Orbital
Green Album

Essential History of Electronic Music

XII. Tribal Acids in the Rave Era

In the '50s, Stockhausen played with oscilloscopes, and Berry incited the country rockers.
In the '60s, Moog built synthesizers, and the Beach Boys cricked with their surf.
Ten years later, Schulze stuffed synths even in the home intercom. Moroder placed synths in the disco from here to eternity.
In 1980, Kraftwerk staged a cybernetic orgy, Depeche Mode a techno-pop orgy, Throbbing Gristle just an orgy. 

Music is sacred and profane. It has two logical components: theory and practice, and every year, decade, century, it has always manifested in an act of thought and playful journey. The '80s were the years of new wave, synth-pop ballads, the disco tussle between Heaven, Eurythmics, and Blondie, but also the scholarly soliloquies of Tom Waits, the industrial angst of Einstürzende Neubauten, the depressive psychosis of Jesus & Mary Chain. There's a certain discontinuity in the '90s scene, where once again the usual dichotomy between music for listening and dance music reemerges: if the most secretive and experimental phenomena reference the psychedelic revival of Julian Cope and Mercury Rev, the post-rock of Tortoise and Mogwai, and the electronic cut 'n' paste fever of Aphex Twin, Autechre, and Mu-Ziq, the "Music for the Masses" of Depeche Mode fame is expressed in the house tails inaugurated by Frankie Knuckles, in the Eurodance of Corona, and the Nordic trance of Tiësto and Van Buuren. Exactly halfway between chamber experimentation and electronic revelry lies the most emblematic and singular phenomenon of the '90s, the rave music, a musical genre where the most anarchic youth wing finds its catharsis among agitated electroshocks and cocktails of drugs and vitriol: in abandoned warehouses and uninhabited underground spaces, a feverish dance inspired by underground electronic productions that distance themselves from the conventional disco fanfare to which mainstream youth culture is subject comes to life.

The development of rave parties in the '90s is rooted in the techno-house sensations of late '80s Detroit, the cradle of that musical production that would soon be recognized as acid house (a clear reference to the natural bond between music and drugs) and would match with the exquisitely European techno capable of making the history of rave parties on the old continent. Once again, it's England taking the lead: between the late '80s and early '90s, the scene is populated by illustrious names like Orb, Prodigy, Future Sound of London, Orbital, and Underworld. The common factor is  the electronic escape, performed through ambient-house suites, techno-hip hop vortices, and long cut 'n' paste découpages. In a musical landscape where Prodigy first rise to the masses' spotlight (with the rave manifesto Music for the Jilted Generation of 1995) and then Underworld (with Beaucoup Fish of 1996, but especially with the single Born Slippy a year later), the most forward-thinking experimentation is that of Orbital. The British duo inaugurates the scene at the beginning of the new decade with the first volume known as the Green Album, a brilliant self-explanatory pamphlet of rave culture: the trademark is sampling, the continuous theory of overdubs and heterogeneous patchworks that reveal and hide the musical track under a layer of rhythmic and melodic strata. Green Album surprises right from the start, when in the ethereal opener "Belfast" an unthinkable sampling of a hymn by the Benedictine Hildegard von Bingen (11th century) dissolves in a sequence of floating keyboards reminiscent of Art of Noise's "Moments of Love": in an atmosphere that seems as distant from Keith Flint of the Prodigy's frantic voodoo rituals, the album's seven most controversial minutes afford the luxury of slowly inching towards a minimalist exit, as surprising as it is unconventional. Of course, everything is destined to change: with the labyrinthine beats of "The Moebius" first and with the funky samples of "Speedy Freak" later, one is already in full rave fever: Phil and Paul Hartnoll cut and sew unyielding rhythms with nearly surgical care, crafting perfect sketches for dizzying and feverish dances. At this point "Satan" becomes indispensable, even within the bounds of Detroit's hypnotic techno, consumed among synth flights and ferocious vocals: the track immediately positions itself among the must-dance pieces of rave parties, paired with "Choice", spatially and temporally completing the previous piece, crossing the industrial orbits of Front Line Assembly. Therefore, if Orbital's stylistic feature is the operation of rhythm insertion and overdubs, the trance detours of "Desert Storm" and "Midnight" should not surprise, but confirm the concept, defining the precise contours of a work of specific value in the rave culture panorama: each frame includes, repels, implies, encompasses, and excludes each of the other frames, in a cannibalistic vision of Dalí where music is reborn from its own ashes.

Orbital will stabilize their musical thought two years later with the mannerist Brown Album, capable of formalizing rave culture in an even more reasoned and organized work: their dogma will become a cue and inspiration not only for the English party scene but for consumer techno music as a whole thanks to the discreet international success of In Sides in 1996. In an era where youthful distress bluffs through the empty popular myths of the MTV generation, the desolate cathartic paradises of rave depression still survive.

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