"Drop Bass Network"
Trance Atlantic 2, pgs. 96-103
Sarah Champion


Milwaukee is known as 'Brew City'.  It's a town renowned for beer, heavy
metal, The Violent Femmes, its large number of German immigrants... and now,
Drop Bass Network, the Midwest's foremost party promoter and techno label.

We drive into town along an aerial highway, through a skyline of factory
chimneys and church spires reminiscent of a Northern English mill town.
Outside a wooden suburban house is a clue that all is not what it seems -- a
Barbie doll, sprayed silver and fetishized in a cage of nails hangs on the
wall.  Welcome to Drop Bass HQ, from which Kurt Eckes (aka Jethro X) and
Patrick Spencer (aka Jedidiah the Messiah) spin, record, run a label and
organize their raves.

Inside, Kurt is studying a huge anthology of Native American designs.  He's
looking for a new tattoo to add to his collection, which tells the story of
US subcultures of the past ten years.  For life he will bear the name Black
Flag, the letters LSD, Celtic symbols and even his own Drop Bass logo.
Every week he looks one stage freakier, as his blonde dreads grow and he
acquires more body piercings.

"The first music I was into was heavy metal -- Kiss!" he confesses.  "Then
when I got to high school I was into the punk scene.  I liked English punk
like the Sex Pistols and GBH of course, but mostly I loved Los Angeles bands
like Black Flag."

Then, in the fall of '88, his life was changed.

"I made my way to a club in Chicago and took ecstasy.  It was all by chance.
I'd never taken drugs.  I didn't even drink.  I'd never heard dance music or
been to a club.  I was into skating and hanging out with all these
skateboarders.  One of them had just gotten out of college.  He took us to
this club called Medusa's in Chicago.  It blew me away.  I'd never even
danced before.  It was probably one of the best times of my life."

Medusa's, a notorious underage party club, was responsible more than
anything else for turning Chicago's white industrial/punk kids onto dance.
Others among the audience who would later become influential included Matt
Adell (who now runs the Organico label) and David Prince (who was imspired
to launce America's first ravezine, Reactor, and has become Rolling stone's
first techno columnist).

Until then, house had been an exclusively black (and before that gay) scene.
Medusa's mixed it up in every possible way.  While Frankie Knuckles and
Farley 'Jackmaster' Funk spun upstairs, downstairs you'd hear New Order and
'alternative' tracks.  If punk and metal were ever going to morph into
techno, it was bound to happen in Chicagoland's neighbouring state of
Wisconsin.

"Milwaukee is a really heavy metal/punk rock town," says Kurt.  "Every year
they have a thing called Metalfest, three days of black, Satanic metal.  Our
whole intention was to get the metal kids into the rave scene."

Since Kurt's mind-blowing convesrion, he has gone on to throw a serious of
legendary parties.  As well as the four-day techno festivals Furthur and
Even Furthur, they promoted the Chicago leg of the ground-breaking See The
Light tour of Moby, Orbital and Aphex Twin.

"Raves started in Chicago in the winter of 1991.  Basically we got impatient
waiting for them to come to Milwauke, so swe started doing them ourselves!"

As well as establishing their own Midwest mafia of Woody McBride (DJ ESP),
Hyperactive, Mystic Bill, Terry Mullan and so on, they promoted
Chicago/Detroit gurus like T-1000 (Underground Resistance) and Ritchie
Hawtin.

Every influential movement begins with the inspiration of a few maverick
individuals.  The Midwest is no exception.  For the full picture you gotta
go much further back -- back to London in '88 where New York DJs Frankie
Bones and Lenny Dee would fly in to play acid house parties.  You could draw
a ten-year dance family tree, with pioneers crossing the channel in both
directions.

These New Yorkers took the rave ethos that they had witnessed on their many
UK trips and tried to recreate it in tuff-ass NY style.  By the early '90s,
they'd jump-started a whole scene based around Brooklyn's Storm nights.

In turn, Milwaukee punk Kurt stumbled upon them, and returned to his home
town on a mission.  And so the cycle continues.  "What was going on in the
Midwest wasn't going on anywhere else in the country.  We'd been playing
breakbeat, house and happy hardcore," says Kurt.  "Then, in the winter of
'93, I went to New York for the Storm parties and heard hard acid and
techno."

Inspired, the Drop Bass formula was sealed -- drawing together some of the
ruffest music from around the earth, pumping it out to rock-weaned Wisconsin
kids at mental orgies and blowing their minds!

"The hardcore we love is _really_ hard acid or _really_ hard, monotone,
driving German techno or UK hardcore like the Outcast Clan stuff or Spiral
Tribe."

The parties, described as "techno pagan rituals", criss-cross from Biblical
references to hedonism, peace 'n' love, rebirth and, at their weirdest,
Satanism.  They use skull and Exorcist logos and, like the Dutch Hellraiser
parties, their flyers burn with hellfire.

"Demons of the darkside taking control of your soul" promises a flyer for
their Grave Reverence party ('Helloween '93').  "An epic pagan gathering of
the tribes of evil."

Kurt says: "Personally, the dark side appeals to me more than the good side,
but I'm not like a satanic person or anything, although that's how a lot of
people perceive me."

"We threw a couple of parties that were based on hell:  that you were in
hell!  People really got off on it!  What we realized was that there was
this core group of kids at our parties who were really into this whole
concept of evil.  It doesn't go along with the whole happy rave image, I
know, but that's what we and our parties are about.  It's dark, but not
depressing -- just sort of unifying.  This is what we're trying to do -- you
got this super-heavy music and 1000 people crammed into a small space.  It's
a really intense experience."

In the summer of '94, Drop Bass Network turned their fierce philosophies
into a record label -- an outlet for all the up-and-coming purveyors of
gabba, acid, hardcore and hard techno whom they were booking and inspiring.
This posse became known as the Midwest Hardcorps and included Woody McBride,
DJ Hyperactive, Freddie Fresh, Astrocat and Delta 9.

The music... gritty, churning, urgent, lashing, grinding, throbbing,
enforcing, strong, breakneck, metal-laced, stomping, percussive,
hallucinating techno?  Or speedy, trance-inducing, kick modulating, 200-plus
bpm, acid-pounding, indescribably noisy, carnal, terrifyingly mean hardcore?

Gaining singles of th eweek in techno Bibles like germany's Frontpage, Dropp
Bass were soon able to recruit their heroes:  New York's stormtroopers Adam
X, Jimmy Crash and Frankie Bones.  Meantime, their success inspired their
artists to launch their own labels -- Woody McBride, Freddie Fresh...

Two years on, Drop Bass Network have grown beyond their Midwest roots to
become a global force, selling most of their stock in Holland, Germany and
Belgium.  THe label's logo of an arrow circling the world couldn't be more
appropriate.  Euro releases have included Deutschland's Speed Freak and
Brixton, Mooses On Acid from Sweden, Roland Caspar from Switzerland and
itinerant Spiral Tribe offshoot R-Zac 23.

It's a neat irony.  While CHicago's black house DJs found a home on
Holland's DJax, there's an army of Scandinavian artists whose only outlet is
Hicksville, Wisconsin.  Their upcoming catalogue is virtually all Euro
tunes.  After they released the "deep, dark hardcore" of Zekt and Nick East
from Denmark, the word got out that these American nuttas were into hard and
heavy and the Scandinavian demos flooded in.

"There really are no Scandinavian record labels, but in that part of the
world there a are a lot of artists doing Drop Bass-style hard acid,"
explains Kurt.  "And you know what I reckon... Scandinavia is the Midwest of
Europe!  It has the same mixture of industry and farming..."

Both are cultural backwaters, too -- where, out of boredom, the kids are
driven by an enthusiasm for music and a wild desire to party.

"In my perfect world, I would have a farm out in the country," says Kurt.

"We could have massive drug binges.  It would have a cultish type of
atmosphere, where everyone totally believed in the same purpose.  People
could stay for weeks at a time listening to techno -- just one continuous
party."