Bugged Out at 20: electro-house, minimal techno and the first glow of new rave

Though electro-clash expired after a couple of years, it did open the gates to a new breed of DJs and gave house music a more steely, seedy underbelly. By 2003 electro-house became the latest genre to whizz across flyers.

Examples of the genre nexus became huge at Bugged Out at The End, including the Tiefschwarz mix of Spektrum’s Kinda New and Ewan Pearson’s mix of Perspex Sex by Freeform Five.

Though mavericks such as Damian Lazarus and Ivan Smagghe never liked being linked to any fads, their Bugged Out! Suck My Deck compilations captured this period perfectly. Both DJs had come from different backgrounds musically but been pivotal in the electro sea change. Smagghe was a resident at Kill The DJ in Paris and one half of Black Strobe, and Lazarus helmed the club 21^st Century Body Rockers and the Crosstown Rebels label. Lazarus also included a remix on his album by Chilean DJ Ricardo Villalobos who had, alongside Richie Hawtin and fellow Chilean Luciano, been championing minimal techno. By 2005, this was the sound that filled most clubs in London and across Europe.

Minimal at its best was Latin-infused, hypnotic and seductive. But sometimes the tracks were so stripped back it sounded risible. I wondered what motivated a producer to go into a studio to produce hum-free scraps of sound, only really of use as tools for DJs or folk out of their minds on ketamine, the scene’s drug of choice. The best description of minimal’s paltry percussiveness – which has been used so often the source seems irrelevant – was “the sound of a skeleton wanking in an oil drum”.

Though minimal reigned for several years, a counter scene of more maximal sounds juxtaposed it. In 2006 we significantly moved Erol Alkan from Room 2 to the main room of The End. He was very much the antithesis of that oil drum-bound bag of bones. He encouraged us to bring over a Berlin-based producer called Boys Noize and they both played a lot of tracks by Parisian duo Justice in their sets. Justice were managed by Daft Punk’s ex-manager Pedro “Busy P” Winter, who had set up his own label Ed Banger to harness producers who shared this visceral vision. Like Erol, the main players had rock backgrounds and sported leather jackets. Justice’s Waters of Nazareth was the propeller and pinnacle of this rock techno sound. The duo actually went out of their way to make sure they sounded distorted, shrill and as exciting as humanly or robotically possible.

In 2006, during this fork in the road for techno, one of our regular DJs, Tiga, released his debut album, Sexor. To mark the occasion we handed him the keys to Bugged Out for one night. Though it’s now commonplace for a headline DJ to have control of a line-up, back then it was unusual. We had never let a DJ curate one of our bills, but trusted Tiga because he had been involved in clubs for as long as we had, and shared our enthusiasm for most facets of techno, electro, house and the myriad variants. He picked Soulwax – who had helped produce his album – Alkan and Trevor Jackson; but his masterstroke was asking if we could help get Altern 8 to be part of it.

He referred to Altern 8 as “his blues”, the first act he had ever truly loved. Mark Archer from the hardcore act was still DJing and producing and was game to revive the act. He even wore his old chemical warfare costume with the dust masks and brought the same MC they had used back in 1991 when they were regularly in the charts. It proved a prescient booking, as a new band called Klaxons were down the front for the performance that night taking notes.

Sub-genres of dance music are often coined by journalists or record shops looking to group a collection of acts together with a shared vision. Sometimes they are started as a joke. New rave – Klaxons’ invention – erupted in 2007 and lasted about as long as a hit of MDMA. Though Klaxons may have been initially joking, their idea was an original one; to capture the peaks, troughs and giddying highs of old-school rave – with guitars and the traditional band format. They went the whole hog encouraging their followers to bring glow-sticks to their gigs, talked hippy nonsense in the NME and got savvy remixes done by the likes of Simian Mobile Disco.

The scene sartorially mirrored the previous electro-clash generation’s love of garish, dayglo colours. And, once again, our audience at The End turned up to the club in daft cartoon-like fake glasses they couldn’t see through properly. Which is always a good thing.