Introduction
This track was made at home in a bedroom so anybody can do it … and all of the DJs who played it, all the public radio stations, the ravers, all of the ecstasy dealers … thank you very much.1
As I arrived at the podium for the 1995 ARIA Awards to accept the highly unexpected Best Dance Release award for the single ‘Sweetness and Light’, it quickly dawned on me that I would need to make an acceptance speech. As an artist/participant in the underground techno/rave community, I felt passionate about the potential of electronic dance music (EDM) for creative expression and community building. When I look back, I can see that my acceptance speech, blinded by a heady mix of youthful idealism and arrogance, reflected the frustration I felt at the Australian music industry’s inability to understand EDM and its potentially visionary culture. While I copped a lot of industry flack for allegedly promoting the illicit use of MDMA, my primary motivation was to point out that ‘real’ Australian EDM was primarily created in home studios and supported via its own DIY culture. When I walked offstage and into the press room, I was confronted by two extremes of response: the mainstream press thought my speech was reckless and irresponsible, while the dance-music press greeted me as some kind of homecoming hero.2
When discussing EDM, much of the literature rightly focuses on the culture surrounding its creation and reception. I use the term ‘EDM’ here to represent any dance music made with electronic production techniques and instruments. The Australian rave scene has been analysed as political act, the rituals of the individuals who make up its dancefloors examined, and the influence of ethnicity and drug use and the impact of commerce on its sound and DJ culture have also been explored.3 More recently, complete histories of Australian city scenes have been documented in Melbourne and Brisbane.4 What is less documented in Australian literature is a practice-based perspective that investigates the musical developments that occurred. This is particularly significant in the early 1990s as scenes, labels and future mentors set the pace for what was to come.
It could be argued that one creative colonial hangover is Australia’s copycat culture. Would Russell Morris’ ‘Real Thing’ exist without Small Faces’ ‘Itchy Coo Park’? Johnny O’Keefe without Elvis Presley? Production techniques, sounds and ideas are continuously borrowed by Australian artists and producers. The early 1990s is particularly important in this regard. EDM, fuelled by the acid house phenomenon of 1987, was a period of fast-paced hyper-evolution. Creatively radical tracks emerged from the underground, record labels and artists pounced to create similar tracks to capitalise on the new sound and genre conventions and tropes were quickly formed. It is this brief window of time that, as a practitioner and researcher, I find intriguing.
The examples explored below are by no means a definitive survey, more a snapshot of a diverse range of songs, artists and cities that represent a trajectory – or the start of a legacy of influence. It must be noted that, as a participant and researcher, it is challenging to remain objective throughout this account. It is hoped that this initial survey will inspire further research on the origins and influences of EDM in Australia.
Sydney
Beginning in Sydney, the musical turning point in my own EDM journey was hearing Severed Heads for the first time. Their independently released album Since the Accident is a mash of harsh synth sounds and heavily manipulated tape-loop constructions offset by tuneful toy-synth melodies, sped-up vocals and playful song titles.5 It is at times hard, dark and intense yet somehow still makes you laugh at how good these extremes make you feel. Constructed on an eight-track tape machine, the drum-machine grooves underpin multitrack tape loops created from scratchy vinyl sources. They are manipulated to speed up and slow down, played in reverse or looped to create a mix of seasick vocals, church choirs, spoken-word narratives, orchestral stabs and childish babble. The synth orchestration supports this perfectly with bouncy basslines, warm pads, simple melodic ostinatos and the occasional noise solo. It is a perfect balance of dissonance, melody, horror and most importantly humour. Unlike their contemporaries, Severed Heads always struck a balance between over-the-top incongruity and playful whimsy. Perhaps it is difficult to maintain industrial-grade goth-angst when you live in a city of beaches and sunshine – Sydney.
Severed Heads’ most accessible early-career single was ‘Dead Eyes Opened’, which would later become hugely influential to the next generation of Australian EDM artists when DJ/producer Robert Racic remixed it in 1994. In Australia, Severed Heads signed to Volition Records, who began releasing their music in 1985. Volition subsequently became the home of many first-wave EDM artists. The compilation album High showcased tracks by Vision Four 5 (Brisbane), Southend (Sydney), Sexing the Cherry (Brisbane), Itch-E & Scratch-E (Sydney), Third Eye (Melbourne), Boxcar (Brisbane) and Mister Morrow (Brisbane).6 Despite its eclecticism of styles, Richard Harley describes how the compilation gave the impression of a ‘coherent music scene’.7 Volition was manufactured and distributed in Australia by Sony, hoping for a successful investment in local dance music. The label became more influential as label head Andrew Penhallow co-curated the first few years of the Big Day Out’s Boiler Room.
The Boiler Room (not to be confused with the current-day DJ iteration) provided a national platform for EDM artists and helped facilitate EDM’s crossover to a more mainstream audience throughout the mid 1990s and beyond. As the Sydney Big Day Out’s Boiler Room grew in size, it ended up in the Hordern Pavillion from 1995 to 1997. The Hordern is a significant site for Sydney’s LGBTQIA+ community and its dance music history. As a not-quite-out-of-the-closet proto-queer, the Hordern parties were a revelation to me. Hearing and feeling 5,000 people slow down and speed up in orgasmic pleasure in sync with Lil Louis’ ‘French Kiss’ was a new way of experiencing music within a crowd.8 The audience who dressed to theme or to show off their bodies WERE the artist. They faced each other and not the stage. Unlike the suburban beer-barn pub-rock gigs, diversity in sexuality was celebrated and embraced. Ecstasy-fuelled and soundtracked by house music, the atmosphere was more sensual than predatory. In fact, for the queer community struggling with the reality of the AIDS epidemic, Kane Race suggests that the Mardi Gras and the queer Hordern dance parties provided a ‘powerful, exciting, and profoundly political statement of resilience and possibility’.9 While DJs tended to favour the more commercial acid/Italo/hip house and vocal-driven tracks dominating the dance charts, the Hordern parties (see Figure 14.1) were wild all-night events that successfully fused the growing confidence of the Gay and Lesbian community with the nascent acid house explosion.
Figure 14.1 Sweatbox ‘Meltdown’, Hordern Pavilion, 25 February 1989.
The first Australian mainstream EDM hits out of Sydney could be said to align with our cultural copycat history. Influential Hordern DJ Peewee Ferris produced an acid house-flavoured cover of Anita Ward’s ‘Ring My Bell’ for singer Colette, an idea not dissimilar to Yazz’s acid-flavoured cover of Otis Clay’s ‘The Only Way Is Up’.10 It reached the Top 5 of the ARIA charts. Similarly, Euphoria’s diva-driven Italo house track ‘Love You Right’ would possibly not exist if producer Andrew Klippel had not heard Blackbox’s ‘Ride on Time’.11 It reached the number one position on the ARIA chart.
In a recent podcast interview, Ferris’ production motivation was to create local dance tracks that he could play out at the broad cross-section of clubs, parties and, later, raves that he was on the bill at across the nation.12 Ferris is renowned for his ability to satisfy the needs of any event from the most commercial suburban disco night to the hardest rave dancefloor.
Due to increasing noise complaints from neighbours, and police and media concerns about wild all-night ecstasy parties, the Hordern parties came to an end in June 1990, the final being F.U.N’s Vogue party.13 For Sydney, this was a blow to a dance scene in full swing. Without the central dance church that was the Hordern, promoters learnt from their UK rave peers. Rave addresses were revealed by dialling a pre-recorded phone number on the night as makeshift venues were found in basketball stadiums, disused warehouses, inner-city parks and carparks, and semi-rural properties. The parties got smaller and more clandestine. Culturally, this seemed to fit EDM’s sonic evolution, where genres splintered into smaller factions of devout followers, and specialist DJs stuck to their genre lane. The Hordern was gone; the age of legal genre-driven club nights and illegal raves would continue to evolve throughout the 1990s.
For artists like Itch-E & Scratch-E, this was an exciting time to explore what was musically possible with multifaceted genre possibilities. Initially influenced by the playful noise of Severed Heads; Detroit pioneers Derrick May, Underground Resistance and Richie Hawtin; the UK’s dreamier techno artists Orbital and Future Sound of London, the Warp label and Sheffield bleep, techno was an open slate to improvise sonic worlds that could make you both dance and dream. Tracks could stretch to twelve minutes’ duration, moving through ambient intros, acid explorations, melancholic melodies and stab-driven tech workouts. Our live studio set-up could be reconstructed onstage, allowing us to perform live in the Boiler Room and at raves around the country. The peak of this cultural connection occurred at the Happy Valley 3 Rave in 1993. Held in a field south of Sydney, video maker Jay Richards captured footage of our sunrise set in all of its dazed glory. Dancers in baggy clothes, pigtails and madhatter hats blissfully sway and air-conduct in the day’s first light in a crowded field, or solo on a speaker stack. Rantzen and I (and live member Sheriff Lindo) frantically bounce in time, playing, mixing and tweaking filters to recreate the rave-friendlier portion of our back catalogue.14
In hindsight, this was the peak of rave culture for me. From 1994 on, the beats got faster, the breaks got heavier, the manic helium vocals, hectic stabs and piano riffs favoured a more speed-fuelled intensity miles away from the dream-vision possibilities offered by Detroit’s more cerebral funk. By Happy Valley 4 in early 2000 (where one man died of a drug overdose), I hung up my raving clothes and pivoted back to EDM songwriting, releasing ‘Just the Thing’ in 2000, a dancey-house diva-driven pop song that captured the mood of the city’s new mega-clubs.15
Melbourne
As documented in Techno Shuffle, the first wave of Melbourne EDM artists were similarly influenced by the post-punk electronic sounds of Melbourne artists such as Ollie Olsen, Primitive Calculators and Whirly World.16 Venues were large with a sizable club-going community, popular with the communities of first- and second-generation European migrants. Melbourne also has a large and connected LGBTQIA+ community catered for by popular club nights, and similar to Sydney’s Mardi Gras after-parties at the Hordern Pavilion, the ALSO foundation ran large warehouse parties on disused piers in the Docklands precinct as fundraisers for their community outreach services. It also had a thriving rave scene that ran virtually uninterrupted until 1997.
DJ and Razor Records dance label owner Gavin Campbell has been a significant player in Melbourne’s club scene since 1983, running popular club nights Swelter (1983), Razor (1986), Temple (1992), Savage and Tasty (1993) and Bump and Uranus (1995–1998). With the exception of the gay night Tasty, Campbell describes the demographic of his club’s patrons as a mix of straight club music fans and the more sonic-curious portion of the LGBTQIA+ community.17 Campbell suggests that the thriving mix of club and rave scenes and the Docklands pier parties resulted in Melbourne EDM artists striving to create tracks that would work being played in these larger settings. The first wave of successful Melbourne EDM tracks reflects this. Campbell and music partners Robert Goodge and Paul Main began doing club remixes under the moniker Filthy Lucre, informed by the popular sounds that they were currently DJing.
The Filthy Lucre remix of ‘Treaty’ by the band Yothu Yindi could be considered one of Australia’s first international dance hits, charting on the US Billboard dance chart.18 As a DJ, Campbell knew what worked on the floor and which sounds and trends were on the up. From the original Yothu Yindi funk rock multitrack, Filthy Lucre kept half of the original’s powerful English lyrics discussing self-determination, empty promises from white politicians leading up to the 1988 bicentennial celebrations, and female voices singing the refrain, ‘Treaty Yeah, Treaty Now’. The repetition, distinctive vocal quality, yidaki (didjeridu), and bilma clapsticks of the djatpangarri popular music genre of north-east Arnhem Land feature prominently in the mix.
The remix adds dreamy synth drones, conga loops, a ‘ha’ sample cut from the lead to create a rhythmic hook, a funky house sub bassline, a four-on-the-floor kick and TR-909 hats, Italo house piano, tuned clapsticks, gated guitar samples and a disco-diva sample ‘clap your hands and dance’. It is a powerful rework that musically transforms the original song into a more international club language. The remix peaked at number eleven on the ARIA chart and was also successful in several global markets. Its expansive mix clocks in at 6’52” and is still popular to play out. The ‘Treaty Now, Treaty Yeah’ refrain takes on more significance each year Australia continues to exist without one.
Another early 1990s crossover hit and dancefloor filler out of Melbourne was Ground Level’s ‘Dreams of Heaven’.19 Beginning with a simple bell melody, followed by a I–IV upright bass, quaver arpeggios, TR-909 hi-hats and congas, its introduction sounds like the sonification of innocence. Next up, synth stabs play major sevenths over the I–IV chords, as vocalist Jean-Marie Guilfoil blissfully encourages us, ‘You dream of heaven, now create what you like and have fun’. A Shep Pettibone-like bass enters, centred around the relative minor, transforming the harmonic atmosphere into darker, more magical terrain. It is the perfect club track for the more innocent end of the 1990s, invoking the joys of first-time ecstasy, fun and heaven. It is not difficult to understand how it reached number three on the UK dance chart.
Quench managed a similar feat with ‘Dreams’.20 The beginning choir pads, buzzy bass, male voice-over saying ‘Dreams’ and midrange buzzy pulse set the stage for the almighty kick to enter. It is deep in tone, slightly distorted, pitched down and loud in the mix. After several layers of staggered percussion entries and filter tweaks, a doom-laden church bell adds to the dark drama. After a manic bell solo, the real business begins. A soloed buzz-saw theme enters. It is phased and slathered in spacious delay and reverb. The thud of the dark kick returns underneath, and your mind situates you in a massive warehouse complete with laser and fog. Your mouth automatically gurns as it mimics the theme’s filter sweeps. At 3’19”, the theme is then gated and juts out as staccato semiquavers. To this old raver’s ears, it feels like a synaesthetic representation of a strobe light. Even if you were listening in your car, you feel as though you are in the world’s biggest warehouse rave. By 2000, it had sold over a million copies throughout the world.21
These three tracks point to Melbourne artists’ business-savvy awareness of labels, genres, trend timing and dancefloor sonic finesse. Labels such as Vicious Vinyl (run by DJ/producers Andy Van and John Course) survived by focusing on being ahead of the major trends in EDM and creating or licensing tracks that fit the market. Andy Van’s project with vocalist Cheyne Coates, Madison Avenue, went on to have an international hit with ‘Don’t Call Me Baby’.22 It peaked at number two on the ARIA chart and number one on the UK chart. It is an incredibly catchy slice of disco sampling, funky-bassed, vocal-driven house pop with empowering lyrics and delivery. Again, returning to this chapter’s theme of international ‘inspiration’, it is difficult not to think of Mousse T’s ‘Horny 98’ when you hear it.23 The feel, vocal cadence, harmonic movement and disco-drum samples all feel rather familiar.
Not all Melbourne EDM artists are limited to commercial club-friendly bangers. Any survey needs to include the pioneering work of the legendary Ollie Olsen, Gus Til and their psytrance band Third Eye (and Psy-Harmonic label), Christopher Coe’s Digital Primate project, FSOM (Future Sound of Melbourne/Josh Abrahams, David Carbone, Steve Robbins) and live acid performer Honeysmack (Dr David Haberfeld). Melbourne has always had a darker, hard techno side. Artists such as Luke Charbell, Phil K and the members of NUBREED have created their own distinctly Melbourne underground sound.
Adelaide
Gavin Campbell suggests that Melbourne and Adelaide seem to have a ‘reciprocal love’ of hard techno producers and DJs, and that many of the harder tracks ‘resonate’ in both cities. One example is HMC’s ‘Phreakin’.24
HMC is the moniker for Cam Bianchetti’s more banging techno tracks. ‘Phreakin’ is superbly minimal in its construction: consisting of a bit-crushed robot voice sample, a mono TR-909 four-on-the-floor beat, a shreaking synth note every fourth beat and an acid filter-tweaked upper-mid sequence. It is relentless and driving, stomping along at 126 bpm. The only variations come from programmed TR-909 fills, and Bianchetti live-muting individual parts at the desk. Bianchetti said that it was one of the first tracks that he had ever made.25 He just programmed the parts with sounds he liked, plugged them into a desk and turned them up until they hit the red. The crunchy output sounded so good that he quickly improvised an arrangement and recorded it doing the filter and EQ tweaks live. It is simple, brutal, funky and still a joy to hear. Bianchetti more recently works under the moniker Late Nite Tuff Guy, producing popular disco-edits and remixes. Another notable Adelaide act is DJ Groove Terminator (Simon Lewicki), whose hip hop/house/and big-beat anthems are informed by his extensive DJing around the country. In 2005–2006 he formed Tonight Only with Sam Littlemore, and currently works with Ministry of Sound on their tours incorporating orchestral and choral versions of house and rave classics.
Brisbane
The most influential EDM artists to come out of the 1990s Brisbane scene both happened to be signed to Volition. Initially focusing on synth-driven guitar pop, Boxcar (Dave Smith, Carol Rhode, Brett Mitchell, Crispin Trist and Stewart Lawler) had three singles on the US Billboard dance chart (with remixes by dance royalty Arthur Baker and François Kevorkian). In their pub-rock-loving hometown, their New Order-influenced techno-pop sound sometimes struggled to gain acceptance but was perfect for support slots for international acts like Depeche Mode, Erasure and the Pet Shop Boys.26 Their live band set-up also worked as a novel point of difference at dance parties and on the Boiler Room stage.
Label mates Vision Four 5 found the general Brisbane culture ‘horrendous’ for appreciating live electronic music. Band member Noel Burgess described it as ultra-conservative and extremely macho.27 If you sat outside that normality, you were a ‘weirdo’. Consequently, there would be one club night that would shift from club to club, where all of the goths, punks, ravers and alterna-queers would gather.
However, one possible upside of living in the smaller population of Brisbane was that there were more community points of connection. Burgess was inspired by Boxcar’s set at Brisbane’s Expo 88 and would later remix their single ‘Comet’. Everybody knew each other and supported each other’s gigs. As the rave scene began to flourish in the 1990s, those club nights suddenly got much bigger in size. Vision Four 5 engaged with it as a three-piece live band, conscious of the need to compete with the predominantly thumping techno DJ sets. Ben Suthers (who would go on to co-curate the Boiler Room) focused on the sonics, Noel Burgess on the music, and Tim Gruchy (who had previously provided visuals for the Sydney Hordern dance parties) provided interactive live visuals. Their rave hit ‘Everything You Need (Tragic Rave Mix)’ can be better understood when viewed through its Brisbane scene setting.28 While the tracks mentioned above, by Ground Level, Quench, Itch-E & Scratch-E and Filthy Lucre slowly reveal their sonic deck of cards like a slow-moving game of Trance 500, Vision Four 5 seem to anticipate losing the floor’s attention and circumvent this by constantly shifting the game with stimulation-grabbing moves. Every eight bars, something shifts. At a stonking 145 bpm, they introduce manic polyrhythmic basslines, endlessly building and dropping TR-909 beats, hats and snare rolls, squelching acid from an overdriven TB-303, polyphonic pitch bends that resolve to a momentary quiet, gentle whole-note filter envelopes, rising oscillator syncs, pumping breakbeats, dissonant bells, octave jumps, ‘wooh’ samples and the ever-present diva sample bellowing ‘Everything, everything, everything you need, believe the word’. The Tragic Rave Mix is as ravey as you can get. The video matches the track’s intensity, consisting of classic early 1990s Amiga-style animations and live footage of a Gold Coast Boiler Room gig, where sweat drips from the roof and Suthers sprays the raver crowd with a super-soaker. Everybody present is lost in the magic, eyes rolled back, rave outfits on, with smiles on all of their faces. This is the hard-hitting rave that can compete with Brisbane’s macho crowd culture. The track deservedly ended up being released on the Ministry of Sound’s compilation ‘Rave Anthems 1990–1996’.
Canberra
The early EDM scene in Canberra was a cooperative-based scene. Clan Analog is a collective and record label for musicians passionate about synthesisers and all things electronic. Begun by Brendan Palmer in 1992 in Sydney, it rapidly spread to Canberra, Melbourne, Brisbane and beyond and functioned to build networks, organise meet-ups to share gear, play live, co-produce recordings, release compilations and promote bands associated with the collective. Clan Analog has been operating continuously for thirty years and has over thirty releases, the latest being a celebration of the Roland TB-303.29
One of the most intriguing acts from the collective was Canberra-based B(if)tek. Consisting of Kate Crawford and Nicole Skeltys, their music refuses to follow the louder/harder/faster EDM trajectory and has a sonic palette that is warmer, trippier and deeper than their contemporaries. Crawford explains,
Bo (Daley) started a radio show called ‘Sub Sequence’ and it was a beacon … that sent out the weirdest type of electronic music, and I said ‘yes’. Tim (O’Loghlin) came on the show, and then we all joined Clan Analog. It was a relationship between community radio, Clan, and being in a town where there was nothing to do, so you get people that are very deep into music who want to explore sound. It wasn’t about ‘Quickly, let’s write something that’s going to go off at that party on Saturday’, because there wasn’t one. It was more, what’s the kind of music that I like? So, for B(if)tek, it was writing music in Nicole’s garage and not playing live anywhere.30
Their first album Sub-Vocal Theme Park was released via Rosie Cross’ Geek Girl website in 1995. It initiated a label bidding war resulting in Sony’s Murmur imprint signing them for their second album 2020.31 Crawford recounted how Murmur offered them complete creative control over the album, but they hit the standard major label road hump of ‘Yeah we like it, but where’s the single?’. Crawford and Skeltys responded with a suitably sideways move by asking cult-vocalist Julie Cruise to sing a TR-808-driven electro cover of Cliff Richard’s ‘Wired for Sound’.32
Conclusion
In this chapter I have attempted to outline some of the different stories, sounds and artists that emerged from a cross-section of Australian cities in the early 1990s, and the creative influences afforded to or limited by those cities. Returning to the sentiments expressed in my 1995 ARIA speech, perhaps the creative possibilities offered by the collectives like Clan Analog, the DIY ethos of independent releases and the cultural impact of community radio programmes mentioned by Crawford are more significant markers of value than chart success. If space allowed, it would be fitting to discuss the European impact of Newcastle’s nosebleed label Bloody Fist (1994–2004) and the work of its creators Nasenbluten. Similar in ethos to early Severed Heads, their music is hard, relentless and hilarious. Likewise Perth’s drum’n’bass pioneers Pendulum.
Trying to summarise the Australian 1990s electronic music scene in one chapter is a difficult task, and I can already feel the heat of emails reminding me whom I left out. So, in no particular order, I would like to continue my ARIA speech by thanking Kazumichi Grime, Garry Bradbury, Dark Network, Sub Bass Snarl, Ali Omar, Infusion, Pocket, Ian Andrews, Bass Bitch, Bexta, Lush Puppy, Deep Child, Telemetry Orchestra, The 5000 Fingers of Dr T, Transcendental Anarchists, Dub Doctor, Sheriff Lindo, Pavo Cristatus, Monobrow, JujuSpaceJazz, Friendly, Five Star Piazzaria, Downtown Brown, Groovescooter, FC Europa, The Hive, Love Tattoo, Purdy, Alterboy, Toy Death, Coda, The Vibe Tribe, Club Kooky, Frigid and 2SER for making Sydney an inspiring place to be alive in the 1990s. As the decade progressed, mainstream EDM continued its global upswing of mega-clubs, power trance, big-beat and superstar DJs, but I would suggest that it is the eccentric artists that constitute the underground scenes that keep it creatively alive, evolving and dreaming of the future.
This chapter is dedicated to Andrew Penhallow, who passed on 17 May 2023.
