New Rave Zombie
One of my favourite albums from last year was Kai Whinston’s Quiet as Kept, F.O.G. for the simple reason that it is a masterpiece of political/personal sonic integration. The album is as much about post-rave cultural malaise as it is about the passage of human time.
A lot has been made of the deferred future of 80s and 90s rave. It boils it down to the following. Rave culture was the futurist and egalitarian potential of cyberspace made real. The trans-locational elements of portable soundsystem culture fused with the technological advances of musical production to create not only new sounds - breakbeat, jungle, hardcore, drum n bass - but a new way of staging and participating in music culture: fields full of travellers with massive speakers, a negligible security presence, no need for licensing or live instrumentation. This, combined with the proliferation of upper party drugs - ecstasy, MDMA, speed - created a cultural moment where speed and progression were key. Rave culture, at least in this country, was the last true vestiges of a counterculture extraneous to any sort of mainstream influence.
Then the future arrived. John Major’s Conservatives introduced the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994, which clamped down on free parties, raves, and any social gatherings that played music ‘wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats’. This was not purely a Conservative reaction to a culture they did not understand: their colleagues on the opposite benches, Tony Blair’s New Labour, took the position of abstinence from the Bill’s third reading.
It was not long before the culture of movement and travelling that characterised rave in the late 80s and 90s fell apart. While there are plenty of illegal raves occurring today, and in fact there has been a relative resurgence of illegal raves in Britain’s more populous cities, they play out as mummified cultural oddities: a callback to a time of possible futurity rather than an active and progressive cultural milieu.
Burial’s music speaks to this kind of after-the-rave ennui, even if you can still classify it as dance music. Mark Fisher explains it best. The muffled tones of garage, breakbeat and drum n bass pervade Burial’s music. They’re covered with a blanket. They sound like you’re standing outside of the club, coming over the peak of a high, returning to reality. They evoke a cultural memory of how things were and of how things could have been: music for an empty party.
Kai Whinston differs here in that the sonic pallette he adopts does not shy away from the loud and aggressive lineage of in-your-face hardcore and breakbeat, but he nonetheless captures this sense of an end. If anything, Whinston is able to intergrate the anger we should feel at this loss without subordinating any of the meaning of such loss to that anger. Quiet as Kept, F.O.G. is music for a time without a future in earnest: Burial with more rage, dropped during a time when the planet is on fire. It is also an attempt to move forward, to restart the party with a different sound.
The record’s opener ‘Between Lures’, pays homage to the New Age Traveller movement that characterised a majority of originative rave activities while simultaneously shedding its influence. Carried by the sounds of a live string section as opposed to a melody achieved through electronic sampling, the tune sounds like The Prodigy at a funeral. In the accompanying video, Whinston drags behind him a caravan, tangled in a rope that makes him look like a sort of Dickensian ghost, forced to carry the weight of an old musical form. The moment where he frees himself and sets the caravan on fire is interspersed with news footage from the Battle of Beanfield: the largest mass arrest of civilians, in this case rave-goers, in English legal history.
So there are a few influences here that I think permeate the rest of the record. The first is the influence of rave culture itself, which I think Whinston sees as ultimately self-defeating. We get a sense of this in the entanglement of the rope. Whinston is regularly seen attempting to free himself from a caravan and a history that he no longer wishes to be tied to. There is certainly a desire for a new way of doing things communicated in the album, and Whinston has made it clear that the album is by no means a romanticised look back at the 90s. In fact, the album works well as a sort of wresting away of the idealised memory of the time: a reaction to the kind of upper-class co-opting and commercialisation of the rave’s working class origins. ‘There is definitely a lot of movements and attention drawn to like van lifestyle’, Whinston told Glamcult last year, ‘Now, it’s dressed up as a lot more glamorous than it was’, there were ‘some grim and horrible things’. I will address in more detail the inclusion of Whinston’s traveller mum, Helene, later in this piece, but the recording of her telling Whinston about her creeping alcoholism and boiling baby bottles on a fire in the rain at the start of ‘24-04-99’ certainly speaks to this kind of self-destructive reality. It wasn’t all ecstasy and sunshine in a field.
The inclusion of the Battle of Beanfield, however, does speak to an external destructivity. This, intermingled with the broad historicity communicated in the video for ‘T.F.J.’, establishes a timeline of governmental coercion. For Whinston, the party could get horrible and grim, but that isn’t what shut the party down. The New Age Travellers weren’t given the option to call it a day. It was called for them by an expanded hegemonic mainstream. There is a complex interplay between internal/external destruction here then. On one hand we have this sort of apocalyptic sense of a party out of control, a self-inflicted drive at nothing best heard through the urgent pulse of Whinston’s drums and constantly deferred bass emerging from the fog on ‘24-04-99’. On the other there is a sense of something having happened to the party: of a violation from the outside. ‘Peace Convoy’, named after the convoy of travellers arrested at the Battle of Beanfield, begins with a stuttered drum track that sounds like its coming through a broken speaker. The breaking vocals, too, have this sense of evading a destructive force that has enacted itself upon the rave. Both forces - internal and external - push against one other, finally synthesising on the record’s closing track, a movement towards a new sound.
Rather than lie back on the kind of defeatist malaise a lot of post-rave dance evokes (Burial and Autechre are the first names that come to mind here, but there are others), Whinston ends the record with a stunning piece of celebratory sonic ingenuity. As I’ve alluded to, Helene Whinston features heavily on the album, she is the anchor that centres the album emotionally. ‘Between Lures’ ends with a young Helene, speaking to what I assume is the media, presenting herself as ‘not a crusty traveller . . . not a posey raver, just sort of a person really’. Her voice comes into and out of frame at various points to give the emotional grounding that locates the historical narrative of rave - its breakdown from the inside and the outside - within a the personal story of mother and son.
The 10-minute album closer ‘10-10-73’ begins with an extended phone call between the two that captures the appeal of rave outside of the symptomatic cultural forms associated with it. Against a backdrop of swirling synthetic noise and choral voices, Helene tells her son that ‘it was the art side of it before anything else . . . to see more way out there clothes, more way out and more colourful, it was amazing . . . it wasn’t like I started listening to music and then went to the rave, I heard it all that minute . . . it blew me away, it really did, and then literally I lived for it . . . it wasn’t fashionable, it was alternative . . . it wasn’t just the music . . . and then it changed, you still had raves but the travellers weren’t there anymore . . . they were just parties’.
It’s not about the music, it isn’t about the art or the clothes. These are all fashion, really. The appeal for Helene, and the focus for Kai, is that the various tentacles of the culture coalesce into an alternative that is ambivalent to fashion. It belies a new outside of fashion. Rave now, or at least the memory of rave, has become fashion: this is the kind of thing that has made Fred again… a big name. Any attempt to move forward generically, then, is contingent upon a bursting through of the sounds that characterise the retroactive basis of a self-presenting fashionable alternative. ‘10-10-73’ is an attempt to set fire to the caravan. As Helene’s voice fades away and the synthetic pallette builds, a distorted, pitched, almost panicked voice comes into view: ‘What the fuck? What the fuck?’. Bafflement at the new. When the track finally cracks open we get this repeated combination from ‘Between Lures’ of a live string section on a breakbeat, with large swooping synths that simultaneously evoke the movement of rave while pushing it towards a maximalist soundscape more complicated and far-reaching than what most rave attempts to be.
The drum slowdown towards the back end of the track is accompanied by the melody of the string section speeding up, Whinston emphasises the sounds disjunctive with rave while de-emphasising those to which it is adjacent. When the track completely falls away we are left with this Reznor-esque piano line that cuts through synthethic distortion, and while this distortion remains subtle, the piano sits completely at the head of the track. Again it is the kind of organic/live sound that stands against and cuts through the synthetic sound of traditional rave. We then end with Helene telling her son ‘Alright, take care. Call me if you need me’, a reminder of familial movement that sits beside Whinston’s sonic movement.
While the end of the album doesn’t quite lead to the gross sensational shift in sound you would associate with something like the jump from punk to jungle in the 80s, there is a kernal of change created in ‘10-10-73’. More importantly, the album on the whole recognises the importance of rave in British musical culture, and how that role has changed in the past decade or so. No longer an alternative to a mainstream itself in danger of being liquidated by a proliferated cyberspace, rave and its baked through cultural associations have become fodder for a culture industry trading on preconceived notions of cool.
Alternatives are possible, however, and they lie within the manipulation of these preconceptions - of sound, clothes, art etc - to produce forms that do not merely inhabit old ones. It is not necessarily about messing around with the recognisable, but a realisation that using the recognisable to shed the recognisable - a healthy disavowal of influence - provides a potential way forward.
