Whistle posse

3K is only 4 days away and I've been busy scouring my music for samples to punctuate our set with on Saturday. I've been mostly dipping into the many gigabytes worth of old skool hardcore my friend Chem7 dilligently put together over the past year. I've always hated the way some older people high on nostalgia go on about 'back in the days' whether they are into prog rock, punk or hip hop, it's all bollocks. Music's always evolving and churning out brilliant stuff......that said, ahem, the rave scene in the UK of the early 90s is something I always get slightly misty eyed over. In a way it's what probably led me to start making music (over 10 years later!) and it was most definitely what made me dance for the first time. I'm not going to go on about the history, but in short, 'reserved' Brits took a gay, black, US underground phenomena and turned it into perhaps the largest ever youth culture explosion our country (the world?) has ever seen. One that still reverberates today, albeit with perhaps a little less vigour and originality (I give you trance). That isn't to say that the UK was the only place this was going on, Joey Beltram even made Belgium seem cool back then, but the raves and festivals of the those first few summers of the 90s were something special, were massive, and, at the time, it seemed like EVERYONE was doing it. And if you weren't, you were some kind of dinosaur.
The music sounds pretty dated now next to today's production techniques but it's easy to forget, especially for people who have grown up with a big 'dance' scene, just how completely NEW this sounded. Mad breakbeat loops, driving basslines, sped up vocals urging the dancers on and mad synth sounds which made the punk and hardcore I had been listening to only a month previously sound like music from another generation. Aphex Twin's Diggeridoo made me physically throw up when I first heard it in a friend's car on Kiss FM. Well, maybe it wasn't just the record. T99's Anasthasia was a massive tune at the time. It was one of the fist tunes to really use a biiiig orchestra stab. I remember hearing that for the first time in a club. Everyone stopped for a moment and looked around as if to say 'what the fuuuuck is this????', before going mental.
A couple of my favourites from 'back in the day' (christ) - Compounded - Edge 1, The House Crew - Keep the fire burning, Zero B - Lock up to name but a few of the many many others.
A superb book on the scene is Altered State by Matthew Collin

Right, now I've got that out of my system maybe I can concentrate on making some up to date music.