The Answer Is In The Beat

Pure Rave: Vol. 4 + Vol. 5 tapes (self-released, 2018?)

June 17, 2018 at 6:47 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Pure Rave are a team from Detroit who have been playing very abstract mix sets using skipping records, cheap mixers, samplers, CDJs, and I’m not sure what else. Maybe I’m not even right about all of those things. But they’ve been sort of the house DJs for the last 2 Trip Metal Fests, playing weird, warped, noisy dance beats in between bands. It’s hard to find a whole lot of info about then, but there is a Soundcloud page. At this year’s TMF, they had a batch of 5 tapes for sale. I was close to just buying all of them, but I thought that would be overkill so I just got the last 2. There’s no info on them, so no clue when they were recorded or released, or if they’re even available anywhere besides their gigs (or any other gigs besides TMF). But the tapes encapsulate the messiness and spontaneity of Pure Rave’s club sets. The crew seem to think skipping records are way more fun to dance to than records played straight through, so you’ll have house records that keep repeating themselves, turning into their own spontaneous disco edits, and then they’ll be overlapped with other rhythms that are sort of in the same tempo but aren’t quite, and then they’ll just totally lose track and meld into something else. And there’s also moments where there’s Yasunao Tone-like glitches over everything, and some hidden screams and growls. It’s pretty chaotic and absurd but there does seem to be a sense of momentum to it, it doesn’t all seem entirely random or unfocused. And there are points where the beats straighten out and it gets pretty soul-gazing. Near the end of of Vol. 4, they move away from house and drop in some smooth yacht-jazz, and then chop and screw it for a while, making it increasingly disorienting and hallucinatory. Vol. 5 starts out with flashing carnival lights and severely slowed down voices, and the sporadic shrieks and squeaks from the previous tape are still in abundance. On this tape, instead of a continuous mix, there’s plenty of long pauses, giving the appearance of different compositions, but they sometimes seem like progressions from previous portion of the mix. It’s really hard to tell what is going on, of course, so it’s best to just give up trying to make sense and accept occasional awkward silences as part of the journey. At one point, a classical record gets muddled up with some sour horns and grubby, skipping house tracks, and it feels like it’s going somewhere and nowhere at once, and then it just fades out. The other side starts out sounding like it’s being consumed by quicksand, but the beat gets more alert later on. Then it ends with some of the same flashy carnival-type noises as the beginning. The members of Pure Rave are obviously well versed in both dance music and experimental noise, but they obviously chose the name Pure Rave because they do make dance mixes, and these tapes as well as their live sets seem like danceable avantgarde compositions.