A shot of rave and a spoonful of techno: the recipe for a great night out!
The recipe for the perfect clubbing experience has to include some vital ingredients. You’ll need the right venue, with a good sound system and a decent dance floor. You’ll need the right people: friendly, up-for-it ravers who can create that special atmosphere. And then there’s the vital ingredient – without it, you might as well stay at home – the music.
Music’s so important that no-one even thinks about it anymore. After all, every club plays great tunes all night long, don’t they? Not necessarily… What if the DJ can’t mix? What if his equipment lets him down? What if he’s simply not very good at selecting records?
A bad DJ can ruin an evening – but a good DJ can turn a decent night into an unforgettable experience. For me, one such DJ is Stacy Pullen. I first saw him play in Manchester in 1999, and I was blown away by his set. He played for three hours straight, mixing records seamlessly from one to another, never putting a foot wrong. By the end of the night I’d heard dozens of tracks I’d never heard before and had seen how they
You can just feel it; a shot of rave, a spoonful of techno, and a pinch of trance. The bass is pumping, the lights are flashing, and the crowd is grooving. You are having the time of your life, dancing to the best beat you ever heard in your life. Music has that effect on people; it takes away their worries and stress, making them feel happy and carefree. But what if music could do more than that? What if music could make you healthier?
Most people think of music as a form of entertainment. We listen to music while exercising or when we have nothing else to do. However, many studies have shown that music can positively affect our health in many ways. While we enjoy listening to our favorite songs, we may not realize that they are also helping us function better mentally and physically.
Music therapy has been found to be effective in treating Alzheimer’s patients by helping them recall memories from their childhood. This treatment has been so effective that some daycare centers for seniors now hold dances where they play music from their younger days every week. As mentioned by Dr. Oliver Sacks in his book “Musicophilia,” one patient who had lost his memory completely woke up when he heard an old song on the radio
The first time I went to a rave I was 16, and it was the best night of my life. I went with a friend from school that didn’t go to my school. He drove us to an abandoned warehouse in an industrial park. We got there very late at night, and had no idea what to expect. As we approached the door, we could hear the music getting louder and louder. We entered into the building and immediately my senses were overloaded with lights and sounds. There were people everywhere dancing as if they had not danced in years when in reality they probably hadn’t stopped since midnight when we got there. The music was wild and unlike anything I had ever heard before; it was so loud that I felt it vibrating through my chest as if I had swallowed a subwoofer. As I walked through the crowd, people would dance with me, smile and offer me free water, no one seemed angry or aggressive, just happy to be alive!
This is how most people experience their first rave parties: loud music, drugs, dancing, lots of friendly people offering you water and maybe a little something extra for your spirits… but there is much more to raving than that. It’s not about who can take the most drugs or stay up the longest
When you sink into the depths of a rave, you’re transported to another world. A world where the music is everything and your body is one with the bass. It’s a place where people are free to express themselves through dance and leave their inhibitions at the door.
Rave music is characterized by four-on-the-floor beats, syncopated basslines, and layered synthesizers. The tempo often shifts between fast and slow within a track or song, creating an effect of being “in a rush”. Tempos can range from 125 bpm (beats per minute) to over 160bpm, but are usually around 130–140 bpm. Other characteristics include a prominent bass drum on every beat (“four on the floor”), off-beat open hi-hat sounds in sync with the bass drum (often referred to as “snare rushes”), and, less commonly today, synthesized effects such as digitally sampled and processed stabs of electric guitar, electric violin or other real instruments. The development of this style was influenced by genres including house, techno, trance and jungle with most producers using a combination of software synths like Ableton Live & Logic Pro.
Rave music may either refer to the late 1980s/early 1990s genres
In the 80’s, a new genre of music was born. This music, was called Techno. It was a mix of funk, electro, and dub that changed the way people thought about dance music. But as the 90’s rolled around, techno began to change as well.
Techno at its core is a very progressive genre of music. But in the 90’s it became more commercialized and began to take on a life of its own. New sub-genres began to form out of techno and soon there were techno tracks for every mood or occasion you could think of. Meanwhile, Detroit—the birthplace of techno—slowly began to fade into obscurity as other cities took over the techno scene.
In the rave scene, which had already been established in England by this point, new forms of dance music were being created that were taking inspiration from techno but also drawing influence from the house scene that had emerged in Chicago a few years earlier. These new forms included acid house, gabber (a particularly fast form of hardcore), happy hardcore, breakbeat hardcore and eventually jungle/drum ‘n’ bass which would come later on after these other genres had already made their mark on electronic dance music history.
I am a serious student of music. I spend many hours a week listening to old recordings and reading about new ones, and I like to think that I have an ear for what’s good. But once in a while something comes along that is so powerful, so engaging, that all my critical faculties are swept away and I’m left with nothing but the sheer joy of listening.
That was how I felt when I was first exposed to electronic dance music.
I was vacationing on the coast of France and had been invited to a party thrown by some young people who lived nearby. They were nice enough, but hardly more than acquaintances and we had little in common except for the fact that they knew I liked music. It wasn’t until after dinner when the dancing started that we really hit it off.
The music they were playing was unlike anything I had ever heard before. It was fast, loud, relentless and quite rhythmic but it lacked any melody whatsoever. Since none of us knew how to dance this didn’t seem like such a big problem at first, but after an hour or so it became clear that our hosts weren’t going to turn this thing off anytime soon!
The 90s were a catalytic time for music. The electronic dance music genre exploded with new subgenres, new sounds, and new ways to enjoy them. The rave scene was the home of these innovations, and it is still creating new trends in the EDM world today.
The rave culture originated in the United Kingdom. It spread to the U.S. and other countries soon after its inception, however, with major parties called raves popping up everywhere from Southern California to New York City. The energy of these events was unparalleled at the time, and it has carried on throughout the years as a driving force in contemporary dance music culture. Unfortunately, raves have also become associated with drug use (specifically Ecstasy). This bad reputation has been hard to shake off over the past 20 years, but many ravers are trying to change this negative connotation by promoting a drug-free lifestyle while still enjoying electronic dance music events.
One of the most popular subgenres that came out of the 90s rave scene is trance music. Trance can be broken down into two categories: progressive trance and hard trance. These two styles are often referred to as psytrance or psychedelic trance as well because they were originally inspired by hallucinatory experiences due to drug use