To most people, illbient is a footnote in ‘90s music history, another cold body in the great morgue of modern music categorization. To those that know, illbient was more than just a musical genre. Its key protagonists were a ragtag bunch of artists and musicians, thinkers and doers, interested in art, theorizing, technology and living.

In the decade or so it existed, illbient acted as the experimental electronic backdrop to New York’s dance music scene, the arrival of the dot com generation and the gentrification of Brooklyn and Disney-ification of Manhattan that took hold in the ‘00s. Musically, it brought together dub, ambient and hip hop aesthetics, and found kinship in sounds emanating from Europe (namely jungle and trip hop), as well as the downtown music scene. The artists involved tried to find ways to bring electronic music to the stage at a time when the idea was still widely derided. And, physically, it was attached to experiential concepts – rave, warehouse parties, chill out rooms and lounges – that defined much of the decade’s party aesthetics. In Brooklyn, there was the dub and hip hop experimentalism of DJ Olive, Lloop and Once11 (known as We™), the Wordsound label – headed by Skiz Fernando Jr., AKA Spectre – and Bill Laswell, whose studio acted as a hub for many artists. Over in Manhattan was the noise and breakbeat experimentalism of Paul D. Miller, AKA DJ Spooky, the multicultural eclecticism of Byzar, the multimedia approaches of Tim Sweet and the party and community acumen of Carlos Soul Slinger and Soundlab Cultural Alchemy.

The story of illbient is the story of an artistic and intellectual movement set in a city in the final throes of the century. It flourished during New York’s last permissive decade and ended when Giuliani tightened his grip, the millennium switched and all stood still in the shadow of 9/11. Thanks to its complexity, lack of documentation and the protagonists’ minimal hubris and commercial savvy, illbient fell through the cracks of history. In the following oral history of the genre that never was, Laurent Fintoni attempts to shine a light on what it was, what it meant, and why it’s been forgotten.

Rich Panciera

Matt E. Silver

My relationship with Gregor and Lalalandia began with the 1993 Orb show I did at Roseland. Gregor came in and did this huge fucking water installation, I had DJs in the bathroom, basement, everywhere. It was a total trip.

Gregor Asch

We usually had a couple of street musicians we’d find in the subway. We’d bury them inside installations and let them play. You’d find a really cool Latin drummer in the subway and give him 50 bucks to come play at the party for the night. Set him in the corner underneath weird shit and there’d be this incredible drum beat just pulsing out of this corner.

Matt E. Silver

Lalalandia did a 50 ft. blow up condom at my Hardcore From Heaven party. They didn’t really care if they made money, which was great with me.

Gregor Asch

There was a feeling of action. Post modernism was cool but we’d had enough of it. We wanted to build something pure and forward-looking, something positive. I was depressed by how cynical all my friends had become after college in the 1980s. There was no way to be sincere without people taking the piss out of you. No way to talk about solutions without sounding like some idiot. With the rave scene it wasn’t like you sat and talked a lot, it was just a feeling. It was contagious. You got really positive after going out and dancing with a few thousand people. It was political without being overtly political.

Beth Coleman

The story starts for me with Rudi Giuliani. He was shutting down clubs and started to make it illegal to dance in bars. I met Paul [Miller, AKA DJ Spooky] because we both worked at The Village Voice. Wide-eyed, young writers want to do things and change culture. We were ready to do something. The constraint of Giuliani taking fun out of the city was an amazing incentive to say, “What can we do?”

Rich Panciera

I originally developed my live looping technique at one of the Lalalandia parties because they needed some beats for the dancefloor. They had this open source DJ booth with lots of equipment but it was mostly a cloud of noise. So I began to loop breakbeats, breakdowns from techno songs, hip hop records. Anybody who wanted could come up and play on all of this stuff.

Gregor Asch

I’d use tape wire to make the tone arm skip so as to imitate a sampler. Play house records at 16 RPM, using these fucked up granny turntables with speakers on the side, and skip them to get different sounds. Repeat that with other records and you’d get a weird synch. Once you got five going, it was pretty psychedelic. I would also make grilled cheese sandwiches while DJing, which at 4 AM was pretty great.

Matt E. Silver

Lalalandia started inviting me to Brooklyn after The Orb show. I also started doing parties with Pseudo, a company owned by Josh Harris. He was trying to be a dot-com Andy Warhol, they made a movie about him called We Live In Public. I introduced him to the Lalalandia guys and he got them to do some of his parties. In some twisted way he was part of the story.

Raz Mesinai

Gregor started inviting me to their events, the first time I went to Lalalandia was in Greenpoint. It was great to see people doing DIY shit, building stuff with their own hands. Gregor was a carpenter. They were setting up a space for us to do weird shit and make it more acceptable. Bean bags everywhere.

Carlos Slinger

I came over from Brazil in 1989 and opened my first shop in 1990 in Soho. I discovered Lalalandia after meeting Mariano Airaldi and his wife. They showed me some of their techno-organic jewellery, carrots with microchips and wires, and I sometimes sold them in the shop.

Karthik Swaminathan

Carlos Soul Slinger was very important in creating the scene with Liquid Sky Designs and Liquid Sky Records.

Carlos Slinger

We closed our first shop in 1992, and moved to Lafayette Street. I feel that place became essential to help promote ideas and give shelter to a thirsty scene. The need for a physical space is so important, a place to meet outside the club environment, to hang out and exchange ideas. Lalalandia were throwing experimental parties in Williamsburg and we decided to join forces with my party called Noise Lab. I brought Dimitri from Dee Lite, John Hall and some others. When I first met Gregor he was playing on this turntable for kids.

Gregor Asch

Carlos heard me skipping two copies of a Sesame Street record. He was like, “What the fuck?!” The next time we did a party together he brought records and jumped over my makeshift fence and pushed me to the side. We didn’t speak or anything, he just pulled out another Sesame Street record and started skipping it. We became friends after that. Carlos then invited me to play at one of the drum & bass parties they did, in the chill out room upstairs. On the way over he asked if I had headphones. I didn’t know what for. That was the night I got to play on a real DJ set up for the first time. It was maybe 1992. I was completely hooked by the end of the night.

Paul D. Miller

I met Gregor through Soul Slinger. The stuff Gregor and the Brooklyn guys were doing was more spacey, I was doing more noise, art stuff. Weird sounding, but not necessarily spaced out.

Carlos Slinger

I fell in love with Paul’s style and approach to records. I was already into jungle and he was playing all this dub and reggae.

Rich Panciera

Eventually the rents went up and the emphasis moved to Manhattan, which was a bit better I think. It brought people who knew how to market ideas.

Matt E. Silver

Brooklyn was no man’s land. It was all Lalalandia, their warehouses and factories, their events. But you couldn’t really pull people there. Frankie Bones did Storm Rave in Brooklyn, the first raves in New York, but all the way out in nowhere Brooklyn. And those guys didn’t really care about visuals or the overall experience.

Akin Adams

It was still possible at that time to live as an artist in Manhattan. Our scene came together around the East Village mostly.

Paul D. Miller

The East Village was bombed out: empty buildings, mad junkies, the heroin epidemic. There were also a lot of issues with Tompkins Square, homeless people were being forcedly removed by the administration.

Sheldon Drake

A lot of us were living pretty marginally and life didn’t look like such a bright place. Sound was full of possibility. I remember the first times I heard the sizzle of time stretched samples and jungle. Lots of dance music could be super cheesy and idiotic, and it just didn’t speak to anybody I knew. Dark, creepy stuff did.

Beth Coleman

There was a lot of gathering around the Gas Station in Manhattan. Early multiple sound stations, people all playing at once, different kinds of things going on.

Karthik Swaminathan

I would go to the Gas Station, which was next door to me, or Williamsburg to jam and create environments. I did sound production for Pseudo’s online radio during the day, wrote for Word Magazine and studied at NYU. At first I thought I was a part of separate scenes that were working on different aesthetics and ideas, but little by little they converged until it became a huge family that made up the artistic community of the city. It was fascinating how interconnected it all was, especially with the new media field. I would build a video installation controlled by theremins for a Josh Harris Pseudo party and then play with Byzar there later that night.

Gregor Asch

The term illbient was a joke I told a reporter, English guy. We were at a party called Molecular at the Gas Station listening to Akin Adams, from Byzar. He was playing bass on a chair in a puddle of water through some effects and two amps to the surrounding bleeding sound from the other people playing in the room. The reporter asked, “Is this ambient?” and I replied, “No, man, this is fuckin illbient.” It was pretty ill, so when he asked that question it was such a ridiculous thing to say that the response kinda blurted out of my mouth.

Akin Adams

At the start of the night that puddle of water was a block of ice. It was the middle of winter and it was freezing. There was one of those jet engine heaters in the garage. By the time the party got started the ice had turned into a bit of a lake.

Gregor Asch

Rich Panciera and I both thought the word was funny and kinda cool, so we started a mixtape label called Illbient Recordings. We put out Bulbbs on cassette, a continuous mix of Rich’s own material, all loops. Then the word kinda took legs in the downtown scene and we ended the label.

Paul D. Miller

After graduating I moved to New York and started writing for The Village Voice and The Source. Illbient was a term I was using at the time for fun and kicks. I didn’t think anything of it, but I was using it actively.

Matt E. Silver

There’s a beef around who came up with illbient, and it still lives to this day but they’re all good people. Gregor and Paul probably came up with it at the same time, but Paul put it in print. He was a super smart guy and prolific writer and Gregor was really at the nucleus of the art scene in Williamsburg before he became Olive. Paul had a great view on how scenes are made, and he brought in all those pieces to help make it happen.

Karthik Swaminathan

I was a huge fan of Eno at the time and inspired by some interviews I read with him. In the end I couldn’t relate to the illbient tag in the long run, and found it became a limitation of musical possibilities. It also seemed that most often the term was taken literally, as in “background sounds to throw up to.” That definition was the farthest place from where I wanted to go.

Rich Panciera

Illbient was a reactionary name. Ambient was brand new and hyped but what was going on in New York wasn’t like the ambient that the rest of the world was experiencing. New York chill out rooms were different, they were way more embracing of free improvisational jazz, more about texture and noise. That’s where the necessity for the name came up. You just couldn’t use the word ambient in New York, it didn’t mean the same thing as the rest of the world. But illbient also had all of these different sounds that each band pushed.

Gregor Asch

The ambient music of the early ’90s was a bit prettier than what the downtown New York scene was about. We wanted to do something more rugged and ill, in the hip hop sense of taking two things that normally shouldn’t go together, like samples that are tempo-matched but out of tune, because of the technology. There is tension in that outness and we felt that tension was true to life in a way, because life has tension, life is fucked up. The music reflected that ill quality.

Akin Adams

Ill came from the alliance with hip hop and breakbeats. We’d spin a lot of the ambient records of the time but also older stuff, compositional records from the 1960s and 1970s. But there would always be a beat and a groove involved, there was always a sense of needing more bass and more of a beat. That’s why it stuck, because we were all like, “This is ill.”

Paul D. Miller

For me ill was about tricksterism, ambiguity, uncertainty. When you said it’s “ill,” it was always meant to be something that is not only cool but also indefinably cool. It’s almost a contradiction in terms. It was also a simpler way to describe the mess of different styles and sounds we indulged in.

Rich Panciera

I mean come on, the Gas Station!? That was ill. Loading gear into the Gas Station was a trip. There’d always be six or seven junkies just looking at you, drooling. Every minute of your life you’d have to get aggressive with someone in New York. It was ill, harsh. People with their heads busted, junkies scamming. It’s why a New York chill out room wouldn’t work the same anywhere else, because it was ill.

Raz Mesinai

When people call New York City rough or whatever, it’s really a tuning thing. It’s off key from western intonations. A lot of hip hop was made from mainly off tune samples. Detuning, vibrating speakers, using four tracks to mess with sound is a very New York thing.

Akin Adams

It’s the same as a Wu-Tang record with a piano sample that’s looped a certain way so that it’s off, but also more interesting.

Gregor Asch

As We™ that’s what we were trying to do with sampling. By combining samples that sounded cool to us we achieved something greater than the sum of its parts. That, to me, was the root of illbient. Infusing that hip hop idea into ambient music was something that was interesting for us as downtown beat makers.

Akin Adams

The beats from hip hop, the bass from dub and the space from ambient. That’s what it was.

Gregor Asch

You’d take a King Tubby record that could be played on 45, match it with a hip hop instrumental and then mix in Edgar Varese’s Poème Electronique. That to us was ambient. The ambient part of illbient was musique concrète, not necessarily Eno. Also acid and techno 12-inches, like the early Air Liquide, with total washed out stuff on the flipside full of lots of weird electronics. They were kinda ill. Mixing all these things together would give you a weird feeling inside. Some people would get a kind of vertigo from it.

Raz Mesinai

Olive and I shared this idea of creating DJ tools, we were inspired by them. Poème Electronique was a tool. Our Sub Dub records were full of tools like that, locked grooves, they were essential.

Beth Coleman

Paul brought a strong dancehall vibe for me as did Ambassador Jr., who died last year. He was a champion skateboarder who got into the whole turntablism scene. He was the most dextrous scratcher within our loosely affiliated crew.

Raz Mesinai

I met Paul early on, and we threw a party together called Hooky Greens with Max Glazer, playing dancehall, dub and reggae. This was the early ‘90s, Paul had just started to DJ.

Gregor Asch

Dub was almost more important than hip hop as an aesthetic, dub production values influenced us. A lot of it grew out of the Crooklyn scene and Bill Laswell’s studio. Musique concrète was this academic approach to sound and engineering, but dub was a different approach, developed for sound system battles. And this tradition was key to us.

Paul D. Miller

Growing up in DC, the stuff that inspired me was dub. I used to go to a club called Kilimanjaro, a small place. We also had stuff like Bad Brains and Minor Threat and I grew up listening to that.

Rich Panciera

We considered ourselves dub artists in a way, even if we weren’t playing reggae. Dub was beyond genre, it was the embrace of this idea that you can move a step higher with technology. And with hip hop having roots in Jamaica, but being an American music, we also saw a parallel.

Gregor Asch

Dub and instrumental hip hop didn’t do four on the floor, which was huge. That classic reggae element of drums and bass having this subtle but effective elastic tension between them, not so much in your mind, more in your ass. It gets your ass moving. It excites you until you can put your finger on it, so the longer you can’t, the better.

Rich Panciera

During the daytime I would work with all these hip hop beat guys from the different neighbourhoods. So I was aware of the position of the producer in hip hop, and to me they were totally jazz. Producers are jazz. Jay Dee is John Coltrane. The interesting thing is that not all the illbient scene realized they were hip hop beat guys. But they were, in a mutated way. Hip hop and illbient were just two different manifestations of the electronic developments of the time.

Raz Mesinai

Before illbient happened there was already an experimental hip hop scene in New York, with Anti Pop, Mike Ladd, and I felt close to them. Some of the illbient scene had stronger ties to hip hop than others. Wordsound worked with a lot of New York hip hop artists like Prince Paul, Jungle Brothers.

Skiz Fernando Jr.

As I saw it, we were stretching the parameters of dub, and really rhythm in general, and taking it away from its Jamaican roots and into outer space. To me, that was the whole intention of dub anyway: to make the most of whatever technology you had to reach a higher plain.

Gregor Asch

There was a real segregation between the downtown experimental musician scene and dance music. There was a schism there at the time, which was also true globally. We were trying to bridge that.

Paul D. Miller

The issue for me was convincing people there shouldn’t be any divisions. If someone’s good enough at their instrument they’re always going to be open to new ideas and approaches of how to use or integrate it. It’s about expanding your playing vocabulary. DJ culture suffered from making it easier to “play” things without knowing the musical make up, chords, progression etc., but it also freed things up.

Rich Panciera

Illbient had its feet in different scenes, from the chill out rooms of electronic music to jazz and the downtown scene. The Kitchen and The Knitting Factory really embraced it early on. The jazz and downtown scene guys would show up to shows you’d never imagine.

Raz Mesinai

John Zorn actually discovered me through one of those parties.

Karthik Swaminathan

It was always the intention to bridge electronic and live with Byzar. Even in the first shows at the RV we used the drums as a means of triggering samples and the violin as a controller for synth filters, while Akin recorded soundscapes that were used in the background. We were as comfortable playing gigs in a post-rock stage context as in dance clubs. I didn’t see any divide. We played gigs with Trans Am and Hovercraft one night, with Cibo Matto and Blues Explosion the next and then we would open for The Prodigy the following night and I would do a DJ set in-between.

Gregor Asch

We were trying to breakdown the prejudices on both sides. We didn’t want to do the hip hop instrumental with a sax player on top. We were trying to find a way to be inside the band, or have the band be inside the electronics. And that required a certain type of aesthetic and ability on the part of musicians to be more repetitive or use weird sounds, use electronics themselves, and for us to strip down to make room for them. There was a communal research between the two strains and a lot of the parties weaved back and forth. The best ones started out with more band stuff into weird electronics and by midnight into more of just DJ sets. I think that was really the reason illbient got onto the map and had some success, because of that crossover. It allowed these great downtown improvisers to enter into the music. And that in turn appealed to a lot of people, especially in Europe.

Manny Oqeundo

We appealed to all those who were kinda done with rock, done with straight hip hop and who needed something else. We were mapping stuff out. We were writing the rulebook. I see people’s setup now and I see us. We were smashing machines.

Gregor Asch

In the chill out room we could do weird shit with dub, old concrete records and a musician or two. That was just so beautiful. When illbient got defined later on as a reaction to dance culture, that to me was bullshit. I felt like we were very much part of the dance culture and electronic music movement. We were just trying to make our own corner of it. No greater or lesser than any of the other sub genres that were being defined every week at that time.

Akin Adams

We were all working with the kind of live set ups that are taken for granted now. Back then we had to spend a lot of time figuring out stuff. How do we take this out of the studio? We’d always run into this issue at certain shows, venues were either set up for rock bands or DJs. Sound guys going, “You want us to plug what into what now?” We had more line inputs than most people knew what to do with.

Matt E. Silver

Nobody took live electronic music seriously in the early 1990s in New York. Moby’s second show at The Limelight, in 1992, he brought he whole studio on stage. Everybody was laughing.

Raz Mesinai

I always saw people doing live electronic music but the illbient scene helped. Sub Dub always brought a lot of gear to the stage, so did The Orb. A lot of what we all did in the 1990s set the way for today, for Ableton and presets. We had to figure out how to hold keys down to play samples while doing other things.

Rich Panciera

There were a lot of battles when we played live, especially on tour. We always wanted to perform with the soundman but we were always stuck being on stage not able to hear what’s going on in front of house with someone translating for us. We tried to get it in the contracts that we should perform at the sound booth and people can go dance on stage if they want. They were all looking at each other anyway. But promoters wouldn’t have it. They wanted a visual thing, which was ridiculous to us.

Akin Adams

There was a period in the mid- to late ’90s, though, where we had regular weekly venues. Abstrakt Wave one night, Soundlab another night, Electro Foetus on a Wednesday with live electronic jams. There was an event on Sundays at Belle Café.

Sheldon Drake

For a while I had parties to go to every night of the week. Everybody wanted to play records and it wasn’t hard to find places to DJ and sometimes stretch out and be weird.

THE PARTIES

MOLECULAR AT THE GAS STATION

Paul D. Miller

I was renting the Gas Station from this eccentric dude whose family had bought the building. He was a painter and sculptor, and he had all these crazy sculptures in the space. He told me I could put my studio and keep stuff there. It was huge, in the middle of downtown and almost zero rent, maybe couple hundred bucks nominal. So I started throwing what I called rent parties where people paid five bucks to get in, and we invited people to do installations.

Akin Adams

Molecular wasn’t a regular event. There were maybe four, five of them. The set-up for early Molecular parties involved Paul spinning breakbeats in one corner, me in another corner playing guitar, with a lot of effects, feedback and delay, and sometimes another DJ named Peter who spun purely ambient, art records. I remember Olive and his crew would sometimes come and do inflatable mazes and space transformations. So you’d walk into the room and depending on where you stood you’d get a different mix of sounds happening.

Paul D. Miller

We wanted to keep it light and fun, so the parties would spread. I was making mixtapes at the time and they spread too. Bill Laswell got hold of one, he got in touch and him and Julian Schnabel came by the Gas Station. So did Yoko Ono and Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth. We had a lot of rock and punk bands playing too. GG Allin and The Murder Junkies played their last show in the Gas Station before he died from an overdose.

Matt E. Silver

Spooky was a hip hop Jean-Michel Basquiat type character. There was even a moment when Julian Schnabel wanted him to play the part of Basquiat for his biopic, so this association, this legacy, was tied to him. He was sleeping in the Gas Station in the freezing fucking cold with ten blankets. He came from a good background but he knew what he was doing. He wanted to be an artist so he went and lived it. He was like Schnabel’s street guy, more of an operative. Whereas Gregor and Lalalandia… those guys were the real deal. The writers were more Paul and the Soundlab crew, Howard and Beth. They looked at the scene from an intellectual point of view.

Akin Adams

Molecular brought together all these crews that had been operating independently and provided a playground for them to work together in, and from there people moved on to doing other things. Beth Coleman was a really strong female presence in the scene, as were Christina Wheeler, Honeychild and others. There were a lot of really cool women doing really cool stuff.

Beth Coleman

We had a lot of language, philosophy… it drove some people crazy. They thought it was pretentious and annoying. People had problems with Paul or Howard [Goldkrand, Soundlab’s co-founder with Beth and Paul] having so much language. We’d talk about Temporary Autonomous Zones, Hakim Bey, semiotext authors. It was part of the play for us. You didn’t have to read Deleuze to like it or hate it. We were psyched to have these ideas and do things.

Rich Panciera

The Gas Station had a net of metal welded over it outside, like a Terrordome type thing. All car parts and every bullshit piece of metal you could find. We would lift our gear up into that dome and play looking down on everyone for the whole night. We’d play for eight hours, first at the Gas Station and then Save The Robots across the street. It allowed us to hone our skills. I saw it as absolutely necessary if you were going to become good at performing with gear to play long gigs. When you stopped, you were exhausted.

ABSTRAKT WAVE

Gregor Asch

The Abstrakt Wave party started because I couldn’t get hold of any 1200s. After I started playing on real DJ set-ups I met this guy Josh, who designed Yak Pak bags. He told me a bar in the Village might have 1200s. We went and the owner said I could come on Sunday nights and have run of the turntables for 40 bucks and some drinks. Josh would make flyers and I invited bands. We had Cibo Matto play before they were anybody. That night was so packed you couldn’t get in. Afterwards the owner kicked us out because he never wanted a party on a Sunday. Tim Sweet, who lived round the corner and had a storefront, said we could move it to his place. And it ran there for a few more years.

Tim Sweet

In 1994 I moved into a new studio space that I dubbed The RV in the East Village. At the same time Olive and Spooky were looking for a new spot to do Abstrakt Wave.

Sheldon Drake

The studio The RV was in was previously occupied by Michael Gira of Swans. I lived two floors above with a hateful deranged creep between us who was the ultimate cause of the party ending.

Akin Adams

The RV space was really small, you couldn’t get more than 50 people in there.

Manny Oqeundo

It had this railroad feel to it, it looked like a real RV. The sound system always moved around, it was never set up in the same place.

Gregor Asch

We did a few parties that ran for 24 hours. Then we did a 36 hour one and a 48 hour one. DJs playing back to back sets non-stop. They were really cool parties because you could leave, go shower and maybe even go to work and come back. The crowd would change with the DJs too. It was also a place where you could spin real ambient sets. There’s a great quote from one of those nights, someone came up to the DJ and said, “Man, your set was so good I didn’t wake up once!”

Manny Oqeundo

These events were real small and a lot of smart people would come. Writers, artists… it was an interesting scene. Intellectuals. People would be talking about all sorts of stuff. It wasn’t elitist but there was a lot of intelligence there.

Tim Sweet

One of the many things that made the Abstrakt Wave special was the diverse mix of DJs and performers, some of which were experienced performers while others were filmmakers, writers, engineers and visual artists with a love of sound that wanted to experiment. Everyone was appreciative of and in it for the spirit of raw creativity.

Gregor Asch

The Abstrakt Wave was really a meeting ground for people that were doing weird shit.

Raz Mesinai

It’s New York, not everyone is from here but at the same time multiculturalism was pretty new. So a degree of gentrification comes into it. Hearing Indian music mixed with beats was pretty new for me growing up in the city. The best thing about The RV for my artistic practice is that it gave me a space to do things I couldn’t do in big clubs like The Limelight. Four turntable sets, all kinds of crazy ideas. Olive, this guy Toshio and myself formed a DJ trio playing four turntables, handing each other records so we wouldn’t know what we were playing, improvised turntable jams. It blew my mind open.

THE COOLER

Paul D. Miller

Thurston Moore and Mos Def used to play at The Cooler. It was run by this guy called Jedi.

Raz Mesinai

I met Jedi before The Cooler opened. Sub Dub played there regularly. Anti Pop played there, it’s where I met Mike Ladd. Jedi had an amazing ear for music and a wide range, and he looked like a pimp! The place looked amazing, it was an old meat cooler.

Rich Panciera

The Cooler was an important venue for the scene. I remember going to a show there that had something to do with Bill Laswell’s studio or label. That was first the time I saw Sub Dub. We™ had just begun, we’d started gigging, coming into Manhattan and talking about what we wanted to do musically. For me that’s when a lot of paths began to cross in the course of a few months and which would eventually continue for the rest of the decade. This might have been around the time of Crooklyn Dub Vol. 1. Everything became very active all of a sudden.

Skiz Fernando Jr.

I saw Sub Dub for the first time at The Cooler, and was amazed that someone else was pushing the dubwise vibes. I approached Jedi after that and convinced him to do Night Of The Living Dub, which was a Wordsound monthly party focused on dub and hip hop.

Matt E. Silver

I did my Futur Space parties at The Cooler. This is back when the Meat Packing district was a total no man’s land. I had Mixmaster Morris play there, Spooky, Autechre, Terre Thaemlitz. The party tapped the whole ambient side of illbient.

MATT E. SILVER ENTERTAINMENT PARTIES

Akin Adams

I first started working with Matt E. Silver as part of the crew for parties, before Byzar. He went big – Irving Plaza, The Ritz, Sound Factory, Ravestock ‘94. He would bring The Chemical Brothers, The Prodigy and The Orb over and he would hire us to do support shows. When those guys would play Irving Plaza we’d set up a bass lounge on the second floor bar. All sub woofers. We were totally overpowered by the main PA so we’d just bring subs and play bass waves. You couldn’t hear what we were doing on the top end anyway.

Matt E. Silver

It’s boring just watching a band. At Irving Plaza I put Akin at the back bar and I wanted to have some bleed, so it felt like you were on a trip.

Akin Adams

Apparently, after the first one the bartender told Matt E. they sold four times as much as they usually did. Matt would always hire as many of us as he could. He was a real visionary as far as New York events go in that period. His events would have multiple rooms, people walking around in weird costumes. It was tapping more into that old school New York classic party era.

Matt E. Silver

I was a bartender at Studio 54, so my view on dance music was production. Studio 54 was a fun club, sound system was off the hook, a little rawer than Paradise Garage, but that was Levan’s house, he designed it. Every half hour something happened, it was always fun. That has been my inspiration to this day. Everyone laughing and dancing, making it an event, a party.

Akin Adams

Ravestock ‘94 had Spooky as the opening DJ, We™ did an experimental installation and Howard from Soundlab did a performance piece with bubble wrap suits and giant nylon arms. A lot of us connected there. Rave culture took longer to come to New York, but people were figuring it out in surprising places.

Gregor Asch

A few years after we started We™, we opened for the Orb at Hammerstein Ballroom and we pretty much shat our collective pants.

Matt E. Silver

I had people do all these installations not just to enhance the event but also draw people. They all had their own crowds. Spooky was a great self-promoter, so when you booked him he promoted the shit out of it. And this was before email. At the end of the night I would barely have made any money, so I couldn’t hire anyone to take stuff down. I’d be left with Akin and Gregor taking shit down. I was barely paying any of those guys anything, so I ended up taking things down with them. That was my favorite part of the night.

Akin Adams

That was the grind aspect of being involved in those parties. We’d stay to the bitter end, 5/6 AM, to either break down the installations, get our equipment out or get paid. Usually all three. Matt was always there.

Matt E. Silver

They understood that I was trying to make electronic music happen. They got it and backed me up no matter what I had. Everybody was laughing for a long time here in America. Where’s the vocal? Not gonna happen! But I saw it early and these guys got what I was trying to do and that I was trying to make it a happening.

SOUNDLAB AND THE BROOKLYN ANCHORAGE SHOW

Beth Coleman

We needed a speak-easy style space for Soundlab so we wouldn’t have to worry about licensing and the rest. David Linton, who was part of the experimental downtown scene, had a dance studio in Chinatown on Walker St and that became the first Soundlab site. We had a ritual for setting up. Howard, Manny and myself would buy old vinyl on Canal St and roll it out to protect the dancefloor. Then we’d build the sound system with these Trinidadian brothers who had these giant cabinets. We were all invested in bass. The elevator would cut off at 6 or 7, so it was always a crisis to get the system to the 9th floor on time. Key to Howard’s vision and how the room felt was that musicians were at the center, in the sweet spot of the sound. It was immersive.

Karthik Swaminathan

Things really moved ahead when Howard and Beth started Soundlab Cultural Alchemy. It was so comfortable that if you needed to take a nap in the middle of the dance floor you could, and everything would be all right. At the same time it was a decentralized and collaborative effort. It’s amazing how much work was put into each of these events that happened so regularly and intensely. It was a true labour of love.

Beth Coleman

We started Soundlab in late 1995. Six months later Neil Strauss wrote about us in The New York Times. At the following event we had a queue going down all nine flights of stairs. We went from being totally intimate, handwriting invites, to scaling up and doing bigger places, travelling to do shows and bringing in foreign artists, like Autechre and Plaid.

Akin Adams

Soundlab at the Brooklyn Anchorage in 1996 was the big one. I don’t know if people really understood what was going on with that show.

Beth Coleman

As we became known we started to learn about working with the city and cultural organizations began tapping us. This was just before museums worldwide started having DJ nights. Creative Time asked us if we wanted to do an event at the Brooklyn Anchorage. It had three cavernous chambers and three smaller ones. Our first problem was figuring out how to get people to play beats without it being a cacophony.

Rich Panciera

That space was fantastic experiential-wise, but sound-wise it was a bit of a wrestling match. Ten second reverb. We did a show there for Asphodel once and these German guys who invited us to play suggested we play “real slow” to get around the reverb. We were playing a lot of drum & bass at that time, so we did it insanely slow and it worked out really well. It was the only way to play in those rooms. Walking into them was a spectacular experience, though. Like walking into the hull of an empty ship.

Beth Coleman

Akin and Howard were the design team who solved our problem. Instead of blocking out rooms, we designed it so the music could flow. We had some 80 individually wired speakers so you could control the sound in each room and also move sound across rooms. One room was acoustic with vocalists and the last was a d&b cave, the heaviest beats in the smallest space. In the middle was live sound with We™ and Byzar. There were no international headliners, it was our sound, this New York sound.

Manny Oqeundo

I think it was the first time anything like that happened in that space. It was just being opened up to events. The whole scene was there that night: Raz, We™, Byzar, Paul, Skiz and Wordsound. Every cavern and space had a different sound system. Akin was mixing them all together. He’d drag the bass from one place to Paul’s set, take his drums and put them somewhere else. It was crazy. People there didn’t know what was happening. We shook those rooms.

Beth Coleman

All of the sound connections went to a master mixing board, and all these channels were controlled from a tent outside. There was a hurricane that night, so the pressure in the air was totally electric and this combination of the moment and thousands of people inside and outside… One of the things I saw when people walked around is that they’d hear the music moving and then look at each other. They’d see that no one was having the same sonic experience.

Akin Adams

At one point the whole venue, all five zones, was coming through all five systems. Just stroking the Brooklyn Bridge with the bass.

Rich Panciera

MultiPolyOmni made a fountain in the Anchorage. It was about 30 meters high and shaped like a square. Two pieces of plastic with water running down. It was colossal, really fantastic. For environment engineering, those rooms were something else.

Gregor Asch

That fountain was part of The Early Aquatic Episode, a segment of our Quark Soup opera [a “never-ending Omnisensorialist production designed by Gregor and Nacho in the early days of Williamsburg”]. The New York Times art critic Roberta Smith hailed it as “the only work in scale with the Anchorage.”

Manny Oqeundo

The Anchorage party was a turning point for Soundlab and the scene. We started doing events everywhere after.

Akin Adams

There were some tensions within the scene that arose from the different forms of success. There were some significant tensions that developed between Spooky and the rest of the scene, but when Asphodel came and signed Paul he basically put the rest of us in front of Naut Humon. And they signed us all: Sub Dub, We™ and Byzar. All our first records came out on Asphodel in fairly rapid succession.

Paul D. Miller

I brought everyone to Asphodel because I thought it would be cool if everyone got hooked up. Naut came up to me in San Francisco I think, he found out about me through the mixtapes. I compiled stuff for my first album while at the Gas Station and during travels. Off the success of that, Naut said they wanted to put a compilation together of illbient stuff. So I made introductions and wrote the liner notes for it. It didn’t sell, but it did well with tastemakers.

Manny Oqeundo

I love Paul, he got us all signed to Asphodel. I was impressionable at the time, and that stuck with me. Who does that? Who goes that deep? They wanted to make Spooky into the electronic Jimi Hendrix, that was the plan. That’s how I remember it. From Naut to management… I remember talk like that. I was in many rooms sitting very quietly during that period, I just sat there and listened and watched. Why I respect Paul is that he wasn’t having it. He pissed a lot of people off. I have friends who are pissed off at him and they have a right to be. It is what it is, nobody’s perfect.

Raz Mesinai

Naut Humon already knew me from the records I’d put out. It’s true that Paul was out there hustling and he might have told Naut about other artists he didn’t know. He was the kinda guy who’d do that. But Naut came up to me and asked for a record. Asphodel had money and I had none. The Sub Dub album was the last thing we did. I was pissed they called the compilation illbient. I didn’t know that would be the title.

Matt E. Silver

You gotta give credit to Asphodel for capturing it. They anchored that illbient scene by giving them all record deals and putting the records out. No one in New York was signing them. If Asphodel hadn’t signed Spooky, the other guys might not have come to fruition. Paul definitely put everybody on. He was good like that.

Manny Oqeundo

When the Incursions In Illbient compilation came out, it was still a joke to us. Even the name was an answer to the Excursions In Ambience release. We were rude, a little punk, but the music was loved. For me Sub Dub had the best tracks on there. It was their record.

Raz Mesinai

For me the greatest records of the illbient era are the We™ albums and Byzar and Paul’s first albums. And that’s all due to Asphodel. Naut Humon paid for a studio in Chinatown and gave us all access to it. I jumped on that cos I didn’t have a studio, but that experience also fed my dislike of serious equipment. I was suspicious of Naut because he was trying to upgrade us into a better sound. To me that was insulting, it was going to change the music’s relation to the sound systems, it was going to make it more European.

Akin Adams

There was definitely a sense that we were all pulling together, but then the media stuff got in the way.

Skiz Fernando Jr

A lot of us thought the illbient tag was ridiculous. We freely mixed genres so resented being placed into one. I didn’t even know about half these other guys until that piece in The Wire came out. In 1999, we were all invited to perform at the Fin-de-Siecle Festival in Nantes, France, and this was the first time I had met many of my so-called illbient brothers and sisters. I think we were all a little suspicious of each other and didn’t really mix well. There was a lot of tension created after the term came into usage.

Raz Mesinai

I saw no unification in illbient. It was dysfunctional, people talking about this guy, that guy… that’s another thing about New York, there’s a real loyalty to things. You don’t turn on each other like that. Some of the beefs from back then were boring and relentless.

Manny Oqeundo

When the lines of communication got crossed, it took a big hit. When the article came out, there were misunderstandings… And then there was a fight. It got crazy. It was real and gritty.

Paul D. Miller

Peter Shapiro, who wrote The Wire feature on illbient, wanted to play a lot of politics. He felt I was somehow inauthentic and he was going to be determining who was. It was this weird political thing… Peter wanted to feel like he had defined a scene. And the actual reality was he hadn’t, it was an artificial construct and fell apart because none of the stuff he was talking about was organic, real dynamics. That article created a huge toxic feud.

Gregor Asch

We were so allergic to the term illbient by 1996. We felt it was really trying to shut people out and control the sound. It was no longer about a sound but about certain bands that had been favored. We felt that that was a total dead end. It was everything about Manhattan that we hated.

Paul D. Miller

I’d never planned on DJing or music becoming my main thing but it took over. My major concern was to position what I did as art. Some people might draw links in the chord progressions and weird sounds we used to newer music, like dead ancestors to dubstep almost.

Rich Panciera

Art works on words ultimately. If you could translate music that has no points of reference, it would be like me talking jibberish. It could be appreciated for how it sounds but the industry wouldn’t embrace it.

Raz Mesinai

Illbient to me seemed like a scene. And when a name did come up I completely disconnected from it. I just saw it as a nail in the coffin for me, and bad for my business. I was pretty sure it would end badly. I’ve always looked at how things are sold and represented, myself included. I don’t think who called it what, did what, is important.

Beth Coleman

I wasn’t one of the people who were supposed to be stars, I didn’t get my nose bent about names and other shit. I got so much good from it. Perhaps some people thought too much about it…

Manny Oqeundo

Our record did really well in this one place in Italy. I never believed it until I met this Italian kid. He was like, “My whole city loves you.” So it turned out to be true, somewhere in Italy we were pretty big in the 1990s.

Gregor Asch

Around 1997 acts like The Chemical Brothers and Moby were being pushed real hard and majors were trying to capitalize and make money off dance music. They were repackaging it as rock & roll. All of a sudden they took away the chill out rooms and there was just one stage. Everyone staring at the band, like, “Whoa, this is The Orb?!” Parties just sucked after that. Someone behind a bunch of gear is not interesting. The interesting part is you and your buddies.

Rich Panciera

Electronic shows are boring! The problem isn’t that the electronic musicians are boring on stage, the problem is that electronic musicians are on stage.

Gregor Asch

The problem was with the context. With lots of room you could get lost, you couldn’t see it all. You were always talking about the whole experience because no one saw the exact same thing. When promoters realized they could make more money from one act, there was a real Darwinian economic force that helped pull the plug on the scene. So you ended up with parties that left you thinking about the performance, which is more like art in a gallery. And that was everything we were trying to get away from in Brooklyn. We wanted to take art out of the gallery and put it in a living context.

Akin Adams

The tide started to shift in the mid- to late ‘90s with police busts. In a fucked up way it was after the press had started taking off. 1997/98 was a dark time for events. The Cooler was being put out of business, cops busted an RV reunion, it was all just trumped up silliness. They’d have undercover cops at events waiting for people to dance so they could say, “Stop or we’re raiding the place.” It happened to small and big venues.

Manny Oqeundo

The crackdown on parties was definitely a big part of it. The name illbient was a thing we were supposed to be doing and everyone wanted to run with it but us. It was weird. The city was changing, there were tensions between people and some chose sides.

Akin Adams

The end of the Giuliani era and the quality of life push meant that you had to do big things in big clubs, which for a genre that wasn’t quite a genre couldn’t guarantee you’d have a 1,000 people coming in to the Bridge or Tunnel to see events. It wasn’t sustainable because it was about creating spaces where people expected to hear something different.

Beth Coleman

If it’s not small scale and strictly underground – if you’re in the middle space – you have to dial it up or down.

Gregor Asch

The Brooklyn scene started disappearing and club owners changed their mind. They started saying, “You are not fucking doing anything to my club. And when the party is over you get out in 20 minutes.” There weren’t many options left: you could say “it was fun while it lasted” or compromise.

Sheldon Drake

I’m actually kind of amazed that anybody let us play all this weird stuff. Dark ambient in a bar? Really? OK, we did move around a lot.

Rich Panciera

It’s hard for a scene that doesn’t want to be boxed to be successful in an industry that needs it to be in a box. At least long enough to be packaged and sold. We were always running up against these issues. Either we were unhappy or the industry was unhappy.

Akin Adams

All the momentum we built up from 1993 to 1996, people getting together, sharing ideas, jamming, began to die off. By the end of the 1990s the idea of an indie label giving you an advance to do something interesting that they can recoup after release went out of the window as people stopped buying records.

Rich Panciera

I think the changing of the date was important. It’s a very subtle thing that happens in culture and affects people every time a decade hits. I saw a fast change after the millennium. ’80s retro hit really fast and hard. You start saying things at the beginning of the decade that make you think we need something new, that we can’t represent the decade just gone. By 2002 it was apparent that this ’90s aesthetic was getting squashed for ’80s retro. We had a core group and people who would come to parties, but to a certain extent we had to convince the average person who doesn’t think about music too much. They’re the ones whose ideas change when the decades change. They’re more likely to say “I’m not living in the ’90s anymore, I’m living now,” and they’d go to different parties.

Gregor Asch

The early years in Williamsburg for me were the real time. From 1990 to 1994, before it got codified. It was just the most amazing moment in my entire life. What was happening in these warehouses was incredible. Not just musically or artistically but the mentality. The people involved were so much more pure than what I see today. It was insanely positive.

Paul D. Miller

For me, the legacy is that you can do something not normal and thrive. You don’t need to standardise experiences. I wanted to show that you could do something different and be successful. It’s a shame that there is interpersonal strife attached to the memories.

Akin Adams

Getting electronic sounds to sit with grooves and live feels is always a challenge, tension is always going to be there. But I still think that we were successful in creating music that did not sound like anything else and it’s not too much of a stretch to see the links between the sonic manglings we were doing under the illbient term and modern dance music like dubstep. I don’t know how dated our stuff might sound, but I’d like to think it still sounds different to what’s out there.

Beth Coleman

It was an amazing time. You’d go out and move through the city with all these different tribes. To have the city at that moment, all of a similar enough age, and to have this shared exploration and freedom to go in different directions.

Raz Mesinai

I do think it’s a really interesting genre from the point of view of documentation. It happened before the internet became what it is today, so a lot of it was lost. I do get upset that We™, Byzar and others made such great music that still gets reactions from people today. But when they ask what it is, I never want to say illbient. I know it needs a name for people to understand so I just say “the New York ’90s stuff.” I do think it was New York, detuned from the grid.

Photo credits: Header - Tim Soter; DJ Olive - David Larkum; Lalalandia - DJ Olive Facebook; Byzar - Adam Lawrence, The Wire, December 1996 pg. 29; DJ Spooky - Magda, The Wire, August 1995; Cooler Flyer - Thump; Orb Flyer - Matt E. Silver; Howard Goldkrand at Soundlab - Tim Soter; The Early Aquatic Episode - djolive.com; Byzar - Adam Lawrence, The Wire, December 1996