A question has been lingering in the deep recesses of my mind. A question as to why I’m still so drawn to electronic music, even as my connection to the earth, the Aina, grows ever stronger, even as I swim with the dolphins, the sea turtles, and feel the ocean swells reverberate through my body long after I get out of the water.
It seems a contradiction, this deep attraction to synthesized, electronic music while the rest of me strives for simplicity, for living in harmony with the elements, knowing that we as humanity must return to a symbiosis with the planet in order to sustain the existence of our species. Is it simply a byproduct of MDMA use, a nostalgic desire to relive the days of my youth when I snuck out and went to raves? Or is it something more, some realization that the deep dubstep, the dark industrial, the progressive hip-hop music I listen to is actually strengthening neural pathways in my brain necessary for surviving in our digitized world?
Perhaps that’s going too far, but I yearn to understand this innate attraction. Even before I was ever involved in the rave scene, I was fascinated by electronic music, much in the same way I was fascinated by computers, by the language of MS DOS, by the green on black contrast of an EGA monitor. There was something so new, so fresh, so revolutionary about this idea of digitizing information, of taking a sound, an image, and breaking it down into 0’s and 1’s.
Maybe it was the environment around me, the fact that the shift from analog to digital was happening around the time of my adolescence, my shift from innocent child to disenchanted teen. It was right around when I first started getting into music, around 11-12 years old, that CD’s started to replace tapes on the shelves of record stores, and I remember sitting for hours on Napster when it first came out, downloading song after song after song as fast as my 56k dialup modem would allow.
The first time I heard electronic music, I think it was the song “Poison” by Prodigy, and I was hooked. I imagine it was a feeling akin to the first time a youth in the 60’s heard rock and roll. I knew that this was something unique to my generation, something new, something fresh that had never been done before, that spoke to the youth in a way no parent could possibly understand. The frantic beats, spine tingling electronic squeals and multi-layered soundscapes opened my eyes to a world of infinite sonic manipulation that went light years beyond anything I could do with my voice, my saxophone or any other instrument I had ever come across.
Don’t get me wrong, I love other forms of music. The first time I heard Rage Against The Machine’s “Killing In The Name” or Public Enemy’s “Fight The Power” or NIN’s “Terrible Lie” were akin to religious awakenings for me, but something about the pure synthesized sounds of electronica hit me on some level that no other music had before. It was the first music I had ever heard that made me want to dance, and a few years down the road, rolling my balls off at some rave, it was the first music I ever completely lost myself in, set aside my ego, my physical body, my entire sense of self and just gave in to the rhythm, the swooping synths, became pure consciousness existing in harmony with the song .
I was never a “candy kid”, I never wore an Addias visor or those silly little plastic bead bracelets and although I experimented with MDMA and LSD at raves, the music was always the central focus for me, the chemicals just a tool for unlocking a greater understanding and appreciation of the music. Some of the most incredible nights of my life were spent stone sober on the dance floor at some warehouse party, moving my body in a physical response to this aural narcotic that is trance, jungle, techno, big beat, dubstep (although dubstep wasn’t really around till long after I got out of the scene) . There’s a song by the group Faithless called “God is A DJ” that describes exactly how I feel about electronica. If the DJ is God, then the universe he/she creates is this music I fell in love with that first time I heard Prodigy, and is a universe I continue to explore to this day.
P.L.U.R.
