hello, I thought you would find this interesting , its all about San Franciscos electronic scene...
it appeared in the San Francisco Bay Guardian today , big thanks to Amanda for writing this....
if this text comes out funny + hard to read , please go to the original at
http://www.sfbg.com
Sounds of the earth moving
From chill-out rooms to experimental noise: the evolution of ambient
music in San Francisco.
By Amanda Nowinski
What were the skies like when you were young?
from the Orb's "Little Fluffy Clouds" (1991)
I'M WALKING BY the corner of Townsend and
Third at 7 a.m., 1992, and everything sounds like
house music -- the newspaper rustling across the
street, the red car screeching into an abrupt left turn,
the click of my boots on cement, the friction of my
bare arms against my nylon vest. Right now the
very rhythms and vibrations of the material world
are palpable as the rising sun. I've just departed
Carefree -- one of the city's first house clubs -- and
although the sound system is tucked away in a dark
room now three blocks away, the thumping bass
line somehow maintains its pulse inside my head.
I approach the underground Muni station on Fourth
and Market; the 21 Hayes chugging past kicks into
a quiet, steady beat, and the airplane buzzing
above provides a perfect accompaniment. As I descend into the station, the metallic
echo of the train reeling against its track resonates deeply. Who knew this mundane,
urban nucleus could provide such a beautiful sound? Or maybe I'm still tripping.
Sounds around
Ambient sound, in its most literal sense, is the music that surrounds us. Records skipping,
wind rushing, infants crying, helicopter blades churning, bombs exploding, motorbikes
speeding across rocky dirt roads -- the noise of daily life. Ambient music, whether
recorded live or re-created digitally on a computer, uses the disparate frequencies of the
composer's surroundings and establishes an environment that is entirely new.
A precursor to contemporary ambient music, Brian Eno's 1978 Music for Airports
reflects this environmental notion of sound. Intended to "induce calm and a space to think,"
as the composer put it, its effect was more like wallpaper than dynamic, immersive music.
Twelve years later, ambient reached an emotional breakthrough with the Orb's seminal
track "A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules from the Centre of the Ultraworld"
and KLF's album Chill Out. Other groups, such as the Aphex Twin and Autechre, also
helped forge this new direction.
San Francisco, with its psychedelic, freak-friendly legacy, was a logical locale for ambient
composers in the early '90s -- just as the underground club and rave movement was
beginning to take hold. Jonah Sharp, Nick Philip, OST, Charles Uzzell Edwards,
Hyperdelic Dave, Miguel Fierro of the Single Cell Orchestra, and Naut Human were
among the trippers who helped establish the San Francisco chill-out scene. But a few
years later, after the rave scene had peaked and Silicon Valley had exploded, the
ambient began to take a harsher, more technologically advanced turn.
The second generation of local musicians, including Kit Clayton, Jhno, Sutekh, Bre-ad,
Twerk, and Blectum from Blechdom, has helped expand the parameters of a once
soothing, narcotic sound. This more urgent music, which is now emerging from both
generations, reflects the environmental makeup of a less raved-out, happy-faced time.
Where does that leave ambient music in San Francisco? Unfortunately for the
semantically obsessed, the results of rapid evolution of non-beat-driven electronic
compositions has become nearly impossible to categorize. The only way to understand
the infinite, abstract range of San Francisco ambient is through investigating its rather hazy
roots.
Generation one: crazy ravers
For most participants in the early San Francisco house, club, and rave scenes, the chill-out
room was where you ventured when the E finally hit. Too lethargic to dance against
pounding beats in the main room, you wandered in, most likely hand in hand with a
stranger, who had recently -- since the drug exploded in your body five minutes ago --
become your best friend. Now, instead of accelerated rhythms, you desired the
comforting space of a warm, peaceful cloud. Here in the chill-out realm, you and your
brand-new cohort would lay back and begin to philosophize and/or smooch on either a
bean bag, a plush carpet, or maybe even a sticky cement floor. Whatever. You felt so
blissful at that moment that nothing else seemed to matter. Providing the soundtrack to
your otherworldly mood, the chill-out DJ would spin downtempo spaceman grooves.
San Francisco's earliest chill-out room evolved in April, 1991, at the legendary Tune
Town parties. Promoted by Dianna Jacobs, Preston from Stompy Stomp, and Mark
Heley, Tune Town is considered one of the city's first major house clubs. "We didn't
intentionally plan the chill-out room," Jacobs says. "It actually evolved on its own, as a
way for people to mellow out apart from the house beats playing downstairs."
1991 was the year that the dance music underground in San Francisco took off, as
exemplified in the Tune Town New Year's Eve party "Psychedelic Apocalypse" -- a
rave at the Fashion Center that attracted 8,000 guests. It also marked the beginning of an
era during which the Full Moon raves and Carefree, Wicked, Osmosis, Community, the
Gathering, and Mister Floppy's Flop House parties flourished.
"People were going through an incredible bell curve of evolution at this time," says
Charles Uzzell Edwards, electronic musician and president of Pete Namlook's
ambient-focused Fax USA label. "Everyone was talking about the 'community' and the
'group' -- it wasn't about individual gain; it was about expanding group consciousness.
The wildness of the era was almost like a vortex that sucked in more and more people.
You'd go to a rave one week and then you'd bring three friends to the next, so you'd
have this incredible cross section of people."
Quickly the club and rave scene transformed into an unstoppable hedonistic marathon of
weekly house clubs, large-scale raves, random one-offs, and outdoor excursions. The
need to chill out became all too apparent.
"The chill-out room was basically creating a framework for experimentation, and it was also
very safe," Edwards continues. "Here you could relax, totally and absolutely. But also
physically, you actually needed to chill out. I mean, what would you rather do: collapse in
the house room or go into another room for a change of pace? On psychedelics, people
were getting out of their depth, and there was a need for something more therapeutic.
Once you relaxed for a bit, then you could reenter the house milieu. You can go out and
do loads of psychedelics, but if it's taken to an extreme, and you go through the trip not
having learned anything, the trip has been pointless. The chill-out room was about
reintegrating those elements back into reality."
"Raves were getting bigger and crazier in San Francisco, and people needed an
alternative," says Nick Philip, member of the experimental group Alloy and founder of
Anarchic Adjustment -- the early rave-clothing company he ran with Edwards. "But the
chill-out rooms eventually matured and became a whole genre onto itself, instead of just
an escape from the dance floor. Once you broke from the four-four rhythms of the dance
floor and no longer needed to keep people dancing all night, musicians and DJs
discovered a chance to explore this music in a more radical way."
When musician Jonah Sharp, of Spacetime Continuum, arrived in San Francisco in 1992,
the lonely keepers of the chill-out rooms encountered a much needed leading force. The
producer of one of London's first live experimental ambient parties, Spacetime, Sharp
helped field a more serious vision for the direction of ambient music in San Francisco.
"When I first came to this city, I played music in the back room at Carefree," he recalls.
"But we weren't even calling it ambient music then -- this was pre-ambient, more like dub
or left-field techno. But in '93 the whole thing started -- Fax label came up, and Mixmaster
Morris put his first record out. The experimental ambient scene started to become more
specialized and independent from the side chill-out rooms. So in '93, it seemed the right
time to have clubs specifically dedicated to ambient music."
Indeed, '93 was the year that ambient blew up in its own quiet way. Chill-out exclusive
clubs such as Trip, the Ambient Club, the Ambient Jungle, and the Gardening Club were
soon launched. That same year, Sharp released the critically acclaimed Fluorescence EP
on his ambient-based Reflective Records.
One of Sharp's most notable protégés from this era was Christopher Douglas. Under
the moniker OST, Douglas, at the age of 17, began to compile an extensive amount of
experimental work. His first EP, Basilar, on Switch Records, provoked one critic to
assert, "Just about anything that would connect with house is abandoned here ... this is
one of the futures of techno." An obsessive musician who works exclusively with
hardware, Douglas has created nearly 750 unreleased tracks and has released more than
25 albums with labels such as Phthalo, Dial, Plug Research, Reflective, and Worm
Interface.
Douglas's contribution to the realm of experimental ambient is best explained by Dimitri
Fergadis, president of Phthalo records (Douglas himself is an enigmatic character, unwilling
to discuss his work): "OST is one of the most important people in the world of electronic
music, period," Fergadis says. "He's got the largest body of work of any artist I've ever
met, and he's not looking at it as a game of fashion or a game of genre or something.
He's looking at music in the most far-out sense. There aren't too many good words to
describe his work, but abstract, avant-garde, and distasteful will probably do."
Generation two: responsible geeks
By 1995 the ambient genre had come to signify something as passé and dull as the
plastic, bouncy castles at raves. Stigmatized as innocuous and fluffy, ambient now
ceased to keep listeners attentive -- literally. "One thing that pissed me off about the
whole ambient scene is that people would turn up with sleeping bags," Sharp says. "At
one ambient club I played, people came simply to fall asleep. Now that's taking the
chill-out mentality a bit too far."
But it wasn't just the audience that petered out. "Towards '94 and '95 there were records
coming out that were crap," Sharp continues. "People were putting drone sounds on
CDs and were calling it 'ambient' -- these boring records kind of killed the whole thing off."
So in '95 the ambient scene took a brief hiatus; this resting period, however, allowed the
sleepy, drug-addled genre to rehabilitate and reinvent itself. By this time, too, the
old-school ravers had reached their limit -- the innocence of the once newfound mayhem
had ended. But as ravers matured and left the days of all-nighters behind, technological
advances offered new tools for creation. Software became the new addiction, and with it,
a more sober approach to sound.
In 1996 computer programmer Kit Clayton came to town with the goal of developing
music software. A trained pianist and electronic musician, Clayton took his exploration of
the off-center techno music he loved in new directions. Since then, he has released
numerous tracks with labels such as Cytrax (a minimal techno label he runs with DJ
Jasper and Tang), Delay, Phthalo, and Plug Research.
These new sounds -- non-beat-driven electronic music now referred to as experimental
or minimalist -- were no longer burdened by the need to calm down partiers. Making
sounds that were sometimes grating and other times disturbingly sublime, Clayton, OST,
Fierro, Jhno, Uzzell Edwards, and Philip subverted the notion of a "mellow" ambient
music, creating a harder sound that seemed to more honestly reflect the present times.
"It's true that there is a less hedonistic environment now, but it's definitely not more
conservative," Clayton says. "People talk about being passive and active listeners --
there's more of this active listening now, where people are critical and analytic, as
opposed to just being involved in a more visceral, chill-out way."
New electronic software has made creating complex music easy, perhaps even too
much so. "There's nothing to defend, there's nothing to criticize," Clayton says. "I'm a big
proponent of using all sorts of tools in all ways. I don't believe the computer, the acoustic
instrument, or the hardware is the answer. Draw on all or certain sources, and try to make
the music you enjoy. If other people find it too academic or mooshy, that's fine. If you
enjoy it, that's all that matters."
When musicians Bre-ad, Sutekh, Re-ach, Quantum 23, and Darin Marshall opened the
Static Club in 1997, a venue was erected for the promotion of a changing, still indefinable
sound. DJs and producers Sean Murray, Tomas, J-Bird, Joe Rice, and Safety Scissors
later joined the promotion crew. Here artists such as Twerk, Jhno, Clayton, and Blectum
from Blechdom can perform their music live, assured that their audience is specifically
there for the music -- not just for the distraction. The Static manifesto best explains the
goals of this new generation of composers and DJs:
"Long before gold-digging venture capitalists brought economic prosperity to the Bay
Area, one measure of urban creativity were renegade parties. Happening in
warehouses, homesteads, or the concrete expanse, they served as a good indication
that night life did not depend on the edicts of club owners ... Renegade parties were
unpredictably fun, and club life, well, was left to bored business droids and lonely-hearts.
Static realizes those days are gone (i.e. thankfully, raving is dead) but the music which
spawned a fascination with beats and sounds is far from over."
"An eclectic mix of people come to Static both to dance and hear different styles of music
that have a more experimental edge to it," explains Bre-Ad, who performs with the
group Pimps of Atlantis. "The music we play doesn't always have to lean towards the
dance floor. We're more about the music and the people who come here, as opposed
to just packing the place. We want people to walk away hearing something new,
something they don't normally get a chance to hear."
Walk into Static any given Tuesday night, and you are bound to find serious, engaged
listeners -- the days of zoning out on weird drug trips are gone. Here the audience
watches the musician closely -- this is not aggressive trainspotting; this is intense, sincere
interest. Thanks to the availability of free software over the Internet, more people than
ever are able to make music in their own homes. The euphoric yet exhausting raving
days have passed, but clearly the interest in harnessing disparate noises and tones has
only just begun.
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