Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture [Paperback]

Although Simon Reynolds ends the book with his personal theory that a music genres relevance is directly proportional to the amount of books written about it, dance music isn't yet at this point. Unlike rock n roll, this music has not been culturally dissected and mummified in a museum somewhere. There is much to suggest that this is now taking place but Simon Reynolds efforts will stand head & shoulders above the others in this field.

Firstly, it is written from an enthusiasts point of view and this comes screaming out of the books text at all points. His style is easy going and clever, with enough musical references to delight the most anal of trainspotters.

Reynolds focusses on dance music in the UK, from its birth as imported street music, to the first British attempts at house music, getting it wrong and creating a musical hybrid which ends up becoming drum n bass. For someone who was round in the early nineties when much of this was going on, this is a tremendously exciting book which covers a creative period which most dance music hipsters are loathe to even recognise (although this is now changing and hardcore is being given the credit it deserves).

A free CD comes with the book showing the evolution from house to drum n bass over the course of around ten years and makes an ideal companion to the book, especially for those of us who didn't bother to buy the records the first time around.

A joy and a pleasure for anyone with even a passing interest in this subject.

Simon Reynolds - Energy Flash (Picador) Watch out, this interactive book is a time bomb supercharged with music, history, interviews and...a CD! Yeah, that's why it's interactively cool! Simon Reynolds, historiographer of the musiquarium of the last twenty years brings you in a journey through the places and the records of all times. From the Chicago house and gay black scene and the techno and black scene in Detroit to the Ecstasy scene of Ibiza and then the British scene. Everything might sound rather the same of what you have already read in Collin' s book, but this book goes further, since it describes even the equipment often used and it stops to brood on other scenes such as the hardcore scene, the techno scene (with precious flashes on Belgium and Germany), the spiral tribe movement, the ambient and trance, the pirate radios and their hip MCs, the jungle and gabba fever with its raves at Rezerection, the rave scene in the States, trip hop and Tricky, drum and bass, jazz jungle and Roni Size closing with technostep, sampladelia, post rave fringe in Germany, the spirituality intrinsic in the E culture and the Big Beat. An encyclopaedia of music, criticism and history with an amazingly good discography and with a CD featuring Joey Beltram' s "Energy Flash", Sonz of A Loop Da Loop Era's "Bust That Groove" and 4Hero's "The Elements" among others. Any comment on the tracks chosen to feature on the CD is practically useless: it's all written in this big Bible of our culture, characterised by an intriguing style coloured by its polymorphous metaphors such as "sounds like it's played on a glocken-spiel built from icicles and stalactites", "chugs and puffs like a steam engine on a gradient, with textured percussion that sounds like a cat coughing up a hairball", "sounded like a brain-eraser wiping the slate of consciousness clean" or "sounded like Carmina Burana sung by a choir of satan- worshipping cyborgs", just to mention you a few. An extremely jam packed book, stuffed with ideas and sounds, beautiful the connection between the Nietzsche's dichotomy of Apollonian and Dionysian applied to the E culture with its utopian and dystopian edges. Read it and, when you're tired of reading, put on the CD and get up and dance and when you're get tired of dancing sit down and read and when you're tired of...

If you are at all interested in the history of electronic music, this book will grab your attention very early on, although I did feel that a lot of the author's terminology was somewhat over my head. It is an in depth and honest account of UK Rave, going into detail about the high points of acid house culture, the roots of techno, the dark side of the scene, and the varios genres that were created after the downfall of the free parties.
The covermount CD is a collection of important, genre-defining tracks, and is excellent in itself.