Neurofunk and techstep

[perceptualChaos]

This extract is taken from Simon Reynold's brilliant history of rave music and dance culture "Energy Flash" (PICADOR ISBM 0-330-35056-0).

 

Simon Reynold's website

 

 

Apocalypse Noir

 

In 1996, a new sub-genre of jungle began to coalesce called 'techstep', a dirge-like death-funk characterized by harsh industrial timbres and bludgeoning 'butcher's block' beats. The term was coined by DJ-producers Ed Rush and Trace, who shaped the sound in tandem with engineer Nico of the No U-Turn label. The 'tech' stood not for Detroit techno, dreamy and elegant, but for the brilliant brutalist Belgian hardcore of the early nineties. Paying homage to R&S classics like 'Dominator' and 'Mentasm', to artists like T99 and Frank de Wulf, Trace and Ed Rush deliberately affirmed a crucial white European element that had been written out of jungle's history.

 

The other important source for techstep was the first era of 'darkside', as pioneered by Reinforced artists like Doc Scott and 4 Hero. This was when the teenage DJs Trace and Ed Rush cut their production teeth with sinister classics like 'Lost Entity' and 'Blodclot Artattack'. The name 'Ed Rush' sounds like a take on the 'head rush', early rave slang for a temporary white-out of consciousness caused by taking too many E's. There's a big difference between darkside 1993 and techstep though. The original dark-core had stil oozed a sinister, sickly bliss on the border between loved-up and f**ked-up. In 1996, with Ecstasy long out of favour, techstep was shaped by a different mindf**k-of-choice: hydroponically grown marijuana a.k.a. 'skunk', whose near-hallucinogenic levels of THC induce a sensory intensification without euphoria and a nerve-jangling paranoia perfect for jungle's tension-but-no-release rhythms.

 

The first stirrings of the return-to-darkness were heard in late 1995 withTrace's seminal remix of T. Power's 'Horny Mutant Jazz'. Working in tandem with Nico and Ed Rush, Trace tore the fusion-flavoured original to shreds, replacing its leisurely glidfe with slipped-gears breakbeats, spectral synths and a brooding, bruising bass sound sampled and mutated from Kevin Saunderson's Reese classic 'Just Want Another Chance'. Meanwhile Ed Rush's No U-Turn tracks 'Gangsta Hardstep' and 'Guncheck' took the explosive energy of hardcore and imploded it, transforming febrile hyperkinesis into molasses-thick malaise. The new sound made you feel like you were caged in a pressure-cooker of paroxysmic breaks and plasmic bass.

 

If Belgian brutalism and early breakbeat 'ardkore resembled sixties garage punk, techstep is like seventies punk rock, in so far as it's not a simple back-to-basics manoeuvre, but an isolation and intensification of the most aggresive, non R&B elements in its precursor. Over the six months, as the No U-Turn squad honed their sound-and-vision, they accentuated the self-same 'noise annoys' elements that punk exaggerated in garage rock: headbanger riffs and mid-frequency blare. Where intelligent drum and bass suffers from an obsessive-compulsive cleanliness, techstep production is deliberately dirty, all dense murk and noxious drones. The defining aspect of the No U-Turn sound was its bass sound - a dense, humming miasma of low-end frequencies, as malignant as a cloud of poison gas - acheived by feeding the bass-riffs through a guitar distortion pedal and a battery of effects. Another stylistic trait was the way techstep shunned the frisky fluency of jazzy-jungle's breakbeats in favour of relative simplicity and rigour. Although the breakbeats are still running at jungle's 160-and-rising b.p.m norm, the techstep feels slower - fatigued, winded, like it's had the crap beaten out of it. In tracks like Doc Scott's 'Drumz 95', the emphasis is on the 80 b.p.m. half-step, making you want to stomp, not sashay.

 

Techstep is a sado-masochistic sound. Ed Rush declared bluntly 'I want to hurt people with my beats', and one No U-Turn release had the phrase 'hurter's mission' scratched into the vinyl. This terrorist stance is in marked contrast to the rhetoric of intelligent drum and bass artists, with their talk of 'educating' the audience, 'opening minds' and 'easing the pressure' of urban life. Sonically, techstep's dry, clenched sound couldn't have been further from the massaging, muscle-relaxing stream of genteel sound oozed by DJs like Bukem and Fabio, all soothing synth-washes and sax loops semingly on loan from Grover Washington Jnr and Kenny G.

 

While the intelligent and jazz-step producers prided themselves on their musicality , the techstep producers veered to the opposite extreme: a bracing 'anti-musicality'. With its incorporation of atonal, unpitched timbres, non-musical sounds and horror-movie soundtrack dissonance, the new artcore noir was simply far more avant-garde than the likes of Bukem. In an abiding confusion about what constitutes 'progression' for electronic music, the intelligent drum and bass producers were simply too deferential to traditional ideas about melody, arrangement, 'nice' textures, the importance of proper songs and hands-on, real-time instrumentation.

 

By the end of 1996, producers like Nasty Habits / Doc Scott, Dom and Roland, Boymerang, E-Sassin, Cyborgz and Optical had joined No U-Turn on their 'hurther's mission'. Techstep got even more industrial and stiff-jointed, at times verging on gabba, or a syncopated, sped-up update of Swans. Above all, the music got colder. The Numanoid synth-riff on Nasty Habits' awesome 'Shadowboxin'' sears the ear with its glacial grandeur, while the trudging two-step beat always makes me imagine a commando jogging under napalm skies with a rocket launcher on his hip. No U-Turn themselves reached something of a pinnacle with the dark exultation of Trace / Nico's 'Squadron', whose Carmina Burana-gone-cyberpunk fanfares slash and scythe like the Grim Reaper.

 

Where did the apocalyptic glee, the morbid and preverse jouissance, in techstep stem from? Nico described the music-making process - all night, red-eye sessions conducted in a ganja fog - as a horrible experience that poisoned his nervous system with tension. Ed Rush talked of deliberately smokin' weed to get 'dark, evil thoughts', the kind of skunkanoia without which he couldn't acheive the right vibe for his tracks. Like Wu-Tang-style horrorcore rap, techstep seemed based around the active pursuit of phobia and psychosis as entertainment. Which begged the question: what exactly were the social conditions that had created such a big audience for music that f**ks with your head so extensively, that appears to be 'no fun'?

 

Future-Shock Troops

 

'It's like this: some people are sharks, and some people are marks. If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. Play pussy, get f**ked. Come prepared or run away scared...You can't always count on E to shelter you from being vic'd.'

- Breakbeat Mailing Lists's Correspondent's riposte to other correspondents' complaints about the loveless, intimidating vibe at jungle events

 

If rave culture was a displaced form of working-class collectivity, with its 'love, peace and unity' running counter to thatcherite social atomization, then jungle is rave music after the death of the rave ethos. Punning on the Labour history of cooperatives and friendly societies, I'd call jungle an 'unfriendly society'. Since 1993 and hardcore's slide into the twilight-zone, debates about 'where did our love go?' have convulsed the UK breakbeat community, with grim tales being related of muggings outside clubs, of fights and 'crack' vibes inside. Disenchanted ravers sloped off to form the happy hardcore scene. Others defended the demise of the euphoric vibe, arguing that jungle's atmosphere wasn't moody, it was 'serious'.

 

In the absence of Ecstasy, jungle began to embrace an idealogy of real-ness that paralleled the worldview of American hardcore rap. L. Double and Shy FX's 'The S**t', a classic 1996 roller of a jump-up tune, kicked off with a gangsta monologue: 'Yo man, there's a gang of muthaf**kers out there on the d**k...Non-reality seeing, non-reality feeling, non-reality-living-ass muthaf**kas, man. And I don't know, man, reality, it's important to me.' In hip-hop, 'real' has two meanings. First, it means authentic, uncompromised music that refuses to sell out to the music industry. 'Real' also signifies that the music reflects a 'reality' constituted by late capitalist economic instability, institutionalized racism, and increased surveillance and harassment of youth by the police. Hence tracks like T. Power's 'Police State' and Photek's neurotic 'The Hidden Camera': lyric-free critiques of a country that conducts the most intense surveillance of its own citizenry in the world (most UK city centres now have spy cameras). 'Real' means the death of the social; it means corporations who respond to increased profits not by raising pay or improving benefits but downsizing (laying off the permanent work-force in order to create a floating employment pool of part-time and freelance workers without benefits or job security).

 

'Real' is a neo-medieval scenario; you could compare downsizing to enclosure, where the aristocray threw the peasants off the land and reduced them to a vagabond underclass. Like gangsta rap, jungle reflects a medieval paranioascape of robber barons, pirate corporations, secret societies and covert operations. Hence the popularity, as a source of samples and song titles, of martial arts films and gangsta movies like The Godfather, Reservoir Dogs, Goodfellas and Carlito's Way, whose universe revolves around concepts of righteous violence and blood-honour.

 

Where gangsta hardstep shares the Wu-Tang Clan's neo-medieval vision of late capitalism, techstep is more influenced by dystopian sci-fi movies like Blade Runner, Robocop, Terminator et al, which contain a subliminally anti-capitalist message, imagining the future as a return to the Dark Ages, complete with fortress cities and bandit clans. Hence No U-Turn tracks like 'The Droid' and 'Replicants', or Adam F's 'Metropolis'. 'Amtrak', another late 1996 Trace / Nico meisterwerk pivots around the sample 'here is a group trying to accomplish one thing - that is, to get into the future'. Given the scary millennial soundscape No U-Turn paint, this begs the question: why the hurry to get there? The answer: in a new Dark Age, it's the 'dark' that will come into their own. 'Dark' is where primordial energies meet digital technique, where id gets scientific. Identify with this marauding music, and you define yourself as predator not prey.

 

What you affiliate yourself to in techstep is the will-to-power of technology itself, the motor behind late capitalism as it rampages over human priorities and tears communities apart. The name No U-Turn captures this sense that there's no turning back. It also has a submerged political resonance: one of Margaret Thatcher's famous boasts was 'This lady's not for turning' - her refusal to bow to pressure from liberal Tories to make a U-Turn on Conservative policies like privatization and the assault on welfare. These same policies led to the catastrophic realization of another infamous Thatcher pronouncement: 'There is no such thing as society.'

 

The persuasive sense of slippin' into a new Dark Age, of an insidious breakdown of the social contract, generates anxieties that are repressed but resurface in unlikely ways and places. Resistance doesn't necessarily take the 'logical' form of collective activism (unions, left-wing politics); it can be so distorted and imaginatively impoverished by the conditions of capitalism itself, that it expresses itself as, say, the proto-facist, anti-corporate nostalgia of America's right-wing militia, or as a sort of hyper-individualistic survivalism.

 

In jungle, the response is a 'realism' that accepts a socially constructed reality as 'natural'. To get 'real' is to confront a state-of-nature where dog eats dog, where you're neither a winner or a loser, and where most will be losers. There's a cold rage seething in jungle, but it's expressed within the terms of an anti-capitalist yet non-socialist politics, and expressed defensively: as a determination that the underground will not be co-opted by the mainstream. 'Underground' can be understood socialogically as a metaphor for the underclass, or psychologically, as a metaphor for a fortress psyche: the survivalist self, primed and ready for combat.

 

Jungle's sound-world constitutes a sort of abstract social realism; when I listen to techstep, the beats sound like collapsing (new) buildings and the bass feels like the social fabric shredding. Jungle's treacherous rhythms offer its audience an education in anxiety (and anxiety, according to Freud, is an essential defence mechanism, without which you'd be vulnerable to trauma). 'It is defeat that you must learn to prepare for', runs the martial arts movie sample in Source Direct's 'the Cult', a track that pioneered the post-techstep style I call 'neurofunk' (clinical and obsessively nuanced production, foreboding ambient drones, blips 'n' blurts of electronic noise, and chugging, curiously inhibited two-step beats that don't even sound like breakbeats any more). Neurofunk is the fun-free culmination of jungle's strategy of 'cultural resistance': the eroticization of anxiety. Immerse yourself in the phobic, and you make dread your element.

 

The battery of sensations offered by a six-hour stint at AWOL, Millennium or any 'non-intelligent' jungle club, induces a mixture of shell-shock and future-shock. Alvin Toffler defined F-shock as what happens when the human adaptive mechanism seizes up in response to an overload of stimuli, novelty, surprise. Triggering neural reflexes and fight-or-flight responses, jungle's rhythmic assault-course hypes up the listener's adaptive capability in readiness for the worst the twenty-first century has up its sleeve. If jungle is a martial artform, clubs like AWOL are church for the soul-jah and killah priest, inculcating a kind of spiritual fortitude.

 

All of this is why going to AWOL is serious bizness, as opposed to 'fun'. Jungle is the living death of rave, the sound of living with and living through the dream's demise. Every synapse-shredding snare and cranium-cracking bass-bomb is an alarm-call saying 'Wake-up, that dream is over. Time to get real.'

[Katipo]

Top Article! :armytroops: keep on steppin.

[Grind]

sceptical!