Rave Techno Quotes

Bringing a child into the world without its consent seems unethical. Leaving the womb just seems insane. The womb is nirvana. It’s tripping in an eternal orb outside the space-time continuum. It’s a warm, wet rave at the center of the earth, but you’re the only raver. There’s no weird New Age guide. There’s no shitty techno. There’s only you and the infinite.

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 essential defence mechanism, without which you'd be vulnerable trauma).

I’d grown up with disco in the 1970s, when I just knew it as exciting pop music on AM radio. In the 1980s it died off, but still inspired everyone from New Order to Duran Duran to Kraftwerk. And then in the late 1980s the ghost of disco came back with a fury, giving birth to house music, techno, rave culture, and even a lot of hip-hop. Disco was the crucible in which most modern music had been born, and within the disco pantheon no one had ever reigned higher or more supreme than Donna Summer.

The coming together of technology, drugs, and music as exemplified in the rave scene seemed to offer a glimpse into a brave new world—a man-machine mash-up that some of the woollier theorists predicted was the future of human evolution. Made-up words such as “sampladelic” and “techno-pagan” summed up the zeitgeist.

Two years earlier there hadn’t been a rave scene in the States. And now, seemingly overnight, the world had changed. Every decentsize city in North America now had DJ record stores and rave-clothing stores. Musicians were trading in their guitars for synths and making techno records that were becoming globe-spanning anthems. It was 1992 and the rave scene was blossoming like a shiny, DIY flower.

copy or are influenced by our music.” 4 The 1996 documentary Universal Techno, produced by French-German public television service ARTE,5 features interviews with such major players as the Belleville Three, Aphex Twin, and LFO, in an attempt to historicize techno and rave culture as a form of global collaboration. As one of the oldest artifacts of the dance music phenomenon, Universal Techno documents their first encounters with rave culture and offers a pre-global oral history of techno's

Four or five hundred people, mostly between eighteen and twenty-five, but some as young as fifteen, were frozen in either the act of dancing or just hanging out. Because the disc jockeys at raves invariably played highly energized techno dance music with a rapidly pounding bass that could shake walls, many of the young celebrants had been Paused in bizarre poses of flailing and gyrating abandon, bodies contorted, hair flying. The men and boys were for the most part dressed in jeans or chinos with flannel shirts and baseball caps worn backward, or with preppy sportcoats over T-shirts, though some were decked out all in black. The girls and young women wore a wider variety of clothes, but every outfit was provocative-tight, short, low-cut, translucent, revealing; raves were, after all, celebrations of the carnal. The silence of graves had replaced the booming music, as well as the screams and shouts of the partiers; the eerie light combined with the stillness to impart an anti-erotic cadaverous quality to the exposed curves of calves, thighs, and breasts. As he and Connie moved through the crowd, Harry noticed the dancers' faces were stretched in grotesque expressions which probably had conveyed excitement and hopped-up gaiety when they were animated. In freeze-frame, however, they were eerily transformed into masks of rage, hatred, and agony.  In the fierce glow produced by the lasers and spots, and by the psychedelic images that film projectors beamed onto two huge walls, it was easy to imagine that this was no party, after all, but a diorama of Hell, with the damned writhing in pain and wailing for release from their excruciating torment.  By seining out the rave's noise and movement, the Pause might have captured the truth of the event in its net. Perhaps the ugly secret, beneath the flash and thunder, was that these revelers, in their obsessive search for sensation, were not truly having fun on any fundamental level, but were suffering private miseries from which they frantically sought relief that eluded them.