The eMusic Dozen: Classic Rave

808 State's Graham Massey had been in the Manchester industrial outfit Biting Tongues. He hooked up with Martin Price, owner of the city's premier underground dance record store Eastern Bloc, and a teenage DJ duo, Andrew Barker and Darren Partington, who, as the Spinmasters, played hip-hop on Manchester pirate radio. 808's first hit "Pacific State" (here as "Pacific 202") was hailed as "New Age house" on account of its soothing sax sample and chorus of sampled bird-trills — perfect "coming down" music for outdoor raves as the sun rises. Highlights of Ninety, their third album but first for a major label, include the poignant "Ancodia," which turns samples of close-harmony soul into a heavenly host hovering over a dense undergrowth of rainforest rhythms, and "Sunrise," whose tendrils of flute and lambent horizons of synth making you picture a Polynesian island at dawn. Overall, 808 State's vibe is Detroit techno meets Weather Report-style jazz fusion.

For a couple of years in the early '90s, Belgium ruled rave culture, spewing out a series of innovatively abrasive tunes that rocked rave floors across the world while also upsetting droves of house and techno purists, who saw the style's brutal bombast as eradicating techno's links to black music altogether. Belgian techno's secret ingredients were indeed strictly Euro: a strong dose of Electronic Body Music, that stentorian dance floor-oriented offshoot of industrial, and a pungent tang of classical music, especially the more sturm und drang-y Carl Orff/Wagner sort. Out of all the Belgian hardcore hit-makers, t.99 had the most crossover success, reaching No. 14 in the UK charts with 1991's "Anasthasia." Its hook is a hard-angled stab pattern playing a choral sample from the famous "O Fortuna" sequence of Orff's Carmina Burana. The four mixes here are fairly indistinguishable, with the "Out of History" version perhaps having the edge.

The Prodigy could be Exhibit A in the case claiming that rave, far from being anti-rock like techno and house, was in fact a futuristic reinvention of rock. From hardcore classics like "Everybody in the Place" to the digi-punk of "Firestarter," the essence of the Prodigy is a teenage rampage of bring-the-noise mayhem. "Charly" was a Top 3 hit in the UK in August, 1991, and spawned the subgenre of "toytown rave"— tunes that sampled children's TV shows. "Charly" pilfers a Public Information Film advising children how to avoid getting lost: "Charly says, 'Always tell your mummy before you go off somewhere,'" the kid says, translating the words of a cartoon cat. The joke here is the idea of UK teenagers sneaking off to raves to get up to things that would horrify their parents. Charly's meow is also turned into a killer riff by Prodigy main-man Liam Howlett and is heard to best effect on the "Alley Cat" mix, where it becomes a blare of MDMA-activating noise.

Moby is surely the single most successful crossover artist to emerge from rave, eclipsing even the Prodigy. Few would have predicted this outcome circa 1991's "Go," a likeable but hardly earth-shattering techno novelty. In truth, there's not a lot to this tune: an efficient hypno-chug of a beat, the ghostly synth-refrain from Angelo Badalamenti's score for Twin Peaks, a soul-diva's moaned "yea-yeah-eah" and the shouted injunction, "Go!" But in its slight way, "Go" is perfect. The remixes are fairly unnecessary and the "Original" mix sounds completely unlike the version that everyone knows, but the "Radio Edit" is succinct, definitive and definitely the one to, er, go for.

The S and L in SL2 were the partnership of DJs Lime and Slipmatt. A big rave DJ, Slipmatt went on to grander fame still in the mid '90s as a linchpin of the happy hardcore scene. A reaction against the tense-and-moody vibe at ragga-jungle events, the happy-core movement attempted to wind back the clock to 1992. Ironic, then, that these 1997 remixes, aimed at the happy scene, revisit a pioneering ragga-rave anthem. Admittedly, the vibe of "On a Ragga Tip" is far from jungle's gangsta-rave glower. SL2 deploy the sing-songy vocal of Jah Screechy's "Walk and Skank," hyper-accelerated breaks and an Italo-house piano vamp to create a vibe of buoyant euphoria rather than growly rude-boy menace. The updates, by happy-core dons Force & Styles and Slipmatt himself, make the tune insanely frenetic and flustered-sounding, so go straight to the untouchable original version.

By the time the big rave acts got around to making albums, the rapid-turnover scene had usually moved on, leaving the group plying an already dated sound and the debut CDs moldering unsold in record store. Few were as surreally tardy as Liquid, aka Eamon Downes, whose "Sweet Harmony" hit big in 1992. The tune was made from heart-tugging piano chords and ecstatic twist of diva soul sampled from CeCe Rogers' "Someday," plus a ruff breakbeat, a rolling bass-line and a trippy techno riff. But it took Downes another three years to complete Culture. Taking vampy Italo pianos in the classic hardcore style but slowing them down to a mellow moonwalk pace, Culture seems like an attempt to adapt rave into home-oriented chill-out Muzak. It's pleasant enough, but in the end, this CD's best moment is "Sweet Harmony," a rave classic and sheer hardcore heaven.

It's abundantly documented that drug use has its dark side, but it was still a surprise when hardcore rave, a genre of music brazenly fueled by ecstasy, plunged into the twilight zone in the last months of 1992. "Darkside" was actually the name that scenesters started using to describe the new sinister sound of death-ray riffs and deliriously fractured breakbeats that emerged that grim winter and would dominate the rave underground through 1993. Bay B Kane was a major supplier of dark-vibed tuneage. This album contains his big '93 rave floor anthems "Rhythm" and "Hello Darkness." The former places its incongruously serene sing-songy sample — "rhy-thm, rhythm, rhy-thm, rhy-thm" — amid wobbly bass-plasma and ungodly synth stabs, while "Hello Darkness" embeds its sped-up and slimy-sounding sample of Simon and Garfunkel's "The Sounds of Silence" in a dank death-funk groove.

A collaboration between DJ Scud (doyen of the post-rave sub-underground known as splatterbreaks) and Panacea (Germany's don of darker-than-thou drum 'n' bass), the Redeemer is an exercise in retro-rave. This album's title pays homage to Reggae Owes Me Money by the Ragga Twins, one of the acts on the pioneering hardcore-rave label Shut Up and Dance. Thankfully, this isn't a period-detail-precise recreation of old-skool rave but more like a recombinant intensification: Scud and Panacea ransack effects from across the early '90s drug-dance continuum, jumbling the sequence of styles so that Belgian noise-riffs crash into eruptions of Jamaican ragga patois. The only anachronistic element with Hardcore is the rhythms beneath the delirious chaos, which aren't the topsy-turvy breakbeats of classic-era hardcore but closer to contemporary drum 'n' bass — jackknifing-at-the-waist snares that create a sprinting-on-the-spot feel like an endless videogame chase-scene.