RECENTLY in a hazy filled pocket of Melbourne's inner city clubland, a trance
dancer stood in the middle of the dancefloor. He waved his arms like a wooden
marionette whose strings had just been removed and his body flowed and buckled
as if an electric conduit were free flowing through it. The hard, Teutonic
beats of drum 'n' bass swirled through a void of metallic industrial dirges
and his body greedily succumbed to the rhythmic current.
Decadence, chemical oblivion, nihilism, tales from the underbelly, slaves to
the rhythm, shabby London docklands and Scottish and Mancunian housing estates
and a collective on a unified high anthemically chanting to a new kind of Messiah.
The '60s had the summer of love and psychedelia - and the '90s has the winter
of neon love, discontent and ecstasy highs.
Trancefloors, BPMs and breakbeats have surged from the dancefloor and into
the quills of a new literary generation and the bold pioneering and provocative
anthology Disco Biscuits: New Fiction from the Chemical Generation is
set to take on Biblical dimensions as it hits bookshelves.
Edited by Sarah Champion - freelance music journalist at NME at 16,
pop columnist for the Manchester Evening News , author of And
God Created Manchester , former publicist and private detective and today
a global party correspondent and the compiler of techno and drum 'n' bass CDs Trance Europe
Express and Breakbeat Science - who has the kind of objectivity
and experience to edit a wonderfully wicked and lethal temple to: "illegal
raves, corporate club culture and hedonistic chapters of drugs, sex, dancefloors,
dealers, police and DJs."
If Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting were the precursor
to addiction, alienation and its own form of generational anarchy then Disco
Biscuits is the next level; a parable for a new kind
of world order, and the breaking of the holy bread written by prophetic shamans
with a penchant for the alchemical side of life.
From junk-art shrine curators to writers and film-makers, first time authors,
cult gods, award winning journalists, editors, a Los Angelean born guitarist
who performed with Desmond Dekker and various ska and acid jazz bands, former
punks and reformed heroin addicts, spoken word poets, devoted fans of The
Simpsons and Star Trek , Liverpudlian writers and a plethora
of fringe-dwellers and culture junkies alike . . . in Disco Biscuits they
weave their intoxicating web into a global consciousness with stories that
pirouette through the seedy, hedonistic and experimental side of life.
A tale to bring a smile to your dial is Dean Cavanagh's flamboyant and brazen-edged ‘Mile
High Meltdown'. Picture a British Airways pilot at an altitude of 30,000, sucking
on a crack pipe, forcing his passengers - at gunpoint - to do the same and
revelling in his decision that the best entertainment his passengers could
ever experience was Junglists Kenny Ken, Fabio and Mickey Finn pumping out
their BPMs across the stratosphere. A Timothy Leary fable for the '90s is Douglas
Rushkoff's 'The Snow That Killed Manuel Jarrow' that weaves
its way through the chemical adventures and revelations of a tripped out dude.
Michael Rivers' cybernetic and nightmarish vision ‘Electrovoodoo ' sprouts
vitriol at the destruction of Gaia (Mother Earth) and conjures images of a
cross country jaunt between ghosts in the machine and sacrificial murder committed
on the dancefloor altar:
"I see the machines arising. I see them swimming
out onto the streets; fridges waddling clumsily, CD-players perching in
pylons, TVs basking in the sun and vacuum cleaners swimming sinuously the
stilted waters... "
The cynicism and alienation of a man a long way from home is heightened by
the corrupting tendrils of an elusive hypnotist named Juan; millionaire, entrepreneur
and parasitical exploiter who feeds the 24 hour raves, consumption of Molotov
cocktails and in the tropics of Morocco in Jonathan Brooks' ‘Sangria'.
Jeff Noon, author of Vurt , Pollen and Automated
Alice delivers one of the most outstanding and compelling concepts within Disco
Biscuits . His tripped-out mind, phantasmic imagination and ode to 1984 draws
a bleak and futuristic portrait of Manchester where “dancecops” rule, death by
disco is frequent and Adam and Eve were the Godmother and Godfather of the rave
in his story ‘DJNA'.
He writes: "There were around five hundred sinners left alive in
Manchester. Helix knew about half of them, but mostly they kept themselves
to themselves. The attributes of being a Dirty Judas (a DJ)? Loneliness,
secrecy, despair. Felix could thank the pagan gods of funk that he had his
very own Fig. Most pure souls ran a mile from such associations, because
most pure souls only wanted to dance with the Lord. And this was Manchester,
after all. The city of forever rhythm, where Jesus danced in the rain.”