Epitaph i

I think it was purely about creating slabs of ‘Exotic Hypnotics’; it was about forsaking any form of melody or traditional structure and building a mantra. 

- Karl O'Connor

End of Party

Artists talk emphatically about the end of the party, light rushes in, filling our consciousness and by dispelling a void of the visual, it closes off our hearing. Audibility fragments into a collection of whispers and as we drift towards the nearby exit our head fills gaps in the numbness with echoes of the just-past sound.

One of my most memorable musical experiences came as an unceasing wall of noise receded into nothing in a split second. The speaker system tripped a switch somewhere and what had built into a crushing force suddenly opened up into an instant and intense eternity of silence. The moment immediately following the silence felt like my sense of hearing had been ripped from me, residual shuffles and hums inaudible until my ears began to readjust, the dividing line between noise and silence was the most intense, as disorientating at the time as it is indescribable now. As my mind struggled to adjust to the change in sensory load, sounds became fractured; I experienced them differently, as if for the first time, I found myself lost for words as I tried to make sense of the morphing soundscape around me.

The transition from club to sofa in the early hours of the day brings with it a certain set of feelings, a way of experiencing the world under a new regime, through a new set of filters. Conversations have a lightened quality to them, the early morning light seems to paint a different set of colours. When people speak about this new music, post-rave music, they speak of a variable bpm, a speeding up or slowing down of their experience at different times of the day and under different frames of mind. It has a transient quality; the watershed between intense club experience and understatement of the waking world. It hints at the reasons for dance culture, sound pushed towards one extreme, to experience the world by blocking out visual dominence - hypnotising us for an extended period of time and enough to shift our experiences of the world and to renew and refresh the way we experience day-to-day.