The Death Of Rave (a Partial Flashback)

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Pavido Scalf

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Aug 3, 2024, 5:29:43 PM8/3/24

to atinditic

Tracks 1 - 48 come from this. 49 - 88 come from this. 89 - 111 come from this. Additional 24 - 48a come from this. 48b - 71 come from this. None of the tracks' speeds are changed. All songs are reversed unless stated otherwise.

Edit: It has come to my attention that most of my death of rave content has been blacklisted from Youtube search results. (this part is outdated but the links should still be here) Because of this: Here's my playlist of samples, & here's my playlist of all the songs reversed to be normal. You can still find this page if you search death of rave samples on Google. Backup source upload, backup additional upload.

Note about additional 7: This song may or may not sample Peacemaker by Nebula II. While I cannot verify this is the sample, there are other songs that don't sound like their samples, and the claim was by a (formerly) trustworthy source. Overall I simply cannot verify if it's the sample, but it could very well sample it.

This has been my perception so far, at least. I moved here two years ago now, and having found little of the music scene I wanted to experience whilst living in Huddersfield (again, because of lockdown), it felt like there was a lot of potential for Newcastle to put itself on the map. And thankfully, there is a lot of talent here that could make that possible.

I am nevertheless excited that friends who feel similar are making an effort to bring something different to this city, fostering a scene that has a healthy sense of competition, encouraging each other to push the boat out and develop something singularly northeastern.

I feel a mixture, then, of pessimism and optimism, which nonetheless feels familiar. Our conversations at present feel very similar to those had in the late 2000s, when everyone was talking about the death of rave. We are almost twenty years on from that moment now, and ten years on from the most significant reflection on it, offered up at CTM Festival in 2014. The cyclical nature of this melancholy has led to an atmosphere of further reflection as we enter a new period of apparent rave stagnancy. I wonder, if we can make forceful contact with those pre-existing currents, if something might grow out of them.

There is a positive ambivalence here, then; an attunement, which seems to be using the then-palpable death of rave as a springboard for a new defiance. The discussion ends, significantly, with an interjection from Steve.

Now, obviously, all musical entities contain influences from the past. Necessarily, musical creativity is an evolutionary process. We only need to think of the role of sampling, for example, to think about how new musics bootstrap themselves into the future using the resources of the old. And yet, push beyond a certain proportion of mixed retro elements of an entire ecosystem of sound will serve to undermine the overall dynamic of innovation. It is this inability to turn the old into the new that is really at the heart of retromania.

The CCRU was founded in 1995, and it was a renegade, parasitical entity initially living off the body of the philosophy department at Warwick University in the United Kingdom. It basically was a sort of intensely multidisciplinary entity which sought to dissolve the sort of pious scholasticism of the university under a deluge of chaotically interbred disciplines.