anyway this set from 93, warlock at knowledge, quite gloomy actually, i think you'll like it Simon...
This sounds alright - quite banging
i went to Knowledge once and it was quite intense but a bit austere for me by that point - this is late 92 i think - i was firmly in the nutt-E / breaks / edge-of-chaos / cartoony sped-up samples / ooozy dubdeep bass camp by that point.
When i
first got into rave though I preferred the technoid Euro slamming sound over the breaks stuff - I was all about Beltram and the Belgians and things like CJ Bolland's "Horsepower". I kind of went along with the "all these breaks tunes are just thrown together" viewpoint that was the general discerning techno fan's attitude. Then I Saw the Light. And the switch-over to breakbeat as the true path (or vastly more interesting and enjoyable path and actually musically more productive and mutagenic) was certainly helped by people like Bolland making boring records (one called "Camargue", right?) and Beltram doing "Forklift", this incredibly dry, cold (but not wintry gloomcore wastelands of remote ice planets type cold) sound.
The direction out of Belgium / "Dominator" / "Mentasm" i did like was the Mover / PCP which is much more emotional and grand-sounding.
The sort of straight, banging, hard as nails techno that i guess places like Lost and Final Frontier and Orbit and Pure up in Scotland did - it always seemed like a grim slog. I remember there was some comp of that hardtechno (but not gabba) that Kickin or someone like that did, and it featured a Ajax bottle on the front - and that image, of the music as a harsh scouring agent, always stuck with me. I was like, 'yeah, this is
exactly what it's about'. An austere regime of purifying hygiene.
Modeled physically by the dominant look at that time - the slaphead. Loads of people will cropped tonsures at Knowledge.
Richie Hawtin was good though but I prefer the earliest Plus 8 stuff
I do associate the hard, near-industrial purist techno with the trance though - they seemed in the same camp, supported by the same people - especially as trance then was quite cold, quite hard, quite fast. The fluffy Ibiza trance came a bit later I think.