electronic sounds all too accurately reproduce the snap of synapses forced to process a relentless, swelling flood of electronic information.

If there is one central idea in techno, it is of the harmony between man and machine. As Juan Atkins puts it: "You gotta look at it like, techno is technological. It's an attitude to making music that sounds futuristic: something that hasn't been done before." This idea is commonplace throughout much of avant-garde 20th-century art --early musical examples include Russolo's 1913 Art of Noises manifesto and '20s ballets by Erik Satie ("Relâche") and George Antheil ("Ballet méchanique"). Many of Russolo's ideas prefigure today's techno in everything but the available hardware, like the use of nonmusical instruments in his 1914 composition, Awakening of a City.

Postwar pop culture is predicated on technology, and its use in mass production and consumption. Today's music technology inevitably favors unlimited mass reproduction, which is one of the reasons why the music industry, using the weapon of copyright, is always fighting a rearguard battle against its free availability. Just think of those "Home Taping Is Killing Music" stickers, the restrictive prices placed on every new Playback/Record facility (the twin tape deck, the DAT), the legal battles between samplers and copyright holders.

There are obviously ethical considerations here --it's easy to understand James Brown's outrage as his uncredited beats and screams underpin much of today's black music-- but at its best, today's new digital, or integrated analog and digital, technology c an encourage a free interplay of ideas, a real exchange of information. Most recording studios in the U.S. and Europe will have a sampler and a rack of CDs: a basic electronic library of Kraftwerk, James Brown, Led Zeppelin --today's Sound Bank.

Rap is where you first heard it --Grandmaster Flash's 1981 "Wheels of Steel," which scratched together Queen, Blondie, the Sugarhill Gang, the Furious Five, Sequence, and Spoonie Gee --but what is sampling if not digitized scratching? If rap is more an American phenomenon, techno is where it all comes together in Europe as producers and musicians engage in a dialogue of dazzling speed.

Synthetic electronic sounds
Industrial rhythms all around
Musique nonstop
Techno pop
--Kraftwerk: "Techno Pop" (1986)

Kraftwerk stand at the bridge between the old, European avant-garde and today's Euro-American pop culture. Like many others of their generation, Florian Schneider and Ralf Hütter were presented with a blank slate in postwar Germany: as Hütter explains, "When we started, it was like shock, silence. Where do we stand? Nothing. We had no father figures, no continuous tradition of entertainment. Through the '50s and '60s, everything was Americanized, directed toward consumer behavior. We were part of this 1968 movement, where suddenly there were possibilities, then we started to establish some form of German industrial sound."

In the late '60s, there was a concerted attempt to create a distinctively German popular music. Liberated by the influence of Fluxus (LaMonte Young and Tony Conrad were frequent visitors to Germany during this period) and Anglo-American psychedelia, groups like Can and Amon Düül began to sing in German --the first step in countering pop's Anglo-American centrism. Another element in the mix was particularly European: electronic composers like Pierre Schaeffer and Karlheinz Stockhausen, who, like Fluxus, continued Russolo's fascination with the use of nonmusical instruments.

Classically trained, Hütter and Schneider avoided the excesses of their contemporaries, along with the guitar/bass/drums format. Their early records are full of long, moody electronic pieces, using noise and industrial elements --music being indivisible from everyday sounds. Allied to this was a strong sense of presentation (the group logo for their first three records was a traffic cone) which was part of a general move toward control over every aspect of the music and image-making process: in 1973-74, the group built their own studio in Düsseldorf, Kling Klang.

At the same time, Kraftwerk bought a Moog synthesizer, which enabled them to harness their long electronic pieces to a drum machine. The first fruit of this was "Autobahn," a 22-minute motorway journey, from the noises of a car starting up to the hum of cooling machinery. In 1975, an edited version of "Autobahn" was a top 10 hit. It wasn't the first synth hit --that honor belongs to Gershon Kingsley's hissing "Popcorn," performed by studio group Hot Butter-- but it wasn't a pure novelty either.

The breakthrough came with 1977's Trans-Europe Express: again, the concentration on speed, travel, pan-Europeanism. The album's center is the 13-minute sequence that simulates a rail journey: the click-clack of metal wheels on metal rails, the rise and fade of a whistle as the train passes, the creaking of coach bodies, the final screech of metal on metal as the train stops. If this wasn't astounding enough, 1978's Man Machine further developed ideas of an international language, of the synthesis between man and machine.

The influence of these two records --and 1981's Computer World, with its concentration on emerging computer technology --was immense. In England, a new generation of synth groups emerged from the entrails of punk: Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, the Normal all began as brutalist noise groups, for whom entropy and destruction were as important a part of technology as progress, but all of them were moving toward industrial dance rhythms by 1976-79.

The idea of electronic dance music was in the air from 1977 on. Released as disco 12" records in the U.S., cuts like "Trans-Europe Express" and "The Robots" coincided with Giorgio Moroder's electronic productions for Donna Summer, especially "I Feel Love." This in turn had a huge influence on Patrick Cowley's late '70s productions for Sylvester: synth cuts like "You Make Me Feel Mighty Real" and "Stars" were the start of gay disco. Before he died in 1982, Cowley made his own synthetic disco record, the dystopian "Mind Warp."

More surprisingly, Kraftwerk had an immediate impact on black dance music: as Afrika Bambaataa says in David Toop's Rap Attack, "I don't think they even knew how big they were among the black masses back in '77 when they came out with 'Trans-Europe Express.' When that came out, I thought that was one of the best and weirdest records I ever heard in my life." In 1981, Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force, together with producer Arthur Baker, paid tribute with "Planet Rock," which used the melody from "Trans-Europe Express" over the rhythm from "Numbers." In the process they created electro and moved rap out of the Sugarhill age.

The Techno Rebels are, whether they recognize it or not, agents of the Third Wave. They will not vanish but multiply in the years ahead. For they are as much part of the advance to a new stage of civilisation as our missions to Venus, our amazing computers, our biological discoveries, or our explorations of the oceanic depths.
--Alvin Toffler: The Third Wave (1980)

Music is prophecy: its styles and economic organisation are ahead of the rest of society because it explores, much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities in a given code. It makes audible the new world that will gradually become visible.
--Jacques Atalli: Noise (1977)

In the inevitable movement of musical ideas from the avant-garde to pop, from black to white and back again, it's easy to forget that blacks --who to many people in England must be the repository of qualities like soul and authenticity --are equally as capable, if not more, of being technological and futuristic as whites. A veiled racism is at work here. If you want black concepts and black futurism, you need go no further than the mid-'70s Parliafunkadelicment Thang, with its P-Funk language and extraterrestrial visitations.

Derrick May once described techno as "just like Detroit, a complete mistake. It's like George Clinton and Kraftwerk stuck in an elevator." "I've always been a music lover," says Juan Atkins. "Everything has a subconscious effect on what I do. In the 1970s I was into Parliament, Funkadelic; as far back as '69 they were making records like Maggot Brain, America Eats Its Young. But if you want the reason why that happened in Detroit, you have to look at a DJ called Electrifying Mojo: he had five hours every night, with no format restrictions. It was on his show that I first heard Kraftwerk."

In 1981, Atkins teamed up with a fellow Washtenaw Community College student, Vietnam veteran Richard Davies, who had decided to simply call himself 3070. "He was very isolated," Atkins says; "He had one of the first Roland sequencers, a Roland MSK-100. I was around when you had to get a bass player, a guitarist, a drummer to make records: you had all these egos flying around, it was hard to get a consistent thought. I wanted to make electronic music but thought you had to be a computer programmer to do it. I found out it wasn't as complicated as I thought. Our first record was 'Alleys of Your Mind.' It sold about 15,000 locally."

Atkins and 3070 called themselves Cybotron, a futuristic name in line with the ideas they had taken from science fiction, P-Funk, Kraftwerk, and Alvin Toffler's The Third Wave. "We had always been into futurism. We had a whole load of concepts for Cybotron: a whole techno-speak dictionary, an overall idea which we called the Grid. It was like a video game which you entered on different levels." By 1984-85, they had racked up some of the finest electronic records ever, produced in their home studio in Ypsilanti: tough, otherworldly yet warm cuts like "Clear," "R-9", and the song that launched the style, "Techno City."

Like Kraftwerk, Cybotron celebrated the romance of technology, of the city, of speed, using purely electronic instruments and sounds. One of their last records, "Night Drive," features a disembodied voice whispering details of rapid, nocturnal transit in an intimate, seductive tone --this set against a background of terminal industrial decay. After the riots of June 1967, Detroit went, as Ze'ev Chafets writes in Devil's Night, "in one generation from a wealthy white industrial giant to a poverty- stricken black metropolis." Starved of resources while the wealth remains in rich, white suburbs, the inner city has, largely, been left to rot.

Much has been made of Detroit's blasted state --and indeed, analogous environments can be found in England, in parts of London, Manchester, Sheffield, which may well account for techno's popularity there-- but Atkins remains optimistic. "You can look at the state of Detroit as a plus," says Atkins. "All right, you only take 15 minutes to get from one side of the city center to the other, and the main department store is boarded up, but we're at the forefron here. When the new technology came in, Detroit collapsed as an industrial city, but Detroit is techno city. It's getting better, it's coming back around."

By 1985, 3070 was gone, permanently damaged by Vietnam. Atkins hooked up with fellow Belleville High alumni Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson. The three of them began recording together and separately, under various names: Model 500 (Atkins), Reese (Saunderson), Mayday, R-Tyme, and Rhythim is Rhythim (May). All shared an attitude toward making records --using the latest in computer technology without letting machines do everything-- and a determination to overcome their environment; like May has said, " We can do nothing but look forward."

The trio put out a stream of records in the Detroit area on the Transmat and KMS labels: many of these, like "No UFO's," "Strings of Life," "Rock to the Beat," and "When He Used To Play," have the same tempo, about 120 bpm, and feature blank, otherworldly voices --which, paradoxically, communicate intense emotion. These records --now rereleased in Europe on compilations like Retro Techno Detroit Definitive (Network U.K.) or Model 500: Classics (R&S Belgium)-- were as good, if not better, as anything coming out of New York or even Chicago, but because of Detroit's isolation few people in the U.S. heard them at the time. It took English entrepreneurs to give them their correct place in the mainstream of dance culture.

Like many others, Neil Rushton was galvanized by the electronic music coming out of Chicago mid-decade, which was successfully codified in the English market under the trade name "house." A similar thing happened in Chicago as in Detroit: away from the musical mainstream on both coasts, DJs like Frankie Knuckles and Marshall Jefferson had revived a forgotten musical form, disco, and adapted it to the environment of gay clubs like the Warehouse. The result was a spacey, electronic sound, released on local labels like Trax and DJ International: funkier and more soulful than techno, but futuristic. As soon as it was marketed in the U.K. as house in early 1987, it because a national obsession with No. 1 hits like "Love Can't Turn Around" and "Jack Your Body."

House irrevocably turned around English pop music. After the successes of these early records by Steve "Silk" Hurley and Farley "Jackmaster" Funk (with disco diva Darryl Pandy), pop music was dance music, and, more often than not, futuristic black dance music at that. The apparent simplicity of these records coincided with the coming onstream of digital technology whereby, in Atkins's words, "you have the capability of storing a vast amount of information in a smaller place." The success of the original house records opened up more trends: acid house --featuring the Roland 303-- was followed by Italian house, and later, Belgian New Beat's slower, more industrial dance rhythms.

"The U.K. likes discovering trends," Rushton says. "Because of the way that the media works, dance culture happens very quickly. It's not hard to hype something up." House slotted right into the mainstream English pop taste for fast, four-on-the-floor black dance music that began with Tamla in the early '60s (for many English people the first black music they heard). In the '70s, obscure mid-'60s Detroit area records had been turned into a way of life, a religion even, in the style called "Northern Soul" by dance writer Dave Godin.

"I was always a Northern Soul freak," says Rushton. "When the first techno records came in, the early Model 500, Reese, and Derrick May material, I wanted to follow up the Detroit connection. I took a flyer and called up Transmat; I got Derrick May and we started to release his records in England. At that time, Derrick was recording on very primitive analog equipment: 'Nude Photo,' for instance, was done straight onto cassette, and that was the master. When you're using that equipment, you must keep the mixes very simple. You can't overdub, or drop too many things in; that's why it's so sparse.

"Derrick came over with a bag of tapes, some of which didn't have any name: tracks which are now classics, like 'Sinister' and 'Strings of Life.' Derrick then introduced us to Kevin Saunderson, and we quickly realized that there was a cohesive sound of these records, and that we could do a really good compilation album. We got backing from Virgin Records and flew to Detroit. We met Derrick, Kevin, and Juan and went out to dinner, trying to think of a name.

"At the time, everything was house, house house. We thought of Motor City House Music, that kind of thing, but Derrick, Kevin, and Juan kept on using the word techno. They had it in their heads without articulating it; it was already part of their language." Rushton's team returned to England with 12 tracks, which were released on an album called Techno! The New Dance School of Detroit, with a picture of the Detroit waterfront at night. At the time, it seemed like just another hype, but within a couple of months Kevin Saunderson had a huge U.K. hit with Inner City's pop oriented "Big Fun," and techno entered the language.

In the future, all pop music will bring everyone a little closer together --gay or straight, black or white, one nation under a groove.
--LFO: "Intro" (1991)

The sheer exponential expansion of dance music in Europe since house is attributable to several factors. First, the sheer quality of the records coming out of the U.S., whether swingbeat, rap, New York garage, house or techno. Secondly acid house --acid being a Chicago term for the wobbly bassline and trancey sounds that started to come in from 1987 on-- coincided with the widespread European use of the psychedelic Ecstasy. In Europe, acid house meant psychedelic house, and this drug-derived subculture has become the single largest fashion in England and across the continent; gatherings of up to 5000 people were common after 1988 and have become an important circuit for breaking hits.

Thirdly, the deceptively simple sound of the Detroit and Chicago records, together with the spread of digital technology like the Roland 808 sequencer [sic.], encouraged Europeans to make their own records cheaply, often in their own home studios, from the mid decade. The long delay between Kraftwerk's 1981 Computer World and 1986 Electric Cafe occurred in part because the group was converting its Kling Klang studio from analog to digital. The result is greater flexibility, more sto rage space, and more sonic possibilities --vital in an area of music as fast-moving and competitive as the dance economy.

The big English breakthrough came in 1988 with S'Express's no. 1 hit "Theme From S'Express" --a playful reworking of that old travel motif, with Karen Finley and hairspray samples for percussion. The acid sound development from the Roland 808 explorations of Phuture's "Acid Tracks" --the sound of buzzing bees discovered by accident from a synthesizer straight out of the shop. Squeezed, bent, oscillated, this buzz became the staple of the 1988-89 acid boom; you can hear an early English version on Baby Ford's proto-hardcore "Ooochy Koochy Fuck You Baby Yeah Yeah."

By 1990, the relentless demand for new dance music was such that, in Neil Rushton's words, "The Detroit innovators couldn't take it to the next stage. What did was that kids in the U.K. and Europe started learning how to make those techno records. They weren't as well-made, but they had the same energy. And, by 1990-91, things became more interesting, because instead of three people in Detroit, you suddenly had 23 people making techno, in Belgium, in Sheffield."

Beltram's "Energy Flash" released on the Belgian R&S Records in early 1991, defined the new mood. Inherent in the man/machine aesthetic is a certain brutality that goes right back to the macho posturings of the Futurist F.T. Marinetti: even in records as soulful as those made by Model 500, you'll find titles like "Off to Battle." With its in-your-face bass, speeded up industrial rhythms and whispered chants of "Ecstasy," "Energy Flash" caught the transition from Detroit techno to today's hardcore --the aesthetic laid out for all time on Human Resource's "Dominator:" "I'm bigger and bolder and rougher and tougher / In other words, sucker, there is no other / I wanna kiss myself."

"In Belgium we had all the influences," says R&S label owner Renaat Vandepapeliere. "We had new beat, which was slowed-down industrial music. Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle were very big in Belgium. Detroit techno and acid house came in and everything got mixed up together." Other Beltram cuts like "Sub-Bass Experience," with its sensuous psychedelic textures and rock samples, pointed the way forward to other R&S releases like the Aphex Twin's "Analogue Bubblebath," which spun techno off into yet another direction.

In England, the techno take-up came not in London or Manchester (which by then was busy with rock/dance groups like the Happy Mondays), but in Sheffield, an industrial city about 200 miles away from London, on the other side of the Pennine Hills from Manchester, which in the late '70s spawned its own electronic scene with Cabaret Voltaire and The Human League. "There are no live venues here in Sheffield," says WARP Records co-owner Rob Mitchell. "The only way to be in a band and be successful is to make dance records.

"All these industrial places influence the music that you make. Electronic music is relevant because of the subliminal influence of industrial sounds. You go around Sheffield and it's full of crap concrete architecture built in the '60's; you go down in to an area called the Canyon and you have these massive black factories belching out smoke, banging away. They don't sound a lot different from the music." You can hear this in early industrial cuts by Cabaret Voltaire, like 1978's "The Set Up," with its deep throbbing pulse.

In 1989, CV's Richard Kirk was looking for a new way to operate. "Cabaret Voltaire had just finished a period on a major label, EMI, and we weren't working together. I spent a lot of time going to clubs, and working in the studio with Parrot, a DJ who ran the city's main club night, Jive Turkey. We made a record, as Sweet Exorcist, called 'Test One,' which we made to play in the club. It was very, very minimal. WARP was a shop where everyone bought American imports, and they put it out. We started to move seriously in that direction."

WARP released "Test One" in mid 1990. By the end of the year they had two top 20 hits with LFO and Tricky Disco, both with eponymous dance cuts. The WARP material is less brutal than the Belgian techno: still using crunch industrial sounds, but more minimal, more playful. And then another change occurred as techno went hardcore in 1991. "I didn't like the hardcore stuff," says Mitchell. "It was too simplistic, crude and aggressive. We were getting sent lots of tracks that we couldn't sell on singles, so we thought, 'Let's just do an LP.' We got the title, Artificial Intelligence, and a concept: 'Electronic music for the mind created by trans-global electronic innovators who prove music is the one true universal language.'"

The cover of Artificial Intelligence is a computer-generated image: a robot lies back in an armchair, relaxing after a Sapporo and what looks like a joint. On the floor surrounding him are album sleeves: the first WARP compilation, featuring LFO and Sweet Exorcist among others, Kraftwerk's Autobahn, and Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. The music inside has slower beats, and is a ways away from the minimal funkiness of Detroit techno; cuts by the Dice Man, the Orb, and Musicology are nothing other than a modern, dance-oriented psychedelia.

Featured on the album was the then 17-year-old Richard James, who, under his most familiar pseudonym Aphex Twin, has become the star of what most people now call ambient techno --although it doesn't quite have a name yet. Coincidental to the Artificial Intelligence compilation, R&S released the Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works 85-92, which developed a huge underground reputation at the end of last year. With its minimal, archetypal graphics --a mutated boomerang shape on the sleeve-- the Ambient Works album trashed the boundaries between acid, techno, ambient, and psychedelic. It defined a new techno primitive romanticism.

When Richard James was finally found and interviewed, he came up with a story that has already become myth: how the by-now 19-year-old student from Cornwall (a remote part of the U.K.) recorded under a bewildering variety of pseudonyms --the Aphex Twin, Polygon Window, Dice Man, and Caustic Window, to name but a few-- how he built his own electronic machines to make the speaker-shredding noises you hear on his records; how he already has 20 albums recorded and ready to go. WARP plans to release his next ambient collection as a triple-CD set with a graphic novel.

The Aphex Twin's success comes at a moment when, in England and on the continent, one wing of techno is going toward ambience. The slowing pace is partly in response to the still-popular working class fashion of hardcore, which regularly throws up generic chart hits like those by Altern-8 and the Prodigy. At the same time as the drug supply in clubland has changed from Ecstasy to amphetamines, hardcore has gone far beyond the linear brutalities of "The Dominator" into a seamless dystopia of speeded up breakbeats, horror lyrics, and ur-punk vocal chants. Like gangsta rap, it's scary, and it's meant to be.

"Ninety per cent of the techno records you hear now are made for a fucked-up dance floor," says Renaat Vandepapeliere. "That's what I see now in a lot of clubs: no vibe, no motivation, aggression --the drugs have taken over. The majority don't understand it yet, but most of the guys who are really good, like Derrick May, don't take drugs. Techno was a sound but it is now an attitude, and that's to make records for drug-oriented people. There is another category, where people are making music for you to pay attention with your full mind, and we're trying to make something now that will last."

"I believe that the '70s are parallel for what's going on in the '90s," says WARP's Rob Mitchell. "Musical moods tend to be a reaction against what has just gone on; we've just had a very aggressive period. The original Detroit techno is very sophisticated. What we're putting out now --Wild Planet, F.U.S.E.-- has a similar level of sophistication. The real change for us since we started is the fact that this music is 99 per cent white, but the idea of raising techno to an artier level is really exciting."

If the '70s are back, then it's the early part of the decade: you can see 1970-71 in the long hair and loose clothes of R&S/WARP acts like the Aphex Twin, Source, C.J. Bolland; you can read it in their titles ("Neuromancer," "Aquadrive," "Hedphelym"); you can hear the hints of Terry Riley, German romanticists Cluster and Klaus Schulze, even Jean-Michel Jarre. The very idea of boy keyboard wizards goes back to that moment in the early '70s when Kraftwerk began their electronic experiments, when rock went progressive. Techno has moved into psychedelia with groups like Orbital; now it's gone prog.

It's hard to avoid the impression that ambient has come as a godsend to the music industry. The very success of the dance-music economy has thrown up problems, as Rob Mitchell explains: "There is virtually no artist loyalty in dance music; the record is more important than the artist. Dance is incredibly fast moving, which is good, but very difficult to build careers in." With ambient acts like the Aphex Twin, the music industry has something it recognizes and knows how to promote: the definable white rock artists, as opposed to the anonymous, often black, record. And ambient techno also slots directly into the music industry's most profitable form of hardware: the CD.

The term ambient was popularized by Brian Eno in the late '70s. The percussionless, subtle tonalities of records like Music for Airports were perfect for the CD format when it came onstream in the mid '80s. Ambient techno and its kitsch associate, New Age, are the modern equivalent of the exotic sound experience that developed to fit the technologies of the '50s. Just as mass distribution of the LP and the home hi-fi gave us film soundtracks and Martin Denny, the CD and the Discman have given us ambient techno.

Ambient could go horribly wrong, but hasn't yet. A cyberpunk/computer games aesthetic is always patched somewhere into the screen, but is not obtrusive. Inherent in the genre is a lightness of touch, and a rhythmic discipline that comes from its Detroit source. The best material, like Biosphere's Microgravity and Sandoz's Digital Lifeforms, also has a holistic spirituality that goes back to the Detroit records. As Sandoz's Richard Kirk says, "I've been making music for a long time. Much of it has been very cold, very aggressive, very stark. It's time to do something that makes you feel good, that makes you feel warm."

Recorded by a 27-year-old from Norway, Geir Jennsen (a/k/a Biosphere), Microgravity stands at the apex of ambient. Its nine cuts (sample title: "Cloudwater II") form a perfectly segued 45-minute whole that balances the utopian/dystopian pull inherent in the machine aesthetic. Their ebb and flow, between fast and slow, between playful and awful, between moon and sun, holds some of the queasy balance within which we live. At the end, a resolution: "Biosphere" merges the sound of technology --the thrum of heavy industry, an electric alarm-- into a bass pulse and atmospheric effects, warning but enclosing. The last sound is wind.

There's something in the air called objectivity.
There's something in the air like electricity.
There's something in the air, and it's in the air, the air.
There's something in the air that's pure silliness.
There's something in the air that you can't resist.
There's something in the air, and it's in the air,
And you can't get it out of the air.
--Theme song, Schiffer-Spoliansky revue: "Es Liegt in der Luft" (There's something in the air) (1928)

Techno, how far can you go? "A lot of it was kind of as we planned," says Juan Atkins, "but nobody knew it would be a global thing as it is now, from little Detroit." "We have played and been understood in Detroit and Japan," says Ralf Hütter; "That's the most fascinating thing that could happen. Electronic music is a kind of world music. It may be a couple of generations yet, but I think that the global village is coming."

The computer virus is loose. Right now, techno presents itself as a paradox of possibilities (and limitations, the most glaring being gender: where are the women in this boys' world?). In its many forms, techno shows that within technology there is emotion, that within information access there is overload, that within speed lies entropy, that within progress lies destruction, that within the materiality of inanimate objects can lie spirituality.

These tensions have been programmed into our art and culture since the turn of the century, and it is fitting that at the century's end, a form has come along which can synthesize the encroaching vortex of the millennium. You can do anything with techno, and people will. As our past, present, and future start to spin before our eyes, and our feet start to slip, the positivism inherent in techno remains a guide: like Juan Atkins says, "I'm very optimistic. This is a very good time to be alive right now."

par Patrice van Eersel

Né en 1946 en pleine gare de Lufu-Toto, dans ce qui était encore le Congo belge, Ray Lema a grandi dans la grande ville de Kinshasa, un pied dans le monde africain, un pied dans le monde occidental. A onze ans, élève chez les pères blancs, il donne son premier concert : la Sonate au clair de lune de Beethoven. Les pères le trouvent si doué qu’ils lui offrent un régime spécial : au lieu de suivre les cours comme les autres, il pourra jouer de l’orgue autant qu’il voudra. Le voilà toute la journée plongé dans Bach. Il veut devenir prêtre... et devient musicien. Il joue dans les groupes à la mode de la capitale zaïroise, en particulier dans celui du célèbre Tabu Ley. Peu à peu, sa réputation se forge : au Zaïre, il devient "I’intello" des musiciens. Celui qui gamberge tellement que sa tête chauffe. Attention, parfois on dirait presque un blanc ! Mais on ne se moque pas, on admire.

Un jour, en 1974, "I’intello" est convoqué en haut lieu pour une mission de la plus haute importance. Dans les nations jeunes du Tiers-Monde, l’orchestre national est une entité importante, un symbole d’union. En Afrique, c’est même un instrument politique essentiel. Mais, au Zaïre, il y a un os : le pays est si grand, les tribus si éclatées et différentes qu’elles ne parviennent pas à jouer ensemble. Or, c’est précisément cela que l’on attend de cet orchestre : que plusieurs centaines de musiciens (et de danseurs) venus des quatre coins du pays jouent dans la même formation. Plusieurs chefs d’orchestre s’y sont déjà cassé le nez : rien à faire. En dernier recours, c’est donc à Rey Lema que le pouvoir fait appel.

Et Ray, comme les autres, commence par échouer. Chaque fois qu’il essaie de faire jouer ces citoyens ensemble, il y en a forcément un qui vient se plaindre : "Ça ne va pas, chef, il joue faux celui-là !" Au bout de quelques semaines, Ray comprend qu’il n’y arrivera pas. Leurs rythmes, leurs manières de jouer, bien qu’apparemment proches, sont organisés de telle sorte qu’il se trouve à son tour incapable de les diriger. Il faut trouver un truc, mais quoi ? Et bientôt une évidence s’impose à lui, assez vertigineuse : la seule solution serait qu’il aille sur place, dans la brousse, et jusqu’au fond de la profonde forêt où vivent les pygmées, pour y chercher des musiciens, mais surtout pour y apprendre à jouer les rythmes lui-même.

Commence alors un long voyage initiatique.

Ray Lema découvre d’abord que chaque village a sa "signature" rythmique. A l’évidence, celle-ci est systématiquement constituée, à la base, par le croisement de deux rythmes différents, très rapides, joués sur des percussions par des "petits", c’est-à-dire des enfants ou des adolescents - "car les enfants sont bavards et doivent se muscler". Ce jeu rythmique - dont le résultat est un battement d’interférences - résonne le plus clair du temps dans l’espace du village, par-delà la forêt et les champs, avec des moments creux dans la journée et des moments forts, chaque fois notamment qu’a lieu une fête, une cérémonie. Quand on joue de cette musique, les gens disent simplement : "Ça tourne" ; mais si Ray leur fait écouter un morceau de musique moderne, il y a toutes les chances qu’ils fassent une grimace : "Ça ne tourne pas !" Ray se demande ce que cela signifie : qu’est-ce qui "ne tourne pas" ?

Il découvre que dans le village, chacun, du plus petit gamin à la plus vieille grand-mère, a sa façon propre d’entrer dans ce jeu rythmique - le plus souvent en cognant contre un tambour, un tronc d’arbre creux, une boîte quelconque, en claquant de la langue, des doigts, ou en jouant de quelque autre instrument, à corde notamment, petites guimbardes résonnant dans la nuit très noire jusqu’au sommet des arbres géants. Comme si les deux "petits", qui donnent sa base au jeu rythmique, faisaient tourner une gigantesque corde à sauter et que tout le village s’amusait à sauter dans cette corde, chacun à son rythme propre, c’est-à-dire suivant son humeur, sa personnalité, son âge... "Suivant l’âge de son âme ! dit Ray ; plus l’âme est jeune, plus elle saute vite dans la corde." Les vieux maîtres du village ne sautent, c’est-à-dire ne frappent sur leurs tambours qu’un coup sur dix, ou sur quinze, ou sur cent...

Et, peu à peu, Ray bascule dans un monde qu’il ne soupçonnait pas. Un monde purement acoustique. Quand la nuit tombe et qu’il fait si sombre dans la forêt qu’on ne distingue plus ses propres mains, même en écarquillant les yeux, cela l’impressionne parfois terriblement : car les villageois semblent voir dans le noir et se reconnaître les uns les autres, de loin, rien qu’à la façon dont ils interviennent dans le faisceau rythmique. Mieux : à la façon dont tel ou tel joue, les autres, à distance, vous disent : "Il est fatigué aujourd’hui", ou : "Elle m’a l’air en colère", ou encore : "Quelle forme il tient, Machin ? Quelle blague nous a-t-il encore mijotée ?"

Ce qui frappe peut-être le plus l’Africain de la grande ville dans les pratiques rythmiques de la forêt, c’est combien elles interdisent le baratin, le mensonge social. Vous êtes qui vous êtes, votre rythme le dit, impossible de frimer. Si vous tentez de jouer un rythme qui ne vous correspond pas, en particulier s’il est trop sophistiqué pour vous (les ados s’y essayent tous un jour ou l’autre), eh bien vous ne tiendrez pas une nuit durant. Car ces gens-Ià jouent, au sens propre, des nuits durant ! Et Ray lui-même, pourtant entraîné, se casse souvent la figure au début. Jusqu’à ce qu’un jour un vieux lui dise : "Mais dis-donc, on dirait que tes mains sont devenues sèches ! Désormais, elles vont savoir faire parler le tambour !" Honneur suprême. Pour ces gens-Ià, nous tous qui n’avons pas l’habitude de taper sur des tam-tam pendant des heures (et même nos batteurs modernes), nous avons les mains "mouillées".

Bref, Ray a passé une première épreuve de la connaissance des secrets de la forêt.

Les vieux maîtres lui parlent davantage. Eux jouent les rythmes les plus lents, les plus sophistiqués justement. Mais ils peuvent aussi jouer tres vite, pour accompagner un plus jeune. Pour l’imiter, ou pour se moquer de lui. Les vieux maîtres savent jouer "à la manière de" n’importe lequel des villageois. Et quand un jeune fait trop le malin et se pavane par exemple devant les filles, ils savent aussi le taquiner et "couper" son rythme de telle sorte que le malheureux ait beau s’esquinter sur son tam-tam, personne ne l’entende.

Mais le pouvoir des vieux maîtres-tambour va beaucoup plus loin. Ils savent comment atteindre telle ou telle partie du corps de telle ou telle personne en train de danser au milieu de la place du village. Et redresser une épaule. Atteindre un estomac. Ou capturer un corps, pour libérer son esprit, et le mettre en transe. Les mois passent. Ray visite, une à une, près de deux cent cinquante ethnies différentes. Et voilà qu’il se met à conceptualiser toutes ces découvertes ; à comprendre par exemple pourquoi un vieux maître tambour à qui il venait de faire écouter du Miles Davis et du John Coltrane, avait ronchonné : "Ils sont drôlement doués ces petits, pourquoi ne leur donne-t-on pas un maître ?

- Comment ? s’était exclamé Ray, mais que trouves-tu à redire à cette musique ?

- Tu n’entends donc pas, avait répondu le vieux, ça ne tourne pas !"

Même le jazz ! Maintenant "I’intello" des musiciens de Kinshasa commence à comprendre : ce qui "tourne" ou "ne tourne pas", c’est une sorte de roue, - du moins visualise-t-il la chose ainsi. Une roue dans laquelle rebondissent les différents rythmes du village. Une roue qui est à la fois extérieure, englobant tous ces rythmes, et intérieure à chaque individu, courant dans son ventre, l’aspirant au-dehors jusqu’aux limites de son être réel, et le reliant aux autres dans un même mouvement. A la fin, les visualisations de Ray deviennent si claires qu’il parvient à les dessiner sous forme de roues géométriques. Et ça marche ! Muni de cet outil, il parvient enfin à expliquer à des centaines de musiciens venus de toutes les tribus comment jouer ensemble...

Et c’est ainsi qu’il fonde le "Ballet national du Zaïre". Grand moment de gloire pour "l’intello", dont s’empare bientôt une idée fixe : cette roue rythmique extraordinaire, il veut l’importer dans le monde moderne ! Car la forêt, tôt ou tard, va mourir. Et l’on a beau énormément danser dans les grandes villes africaines, et savoir faire son marché en balançant son corps de façon chaloupée, les secrets de la forêt vont irrémédiablement se perdre. Voilà pourquoi, vers 1976, on retrouve Ray Lema de l’autre côté du gigantesque fleuve, à Brazzaville, capitale du Congo, où il dirige une drôle de petite communauté baptisée "la Tribu du Verseau". Arts martiaux, méditation, techniques empruntées à toutes les grandes traditions, et au centre : une pratique quotidienne de la roue. Ray fait des expériences. Comme un fou. Vingt-quatre heures sur vingt-quatre. Mais il est trop pressé, trop autoritaire. Surcomprimés, les disciples de la communauté explosent.

Ray se trouve à la dérive...

Pendant ce temps, la création du Ballet national du Zaïre est remarquée à l’étranger, jusqu’à New York, où la fondation Rockfeller invite Ray à venir passer un an aux États-Unis, tous frais payés. Le musicien zaïrois est ravi.

Il pense qu’il va pouvoir expliquer ses découvertes et offrir au monde le plus beau cadeau de l’Afrique : comment réguler toute une société musicalement ! Dans les villages zaïrois qu’il a connus, la roue rythmique institue un véritable ordre social. Elle permet aux gens de se reconnaître, de se comparer, de se jauger, de se soigner, de prier, de voyager hors de son corps... tout ça par les rythmes, et avec un raffinement inouï.

Hélas l’Amérique, qui l’a si bien accueilli, se comporte avec lui comme avec un bon sauvage, et ne l’écoute pas. Ce sont plutôt eux, les jazzmen, qui prétendent enseigner la musique à ce brave-garçon de la brousse ! Il faut dire que, lorsque Ray met sur une platine de grand studio américain l’un des 33 tours enregistrés à la hâte au Zaïre, le résultat est très démoralisant. Le fondateur du Ballet national du Zaïre comprend alors qu’il lui faut percer un autre genre de grand secret : celui de la technologie des studios modernes, du son digitalisé. Aidé par quelques blancs, dont Jean-François Bizot d’Actuel, puis Chris Blackwell d’Island, il entame, en 1983, à Paris (où il vit avec sa femme Carol et ses trois enfants), une nouvelle longue marche, qu’il n’a pas encore achevée.

J’ai passé de nombreuses dizaines d’heures à discuter avec Ray. Extraits d’une de nos dernières discussions :

Ray éclate de rire : "Ça fait vingt-cinq ans que je fais danser des blancs ! Et crois- moi, quand tu fais danser des gens, il ne te faut pas longtemps pour voir à qui tu as à faire !" De sa main effilée, le musicien fait le geste de s’arracher un masque. Ses doigts claquent dans le vide puis se reposent tranquillement sur le bord de la table.

- "Tu veux dire qu’au fond nous dansons mal...

- Ah mais vraiment, rien à voir avec la technique !"

La voix du black claque comme un tissu au grand vent :

"Non, rien à voir avec la technique. Je connais des blancs, enfin, je veux dire des Occidentaux - parce que ce mal menace toutes les races ! - qui, techniquement, ne dansent pas mal du tout. Mais rarissimes sont ceux qui ne te donnent pas l’impression d’être complètement coupés.

- Coupés ?

- Coupés du monde. Coupés des autres. Coupés de tout ! Je crois que c’est le prix terrible qu’ils ont payé pour inventer l’individualisme, c’est-à-dire l’ère moderne. Et quand tu les fais danser, je t’assure que ça saute aux yeux : les blancs sont totalement coupés les uns des autres. Ils dansent chacun pour soi. Même quand ils sont deux !

- Excuse-moi, mais quand je danse le slow, ou même le rock d’ailleurs, le vrai rock, eh bien...

- Mais non, je t’assure... (il a un sourire d’un kilomètre de large). Il s’agit de quelque chose de... comment dire ? de très objectif. Et nous, Africains, nous mettons énormément de temps à réaliser que, cette chose, vous ne la voyez pas, vous ne la sentez pas. Ma position de musicien m’a un peu aidé à voir plus clair là-dedans. Imagine des gens qui diraient raffoler du surf, mais qui ne verraient pas les vagues ! Ils seraient là, dans l’eau à essayer de grimper sur leurs planches, mais chaque fois qu’une belle vague arriverait, ils ne la verraient pas. Et plaf ! ils la prendraient sur la tronche. Parfois, tout à fait par hasard, l’un d’eux saurait en prendre une au bon moment - et alors ZZZZZZZ ! il ferait enfin du vrai surf, et il crierait à la grâce divine et au "miracle" ! Et, à coup sûr, il écrirait un essai là-dessus ! Mais la plupart barboterait en désordre, chacun dans son coin !"

De nouveau son rire tonitruant éclate dans la nuit, puis il reprend : "Eh bien je t’assure, c’est e-xa-cte-ment l’impression que tu as quand tu fais danser des blancs. Comme si, pour gagner leurs indépendances individuelles, ces humains-Ià s’étaient mutilés de tout ce qui les liait au monde. Coupés les ailes ! Et là, pendant la danse, leurs mutilations apparaîtraient tout d’un coup au grand jour. Béantes ! Quelquefois, je te jure que ça fait de la peine.

- OK, mais quand c’est toute une foule qui se balance au même rythme, par exemple dans un grand concert rock, là, quand même ?..

- Là, tu sais ce qu’on sent ? La nostalgie des liens perdus. Une nostalgie assez épaisse. Quand tu y regardes de près, même dans les plus grands concerts rock (et bon sang, j’aime cette ambiance), eh bien derrière une écume d’excitation, la sensation réelle, individu par individu, de ce qui relie chacun au tout, cette sensation-là est vraiment faiblarde ! On a juste des milliers de petits "moi" agglutinés, qui passent un bon moment ensemble, d’accord c’est sympa, mais enfin bon... S’il en allait autrement, avec de pareilles masses de gens, t’aurais des transes carabinées, ah mais crois-moi ! (bien qu’en ce moment, dans la banlieue parisienne, se mijote chez les ados, beurs, blancs, africains, antillais, chinois, un mélange de cultures et de races comme nulle part ailleurs, qui les fait bouger de manière drôlement plus vivante, je dois l’avouer !)"

Il demeure un instant silencieux. Dehors, dans le silence de la banlieue Est, un chat huant hurle. On nous sert du thé. Et brusquement, comme si la conversation ne s’était pas arrêté une seconde, l’Africain reprend : "Mais si tu voyais ce que devient un individu de la forêt africaine quand la musique se met à tourner ! Ah mon vieux !"

Il ouvre les bras en croix et tire la langue la plus large possible. Un geste d’écartèlement, à la fois infini et assez laid. Je fais des yeux ronds :

"Quoi ? Il s’envole ?

- Ah tu parles ! Il n’existe plus, tu veux dire ! En Afrique profonde, quand la musique se met à tourner, c’est bien simple : l’individu n’existe plus. Terminé ! Il est tout entier fondu dans ces fameux "liens" dont nous parlions, et que vous, les blancs, vous ne sentez plus. Or ça, cher ami (les yeux soudain mi-clos, guettant avec un air de grand renard sérieux), nous n’en voulons pas non plus ! Nous ne désirons pas vos mutilations d’Occidentaux, mais ce n’est certainement pas pour revenir en arrière dans l’anéantissement de la forêt ! Ah ça non ! D’ailleurs, ça serait impossible ; même en Afrique, le mouvement de modernisation est irréversible, alors...

- Alors, tu veux quoi ?

- Le lait et l’argent du lait !" De nouveau, il rit, du rire le plus éclatant qui soit. Maintenant, je me sens moi-même pris d’une jubilation perplexe : "Tu me fais marrer : tu veux l’individualisme, mais sans la solitude, c’est ça ?

- Je veux - du moins si c’est la volonté du Très Haut - cette chose tranchante, aiguë, que vous avez affûtée à la limite de l’impossible, et qui s’appelle la lucidité, la conscience individuelle ; mais je ne veux pas pour autant perdre mes liens au monde et aux autres, ni devenir ce petit "moi" châtré et boursouflé, tout imbu de ses "droits de I’homme", qui passe devant la main tendue sans même la voir ! Cet être malade, que la vie va sérieusement mettre à l’épreuve dans les temps qui viennent, crois-moi.

- Tu réclames en somme à la fois l’état de la particule et celui de l’onde...

- Ha ha ! Voilà qui me dit quelque chose ! Ne m’as-tu pas raconté toi-même un jour que les physiciens modernes décrivaient la réalité matérielle sous ce double aspect inséparable ? !

- Oui, bon, la matière, mais imagine un peu : comment un être humain pourrait-il à la fois avoir des ailes et n’en avoir pas ? Tu veux être tout à la fois, libre de tes mouvements, indépendant de tous les autres et pris dans un cristal, en résonance avec le tout...

- Sais-tu que ça existe, ce que tu viens de décrire ?

- Quoi ?

- Cet état particulier, là, à la fois "un" comme le cristal et librement dispersé à la guise de chaque atome.

- Eh bien ?

- Cet état existe, c’est le cristal liquide ! Une substance en pleine expansion industrielle, à ce qu’on m’a dit ! (il rit). Et je me demande même s’il ne s’agirait pas d’un cristal liquide très particulier, dont nous sommes tous faits : l’eau ! D’ailleurs, tu sais, les danseurs blancs, si coupés les uns des autres, c’est peut-être ça que j’aimerais Ieur dire en premier : les gars, il faut que vous laissiez couler l’eau en vous ! Laissez couler l’eau ! Chaque cellule de votre corps est une gouttelette d’eau, laissez chacune de ces gouttelettes tomber de tout son poids. Et résonner au rythme de votre coeur."

Le reste de la nuit ne nous a pas suffit à définir l’impression particulière que ce bout de conversation avait éveillée en nous.