In the mid-1990s, record labels were cash-flush and music magazines plentiful. Warner Bros., Capitol, Universal, Mercury, RCA, Arista, Mute, and Astralwerks shuttled US-based music journalists across the Atlantic to cover England’s burgeoning Britpop, trip hop, drum and bass, and techno music scenes. The latter three genres were hailed by the press as the “electronic dance music revolution.”

Back then, my writing career was divided between jazz, indie rock, and electronic music. I wrote for Rolling Stone, JazzTimes, Ray Gun, and Option, among others. There was ample work, and music journalists—those of us covering popular music genres at least—enjoyed the good life.

In that seemingly simpler era, when the internet had not yet revolutionized everything we consume and the manner in which we consume it, electronic dance music (EDM) sounded menacing, like our imagined future.

Just as the Beatles, Stones, and others had recycled and revitalized American rhythm and blues 30 years earlier, English EDM artists like Goldie, Roni Size, Tricky, Squarepusher, Portishead, and—to different degrees—the Future Sound of London, Massive Attack, and the Chemical Brothers reprocessed early American hip-hop.

The most obvious example of this (re)reappropriation was the so-called Amen Break, a drum break sampled from “Amen, Brother,” the B-side to the 1969 hit single “Color Him Father” by Washington, DC, soul band the Winstons. A seven-second blast of reverb-laden groove explosion, the Amen Break was popular in 1980s hip-hop and can be heard, eg, in Salt-N-Pepa’s “I Desire,” N.W.A.’s “Straight Outta Compton,” and Mantronix’s “King of the Beats.”

Following suit in the ’90s, British drum and bass DJs sampled the Amen Break, boosting its BPMs to form the blazing bedrock of Source Direct’s “Secret Liaison,” Aquarius’s (aka Photek’s) “Dolphin Tune,” and Shy FX & UK Apache’s “Original Nuttah.” Ambient synth tones or gaseous vocal and percussion samples leavened the tracks’ heavy-artillery drumbeats.

Metalheadz Sunday Sessions at London’s Blue Note club, DJed and founded by Goldie, was ground zero for the drum and bass culture. In 1995, I watched slackjawed as solo dancers flagellated and jumped like pogo sticks to Goldie’s drum and bass warfare. It was like nothing I’ve heard or seen, before or since.

My frequent UK press junkets found me buying as many EDM CDs as I could carry home from the Virgin Megastore—that, and Cuban cigars from the tobacconists on Shaftesbury Avenue. I interviewed Squarepusher, Plone, Plug, Coldcut, the Future Sound of London, and others. I stayed in quaint hotels, visited relatives near Stonehenge, and watched Trainspotting at a small theater in Kings Cross.

Nearly 30 years, later, EDM has surfaced. It has been mainstreamed, commercialized, profit-extracted, and transformed into banal background music for cologne and auto advertisements and 007 films. But for one intense, trippy moment, the EDM underground sizzled.

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