Optimo mixtape 4
“Raise Your Hands If You Understand (Ambient House & E Musik from the early Rave era)"
At the start of the 1990s as the Rave scene exploded it was such a new thing for so many people that they often didn’t know what the music was, nor did they have the vocabulary to describe it. I was DJing every Friday night at Pure in Edinburgh and frequently had people come up and ask me to play some of that “E music” I always played. It took me a while to figure out what they were asking for and then I realised exactly what it was; it was a sound I played a lot as a counterpoint to the frenetic and hardcore sounds of the day. It was atmospheric, often tripped out and hypnotic, synth heavy, full of emotion, and yes, sometimes ecstatic. “E Musik” became MY genre and complements the new age, Utopian, proto trance, Ambient House sound, which was an actual thing at the time.
I still love all these records (and would still play them out). While I’m not generally very nostalgic I thought I’d revisit them and create a mix of what I think is a unique sound many people perhaps would not associate with the Rave era. Many of the records these tracks are from were played so often in very intense and extreme club conditions that they are in less than pristine condition, so please forgive some of the less than perfect audio here (I actually spent many hours editing out a lot of the worst scratches). As the record says, “Come together in peace & harmony…”
