This is just a test site at the moment. I would love to create a site with information and music etc from the old skool days but I really dont have time! So, I'm putting up a simple holding page as a temporary measure. If you have any ideas or would like to give me an offer for this domain name then please contact me via my website (see footer).
Boy do I wish it was still 1988! So I could go to every rave there ever was! I caught the end; my first rave was Obsession World Systems at Carlyon Bay, Cornwall 1993 - full on stormer in a lesuire center sports hall. Totally changed my life! Unfortunately I didn't get to any larger events like Fantazia, Universe or Dreamscape etc. Most of our Friday nights were spent at the mighty Plymouth Warehouse at the resident Revelations nights - these each had a headline act and were very much the techno end of rave headlining with DJs like Easygroove, Colin Dale, Dave Angel, Scorpio etc, great times...
I also played a really dodgy live PA at Enjoy Project - Hellraiser, Plymouth Warehouse. it would have been a proper mess as I was only about 16 and had no idea about how to engineer a PA for a massive sound system! Plus the two people I was doing it with (a DJ and another producer) let me down and offered me no support during the gig at all. The fact was they got the gig and couldn't pull it off so they got me (keyboard player) to bail them out. Anyway.. was good fun, a top experience and finished with DJ Dano dropping one of the most storming techno set ever! I have several sets from that night but they rightfully left out our PA because it was so bad!
Anyway, I now have a massive archive of old skool rave sets and tunes which I listen to loads. Hardcore will never die :)
The history can be traced in great detail but for now I'll just note my first thoughts.
Everything evolves - including music. The attraction of strong repetative rhythms has been part of human culture for millenia probably without exception. Whether that be African bushmen with primative drums and percussion or high-tech music producton at the cutting edge of technology - all these musical forms are linked by the common spiritual calling to dance!
If you listen to a selection of rave music from 1988 to 1994 you can see just how much changed in those few years - each year has its own distinct influences and attributes that track the progress of electronic dance music through the golden era of rave. This process of evolution during the early 90s helped define many of the styles we know today such as jungle, breakbeat, techno, house, dnb etc.
The old skool rave scene contained many sub styles of music which different DJ's would be known for, also the music itself incorporated elements of many styles that later broke away to become more specialised. In the earlier and parallel house music scene was based heavily on disco and often contained samples of disco records - noting famous tunes like Donna Summer's "I feel love" that contained all the elements of early acid techno before the phrase had been dreamed up!
The one style of music I know as unique to the Old Skool Rave scene really is jungle-techno! A merging of jungle breakbeats and techno 4 beat bass drums - these together create a serious dance beat that isn't really heard anywhere now except in some breakcore and more experimental tunes.
I cannot mention acid house/techno without mentioning Roland really - they introduced a line of affordable analogue music gear during the 80s that changed dance music for ever. The unmistakable sounds of the TR-909 drum machine and TB-303 bassline synth are all over early house and techno records to the point that many tracks are made purely from a few bits of Roland gear! The classic 'hoover' sound that is synonymous with old skool was a preset on the Alpha Juno synthesizer - known from such epic tunes as Joey Beltram's Mentasm and The Prodigy's Charly. Apparently the Prodigy were signed off a demo they created using two Roland W30 sampling workstations.
Wikipedia has a couple of pages but no one page that really sums up the uniqueness of the UK hardcore scene in the early 90's:
Fantazia, Obsession, Dance Planet, Dreamscape, Helter Skelter, Universe, Amnesia House, Sunrise, Quest, Vision, The Edge, World Dance
Carl Cox, Colin Dale, Colin Favor, Clarkee, Doc Scott, Dougal, DJ Hype, Dr S Gachet, Easygroove, Ellis Dee, Fabio, Grooverider, Jumping Jack Frost, Kenny Ken, LTJ Bukem, Mickey Finn, Peshay, Phantasy, Ramos, Randall, Ratty, Ratpack, Roni Size, Slipmat, Seduction, SS, SY, Swanee, Tango, Top Buzz, Vibes
(I've missed many of the house, jungle, and techno DJs just to concentrate on the biggest names in the old skool hardcore scene, the kinda names you would have seen on flyers of the day.)
Where to get old skool sets and tunes from? Well, there are companies selling CD's and even the old tape packs still. EBay has a lot of tape packs on there off course. For both sets and vinyl rips there are also some great niche communities online if you know where to find them. P2P apps such as DC++ have a number of hardcore old skool heads which share music from the era - with a little digging I'm sure you can find them ; )