"When the music was new and had no rules" -LUNA C
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"My purpose was simple: to catch the feel, the pulse of rock, as I had lived through it... What I was after was guts, and flash, and energy, and speed" - NIK COHN
On Saturday 26th May, veteran free party crew Crossbones join forces with rave promoter Drop The Bomb to bring you a night of the darkest hardcore techno music - Ravers Graveyard - running the full spectrum from primordial Dutch / Belgian darkrave through to gabber and gloomcore.
Location is The Stretch, Dixon Road, New Cross.
DJs and performers include:
Fifth Era - London's original doomcore pioneer
Mental Fear Productions (Frankfurt) - 100% live hardware set
tracklist: 01. Tanochinjaii - Fallen Angel
02. 8 A.M. - The Fog Track
03. Cypher - Marchin' Into Madness
04. Rave Creator - Thru Eternal Fog
05. Pilldriver - Impossible X-T-C
06. Cypher - H-Flash
07. Rave Creator - Bleep Blaster
08. Freez-E-Style - Doom Dancer
09. Reign - Show 'Em
10. Cypher - Skyhigh (Rave Creator's Black Gold Mix)
11. Pilldriver - Pitch-Hiker
12. The Mover & Rave Creator - O.K. Bassquake
13. Freez-E-Style - Awake In Neo Tokyo
14. Freez-E-Style - Enter The Gates Of Darkness (Stay Strong, Raise The Flag And Spread The Spheres Of Light)
15. The Mover & Rave Creator - Atmos-Fear
16. Pilldriver - Apocalypse Never
17. The Mover & Rave Creator - Astral Demons 94 (Cold Planet Remix)
18. Marshall Masters - Stereo Murder
19. Marshall Masters - Stereo Murder (Reign's Olymp Remix)
20. Tilt! - Hell-E-Copter mix by Low Entropy, maker of many tributes to hardcore of yore like this Praxis trib mix and this trib mix to Lory D and Rome's Sounds Never Seen label and this early French hardcore mix dude's Youtube channel is a trove of deepest underground hard-fast-dark-doomy - some of fearful obscurity, names I don't recognise at all like this lot!
Really like the additive logic in this one - building itself up by layers, in a leisurely, almost lazy, definitely non-urgent manner - in comes a vamp, and then a vamp at a slightly cross-ways angle, and then another vamp, and then a vocal lick, and then a pulse, and another non-verbal vocal bliss bit... also really love the promise of that "it's not ovah!" (coming in courtesy of First Choice at various intervals), reassuring dancers looped into the groove that this track will just go on and on and ON (and it does go on and on for a full eight minutes) Thought i did not know this SL2 remix and then within 10 seconds it's "ah!"
but it sounds a bit hectic after the E-Z groovin' first mix, which i prefer, having grown fond of it through repeated play over the years of this rather compilation by Aphrodite (where "Hypnosis" only goes on for just shy of six minutes - not the full eight - and still feels endless and E-ternal, in a good way, a very good way) Ah, i did not know that there was a follow up to Classic to the Core and it looks just as fine Back to Psychotropic - apparently this is the Definitive mix of "Hypnosis" or so it self-proclaims
but I beg to differ - the original is still the greatest Did Pyschotropic - Gavin Mills + Nick Nicely, which Discogs is taking to be the Nick Nicely of Eighties neo-psychedelia cult renown - did they do anything else of note? Well, after "Hypnosis" there was "Psychosis"
And before "Hypnosis" there was "Only For the Headstrong" with that perennial wonderful phased-vocal intro to Raw Silk's "Do It to the Music" possibly they sampled it via this 2 in A Room sample-intermediary - although the original Raw Silk tune was a big hit in the UK in the early Eighties and thus part of the dance folk-memory of the country ( i remember being stunned almost to the point of swooning when i first heard "Do it to the Music" on Top of the Pops, just for that intro)
And then there was also this by Psychotropic
Then getting a bit tougher and ever so slightly baleful
It's all good stuff - particularly the 1990-91 breakbeat house stuff - but nothing quite as perfect and perennial as "Hypnosis"
And here's a remix, from early 2000s, aimed at what scene I can not quite figure - tech house?
Ah, well Gavin Mills went on to be UKG outfit A Baffled Republic - one of those names that has a deep nuumy mystery to me (what on earth is it getting at?) - among many other guises
And you can feel a connection there, between the easy-glide of "Hypnosis" and the slink of "Bad Boys (Move in Silence)"
Later just Baffled
this remix by Steve Gurley eclipses the original though
yeah making well-tardy Clash knock-offs, GNR-aspiring but Bon Jovi-achieving crossover, and Magazine-JoyDiv torment-redux was a far more valid / vital response to the impasses of the Nineties wasn't it?
a very pretty, very clever guy - and endearing - but if ever someone showed that beauty and brilliance aren't enough w/o a smidge of E-Q (that's emotional intelligence quotient) then it was poor old Richey E
i'm fairly certain i was at this - for at least some of the day - it was only four blocks up Avenue A from our apartment block, so it would have been pretty remiss of me not to attend!
gabba in the outdoors, in the middle of the day - incongruous, cool, crowd enthusiastic as hell - but in the end somehow not right - it's music for dark doomy dystopian hangars or "huge space arenas" innit
how on earth did they get the permission? the area where the stage and "dancefloor / moshpit" is flanked on either side by children's playgrounds!
"We Rock the Most" - I put that on the Energy Flash CD that was stuck on the first Picador edition book cover .... what an ideas-packed, action-crammed, eventful tune!
What do you know, I never even noticed this EP is called Time Will Tell!
So love loveLOVE the "Infinite Hype"/"We Rock the Most" side I always forget the other two tracks on the flipside.
Adore the cover - it might actually be my favorite ardkore cover (although there is a ton of competition)
Well actually I guess that is the back cover - and this below is the actual front cover - a bit of a mess, yet cool in its UK attempted wildstyle.
This below is a similar kind of cover (to the first image, ie. the back cover) from Moving Shadow squad - a cut up (or torn up) montage of Shadow crew messing about / getting messy. There were just kids!
But back to DJ Trax, he also had a hand in these slices of madness (alongside Dev Pandya, aka Paradox)
This a cappella bonus track (only on the promo?) leaves the terribly English rapping rather exposed!
Paradox + Trax also went by the name Brown & Dangerman
I'm sure I reviewed something by them but it wasn't that one, I don't think.
Trax's own stuff seems to have bypassed dark and gone straight from manic euphoria to intelligent and tasteful
There were titles like "Talking Drums", "Scattered Memories", "Distracted Thoughts", "Define Funk?", "Spirits", The Drummer Is The Heartbeat", and even - as we push into the 21st Century - "Frantically Calm", which could be a phrase from one of my own reviews
Well you can't stay a teenager for ever...
I hadn't quite the heart to follow through the trajectory all the way through into intelligence and clean production and downtempo chillage (similar trajectory to another freshfaced fave of that era, Danny Breaks)
Still I rather like that tune up at the top, from 2013, with the video, and Trax looking a bit battleworn
Here it is again -
The number of times I have walked down Berwick Street! Or up it for that matter. The journeys would invariably take in the two nuum-oriented shops on D'Arblay Street, Reckless (mostly for their rack of old skool tunes) and - in the middle of the fruit ' n' veg market - that poky branch of Music and Video Exchange (likewise heading straight for the 'hardcore' section but also exploring a bunch of other areas of interest as time went by).
But is that store in the video Blackmarket (if so it's moved to a different building as far as I can tell) or just somewhere equivalent?
Nice to have a snapshot of a shop interior with all the whites in marker-penned sleeves on the wall behind the counter.
