Energy Flash
A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture
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- CHF 16.00
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- CHF 16.00
Beschreibung des Verlags
Twenty-five years since acid house and Ecstasy revolutionized pop culture, Simon Reynolds's landmark rave history Energy Flash has been expanded and updated to cover twenty-first-century developments like dubstep and EDM's recent takeover of America.
Author of the acclaimed postpunk history Rip It Up and Start Again, Reynolds became a rave convert in the early nineties. He experienced first-hand the scene's drug-fuelled rollercoaster of euphoria and darkness. He danced at Castlemorton, the illegal 1992 mega-rave that sent spasms of anxiety through the Establishment and resulted in the Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill. Mixing personal reminiscence with interviews and ultra-vivid description of the underground's ever-changing sounds as they mutated under the influence of MDMA and other drugs, Energy Flash is the definitive chronicle of electronic dance culture.
From rave's origins in Chicago house and Detroit techno, through Ibiza, Madchester and the anarchic free-party scene, to the pirate-radio underworld of jungle and UK garage, and then onto 2000s-shaping genres such as grime and electro, Reynolds documents with authority, insight and infectious enthusiasm the tracks, DJs, producers and promoters that soundtracked a generation. A substantial final section, added for this new Faber edition, brings the book right up to date, covering dubstep's explosive rise to mass popularity and America's recent but ardent embrace of rave. Packed with interviews with participants and charismatic innovators like Derrick May, Goldie and Aphex Twin, Energy Flash is an infinitely entertaining and essential history of dance music.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Reynolds (Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-84) shakes up his landmark 1998 volume on rave culture (Generation Ecstasy) with an expanded and updated edition that promises much and does not disappoint. This pop culture narrative is hip, perfect for the newcomer and old guard raver, and appropriately addictive. While Reynolds's approach is definitely biased the author candidly acknowledges his anthropologically problematic role as "participant observer ", the result is "a constant shifting between calm omniscience' and enflamed monomania," and it makes for great reading. Reynolds guides readers through the early days of techno in late 1970s and early 80s New York, Chicago, and Detroit, to the "pure Balearic" sounds of Ibiza, and onward to the Madchester movement in northern England and 24-hour party people. While the occasional glorification of drugs may polarize some readers, (Ecstasy, or MDMA, is posited as "the remedy for the alienation caused by an atomized society"), Reynolds dutifully chronicles the negative buzz surrounding substance abuse and the inevitable retreat of dance culture back to the underground. Cue mid-90s pirate radio, Euro-Trance, and a tamer but no less soulful post-millennial U.K. garage scene and its compliment across the Atlantic in U.S. nu-wave revivalist movements. Innovatively cyclical in its sampling of the past with eyes on the future, rave music and dance culture continue to morph into new subversive musical forms. For the moment though, Reynolds's guide is the one to beat.
