My darkside-theory epiphany occurred listening to pirate tapes in early 1993 while reading Deleuze & Guattari's A Thousand Plateaux. Suddenly I realized that this roiling bitches brew of mashed-up James Brownian motion and voodoo-bass was basically a guttersnipe version of Can's rhizomatic funk; that darkside was the black sheep bastard child of the avant-funk family tree that runs from Tago Mago through Eno/Byrne's Bush Of Ghosts to Skidoo/Cabs/Ratio/et al. Being avant-lumpen and fueled by bad drugs, darkside was simultaneously more primitive, more advanced, and more derangedly disturbing than any of its
art-house precursors. At the extreme, darkside was just a delirium tremens of convulsive breaks and insectile percussion, a queasy sub-bass drone-quake at the lower threshold of audibility that wobbled your intestines, some ghostly/ghastly sampladelic ectoplasm, plus an Nth-generation video-nasty soundbite. Tracks like Andy C's "Something New," Flex's "Ya Buzzin'" and Hype's "The Chopper" emitted the pulsating infernal infra-red glow of a muggy, murky, body-congested basement as the snowball kicks in and your sense-impressions get uncomfortably vivid. It was death-disco, for real--riddled with the su-E-cidal nihilism of a rave culture discovering that the Ecstasy experience can be literally mindblowing (as in a fuse burning out, rather than psychedelic transcendence) yet not being dissuaded, not at all--rather continuing the headlong heedless mission to the end of the night. That was the real revelation, the real reason that darkside is the most astounding, mind-and-ear-boggling music culture I've ever witnessed birth itself--that shift from plinky-piano-vamp-and-squeaky-diva happy-rave to samples about death, delirium, brain damage, psychosis. The fact that the dancefloors didn't empty, that people lapped it up, that any kind of intensity was better than feeling nothing, feeling numb. In hindsight, you can see the precursors in '90-91---the proto-dark vibe of Eon's "Inner Mind", "Spice", "Basket Case (White Coats Mix)"; hardcore's playful imagery of insanity; the edge-of-hysteria in Nightmares On Wax's "Aftermath" and Genaside II's "Narra Mine". But at the time, nothing prepared for the shock as the shadow fell.