I spent part of Sunday, 1 June 2025 listening to 25 minutes of John Peel’s Radio 1 show from Saturday 10 July 1993.* One track which I heard from that show but haven’t slated for future inclusion here on the blog was Winter by Dave Clarke. In the unlikely event that he ever reads this, I hope Dave won’t take it too badly. After all, he was a big favourite of Peel’s, so there’s plenty of opportunity for other Clarke cuts to feature on this blog in future. Indeed, he’s already been covered here before under his Directional Force alias.
The reason why Winter missed out is that after a striking opening minute, which sounds like an Australian forest being ripped up to make way for the building of a new motorway, the track settles into the the repetitive sound of a high pitched note pounding into the listener’s skull for the next 5 minutes. Sometimes, the tempo varies, but in the main, the note is all that there is, save for the occasional clap of thunder and the sounds of the forest wildlife attempting to break through the squall.
Coming back three months from that show to the selections from 10/4/93, which we’ve been working through, I was aware that Electro-Static by Militia was another dance record characterised by high pitched notes and little else. If you played them back-to-back to a dance music sceptic, they’d very likely tell you never to waste their time again. So, why does Electro-Static make the cut, but Winter doesn’t?
Ultimately, it comes down to quantity and variety. Electro-Static isn’t a soothing listen by any respect, but its atonality never falls into a rut. It too has a strong opening with the first 45 seconds bringing together both a beat of pure groove and the beep of a life support machine. Things kick into a higher gear once the synth arrives, sounding like an incoherent, burbling robot, but the Militia crew match this perfectly with the earlier elements and if you fix on those then the additional synths wails, which come in from 1:09 onwards and which try to mimic the sounds of static picked up by high quality transmitters, won’t drive you off the dancefloor.
And I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s that fixing on an element which makes all the difference when it comes to appreciating one techno track over another, especially industrial techno, which is designed to aurally attack the listener before getting them to dance. Every techno track has something working as its hook, the ones we respond to are those with hooks that continue to call out regardless of how many layers of sound - atonal or otherwise - are placed on top of it.
Video courtesy of Sound of 88/92
*For completists, it was between 1:43 and 2:08.
No comments:
Post a Comment