April 19, 2009
better living through chemistry (chapter two excerpt)
sugarhigh! will be posting excerpts from this book over the next several months
[....A peaceful revolution, revolution without conflict, might be seen as the soul of rave’s social desire.]
Such a desire carries with it its own contradictions — contradictions that were managed with idealism and Ecstasy consumed in varying doses, without much clarity concerning which came first. It’s worthwhile to attempt to catch this dual development in flight; rarely has a subculture’s self-identification been so thoroughly identified with a single drug. The reverse is true as well; one of the most comprehensive studies of what is more formally known as MDMA (and less formally as E, XTC, or X) usage was conducted through the British dance music monthly, Mixmag.
The Greek ekstasis — as is often mentioned — means “standing outside oneself.” This state certainly aligns with the drug’s capacity for offering social intimacy, the escape from one’s own restraints into the unity of the crowd. It gets at well at complementary and less-remarked sensations, such as the occasional feeling of ecstatic alienation from one’s ego, the paradoxical experience of euphoric melancholy that can typify especially the later portions of the E trip (as opposed to the obliterating elation of “coming up”). A strikingly beautiful orchestration of this feeling forms one of the era’s earliest masterpieces: Electribe 101’s “Talking With Myself,” its title reverberating with this curious late-night affect. Echo is the name we have for literally talking to yourself. Echo, delay: these are ecstasy’s digital analogs, a sound at once there and not, standing outside itself.
Electribe 101 spanned the period at hand and scarcely more, forming in 1988 and disbanding in 1992 with a second album unreleased. The group arranged itself in the disco tradition of studio whiz-meets-exotic-diva, with the former role filled by four electronic composers from Birmingham, and the latter by Hamburg-born Billie Ray Martin. Raised in London and Berlin, she would go on to considerable acclaim under her own name; nothing would even approximate that first single, released in 1988 and carried into London on a Balearic breeze. The five-note vamp that opens the song is borrowed from Lalo Schiffrin’s “Mission Impossible” theme, as is much of the music that unspools beneath Martin’s echoey longing. Her voice is beside itself. “And if it’s alright with you, I’ll just talk with myself — I never was the one to leave you mad,” she begins. “And when the light’s shining down on you, you sure look tragic too.” But the song’s melancholy, its sense of something having been lost, is itself at a distance — held at bay by the beauty of Martin’s voice, the heavy delay forming an invincible sheath. “The stars so bright and the light shine down and everything blows all around, it’s a wonder world and a perfect time for loving tonight.” The song finds the deep contours of the ecstasy trance’s faraway-near, filling your head even as it sounds ten thousand miles away.
Posted by jane at April 19, 2009 09:39 AM | TrackBack