Decades ago, the freshman year of college my posse tried to convert me into a rave music fan. For my hardcore grunge/ black metal soul it felt strange to switch from MTV's Headbangers Ball to MTV's Chillout Zone, and though I didn't get fully into it I managed to find myself a niche where I could stay on [more or less] the same grounds with my friends who embraced the likes of the happy hardcore acts Westbam or Marusha never getting through any aesthetic concerns I got through (despite the fact some of them played in death metal band). It was the mere border of progressive techno and electro industrial with Biosphere and Banco de Gaya on one side, :Wumpscut: and X-Marks The Pedwalk on another and Prodigy’s “The Fat Of The Land” as the [theoretically achievable] arithmetical mean of both. "Vortice", though 25 years younger, sounds like the integral part of that era. It sounds like flesh and bones of that time and place. Where is my compact cassette player? I need to listen to a string of Moonraker compilations right now, and maybe to record “Vortice” on the B side of a 90M cassette whose A side is Leftfield's "Leftism".
