1993 – a techno ice cream van
Underworld, 'Rez'
We’ll have been getting the music ready for a funeral when I casually asked if she knew what I’d want to be played at mine. Well, I say casually – it will have been as casual as one could be when discussing their demise. She shrugged, probably feeling quite uncomfortable to have landed on the topic, and made the twirly, speed-it-up motion with her hand so we could hurry off it again, and back onto planning for someone else’s.
“Yeah, yeah,” she said. “I know. ‘Rez’.”
*
I’m not a very good music writer, in that I don’t know things about influences and What Has Gone Before. My knowledge of punk, once my very favourite genre to the exclusion of all other types of music, doesn’t stretch far enough to care for its inspirations. I wondered the other day if Karl Hyde and Brian Eno’s track ‘Lilac’ can be called a spiritual sequel to ‘Rez’ two decades after the fact – or if that was just a very, very pretentious and wanky thought.
But I’ve buried myself under the intellectual weight of things for a long time because enough bad things have happened to me, moulded my mindset and dulled the senses, that I forgot great art is supposed to make you feel things, not just stroke your chin appreciatively. Not just great music, either; a memorable quote or a bit in a film. In the overlap of Bowie’s “crackiiiing” and Mercury’s “can’t we give” in ‘Under Pressure’, there’s a dose of pure adrenaline which makes my hairs stand on end. I could’ve spent 2,000 words trying to describe that feeling in that line of that song, but fortunately for you Mixtape readers, I was born too late.
I’d thought the first time I ever heard ‘Rez’ – all ten minutes of it – was on a compilation my older brother had. I’ve somehow managed to track down the compilation in question online, a double-disc soundtrack for some kind of BBC drama about late-Nineties clubland, only to find that the group’s contribution on there was ‘Push Upstairs’ (oh, and ‘Bigmouth’ is on there too – albeit credited to their previous incarnation Lemon Interupt). So actually I don’t know where I first stumbled across ‘Rez’.
I do know it can be heard in the nightclub scene on Vanilla Sky. But you don’t get the full effect of the beauty of it while you’re watching Tom Cruise stumbling about with his daft mask on. You need headphones, darkness, the vague sense that songs have the power to speak to you in ways you’ve never understood, or really looked for before.
And yes, it made me feel things. Or rather, listening to ‘Rez’ held me in a hypnotic trance for ten minutes and made me feel a whole rush of things after the fact.
A few years removed from their synth-pop past as Freur, and a few years before they’d conquer pop culture with a song about drinking taken from a film about drugs, Underworld was trying to find a new spiritual home. They made two albums of funk-laden synth-rock and bemoaned their lot from big stages across the States, on a big tour supporting Eurythmics. It wasn’t what they wanted. But they struggled on, without a deal and without an idea what their true identity was.
Hyde and Rick Smith would end up in Romford, befriending a young DJ called Darren Emerson who became their cultural conduit to the audience, and the sound, they’d been looking for. It came from rave, techno, and the ability to lose oneself in the sound that these proper musician types had been lacking – hidden behind record labels and tours and trying to make a living. They flogged records from the back of their car in between late-night/early-morning sets, and took their experimental setup on the road.
Hyde dug back through old notebooks of previous lives; he would wander streets from Manhattan to Manchester, piecing poetic fragments together, and would set these to the music they were making. Emerson was a DJ, strictly speaking, but he co-wrote some tracks and assisted on production duties. Smith created the monster, fusing spiky guitars and stream-of-consciousness lyrics onto big beats and synth hooks – the Frankenstein they brought to life, the first time the indie kids and the techno kids bumped into each other on their dancefloor.
Tracks this good, you find it infuriating that they didn’t even bother putting it on an album for ten years after they made it. It’s a staple of their live set, combined with ‘Cowgirl’, which gives Hyde something to do for a few minutes either side of the wordless ‘Rez’. It’s a good combo for a live set, but my experience of ‘Rez’ is all the better on its own.
*
Oh, but it’s just dreamy. ‘Rez’ unfolds with the hallmarks of that tinny techno sound, minimalist beats and bleeps and bloops on a loop. The sound starts to breathe a little more, more air bubbles floating to the surface of this sea of sounds. And then the waves rolling in on top – rolling, rollicking drums that pick you up and whisk you into the wash of the full, unadulterated clap and stomp of rhythms and Rez and my word it’s a journey.
When I close my eyes and listen, I can feel myself in every significant place I’ve spent time alone listening to it. Bedrooms and kitchens in West Yorkshire and Manchester; the times it’s accompanied the views from cars and trains, soundtracking stunning views of cities and beaches as I find a place to watch and listen.
‘Rez’ is the sound of me taking a deep breath and feeling at peace. Which is probably why I feel like it could be the song playing when I’m at a different kind of peace, a few decades down the line. Bit of a depressing note to end on, so how about this: Karl Hyde calls ‘Rez’ “the sound of a techno ice cream van coming towards you”. Much nicer.