Eat Static - ’Implant’
No. 21 in our Top 100 Electronica Albums of the 1990s
“You could feel it, coming, coming down from the sky…”
For a generation raised on Star Wars and Star Trek, the techno trance outfit Eat Static were a godsend. Taking their name from the movie Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan — with Khan’s “let them eat static!” — Joie Hinton and Merv Pepler, bandmates from the psychedelic rock group Ozric Tentacles, moonlighted and then jumped ship to join the growing ranks of the outdoor techno circuit of 1990s rave England.*
Within a few years of their hyper-jump, their album Implant would mark a high point in the tripped-out aesthetic of trance and wide-eyed electronica soundscapes. Held in the same high regard as Underworld and Orbital as a must-see live electronic band, their studio experimentations were nonetheless critical documents in the nocturnal odysseys of the rave generation. An advanced promo cassette made it to mainland Europe, America and Asia, where DJs and tastemakers homed in on the relentless freedom in its sound waves. From meadows to deserts to beaches, Eat Static immortalized for techno mystics the circadian wonders of the lunatic Moon.
Their mad science had started in the ‘80s as Pepler and Hinton first fired up their creative engines with the Ozrics on late night hijinks: “We had met this guy, Steve Everitt, and had an immediate connection with him,” Pepler recalled years later. “He came down to Somerset for a New Year around 1987 and brought with him an Akai sampler and some floppy discs containing some kick drums and some Kraftwerk samples.” Fair enough, they were starting with the basics, connecting their live progressive space-rock with Germany’s 1960s and ‘70s electronic krautrock.
“We were actually planning to do ethnic-inspired electronica, dance music with sitars and shehnai’s, as we all had a deep passion for world music,” he continued, revealing the other deep stream of techno hippie fascination in the ‘90s, as “crusty” types with long hair brought wider musical legacies into the rave matrix, from djembe drums to didjeridoo’s to Tibetan chants and notions of one-world spirituality; from “New Age travelers” selling beaded necklaces and glass-blown pipes, to searching embraces with Hinduism and yoga, the emanations of rave culture was enriching its network. “The ethnic sounds quickly degenerated into wibbly-wobbly squelches, and then Steve started to play a 4/4 kick on top,” he noted naturally. “That was that really.”
From the start, their music retained that raw curiosity. Out in the midnight fields, the two found a wide frontier of sonic possibilities. Hinton brought his keyboard skills to bear, weaving scintillating arcs and cascades of stardust and solar winds. Pepler on the other hand was a mad percussionist who happily matched Hinton’s wild shapes with big bass patterns and warp-speed rhythms. Together, they architected a vast sonic cosmos. In a sense, Eat Static was the Skywalker Sound of trance music, inventing a new vocabulary of UFO bleeps, alien burps and wormhole whoops.
Soon the two hippie boys from Somerset were blasting rave kids to the heavens. Hitched to Planet Dog, a label of like-minded acts including Timeshard and Banco De Gaia, the duo quickly found themselves headlining some of the biggest rave nights in England, especially Michael Dog’s Club Dog and “Megadog” events. Their reputation as live performers only grew, landing them loyal spots at Glastonbury and a US tour, where they were welcomed as underground heroes in “left coast” California.
Their first album, Prepare Your Spirit, put out on their own Alien Records label on cassette, was dished out at Ozric shows. It set a boundless template of psychic thrills mixed with mind-bending rhythms, from the intense rave techno of ‘Hallucinate’ to the heady bliss of ‘Eat Static’ — “I feel like a walking computer!” — to the reggae-dub house of ‘The Fourth Dimension.’ Riddled throughout its DNA was also their fascination with world music, technological wizardry and the Gaia matrix.
Quickly signed to Planet Dog, their first Dog release, Abduction, pushed their sonic exploration headfirst into concept album territory, embodying the otherworldly aspect of the rave experience, beaming it up into the sky as an existential question of techno destiny meets alien life forms. The single ‘Gulf Breeze,’ which got the DJ Sasha remix treatment — the ‘Ashoshashoz Mix’ — perfectly captured the heady times of ‘93/’94, as artists like Underworld, Orbital and Aphex Twin headlined shows with Eat Static.
“Someone once claimed that seeing Eat Static live is like ‘watching a ball of energy losing touch with physics,’” wrote Ben Willmott for New Musical Express. “When the thunderous tabla slips into the mix, worming its way into the center of the sound until the 2,000-strong Megadog crowd at the Manchester Academy is sucked in, you can see what they mean. The house lights are on already,” he continued, “the bouncers twitching nervously as the 2 a.m. curfew nears, but no-one cares. This isn’t about lightships or effects; it’s live music at its purest.”
Abduction, which by Eat Static’s own admission was more a compilation of earlier live work than an album, put Planet Dog on the map. It gained praise even from the likes of Robert Smith of The Cure, who notched it as one of his favorite albums of 1993. (The Cure were indeed an influence. You can almost hear quirky and romantic echoes of Smith’s synth work from 1983’s The Walk and ‘Love Cats’ on title track ‘Abduction,’ with its creature-like playfulness.) And its centerpiece, ‘Forgotten Rites’ — a tribal psychedelic ceremonial whirly trancer — set the stage for a higher dimension.**
The door was now open. “We’ve gone more cyber, more sci-fi oriented,” Hinton told Melody Maker in 1994, in an interview before they would perform live on MTV Europe, the sound, spectacle and brand of Eat Static surging the old circuits. “This is the first time we actually sat down and wrote an album, so in many ways it’s our debut….With Implant we had time to consider where we would put the tracks and what the overall sound would be. Sorry to be so obvious, but it’s a lot more ambient.”
After blazing Europe’s television waves with floating fractals and pulsing projections, including liquid lightning on a giant eyeball, the day after Implant’s release, MTV’s VJ Paul King asked the boys about the initial press and fan reception of their expansive vision. Not surprisingly, the two dreadlocked “armchair travelers” were bemused by some journalists’ mixed reactions. “Some people have really liked it,” Pepler offered, “And some people haven’t yet understood it.” But really — that was the point.
“Well, we’ve seen a few odd things over the years and it all just comes through the music,” Hinton had told Melody Maker before they went on stage. “But you have to remember there’s a tongue-in-cheek element to it. We have seen some weird stuff though — we’ve been chased by … erm, there’s a lot of crop circles in our area … it adds to the whole thing.” That is, Eat Static were conjuring a new sonic space.
With help from artist Paul “Bozzy” Boswell, Eat Static also fashioned a unique psychedelic space aesthetic. Bozzy’s paintings depicted big-eyed extraterrestrials — lots of Roswell “Grey” aliens — and alien worlds replete with crescent ring moons in the sky, otherworldly jungles, crashed recon droids, and desert planets. Joined by Everitt on and off again, who passed by like an orbiting moon, and anchored by a dedicated crew for their infamous live shows, Eat Static’s reputation continued to grow, earning them consistently high marks by fans and peers. Each album accelerated to the next galaxy, and the next, and the next.
Their third and best, Implant, signaled the apex of a wave that would redefine the future of music, putting it in both arch and fun terms, a weirdness and humor to this day that perhaps best captures rave music’s first global explosion, as Europe echoed back the techno tumult of America’s cities. Grounded in the fields and warehouses of the British Isles, it was a triumph of the strange and still remains one of the landmark electronica releases of the ‘90s. Built around a clever catch of sci-fi B-movie and TV samples — “I’m picking up abnormal interference!” and “the space-time continuum may be permanently damaged!” — Eat Static conceived Implant as a visitation from the stars. It sweeps listeners off on an intergalactic space hop and then delivers a head trip outside of time. In a way, you could say, it’s a quantum album.
Two things at once — the Gemini power of “Merv and Joie” — switching back and forth, from a bolt of lightning to a wave of energy, openers ‘Survivors’ and ‘Abnormal Interference’ freak to pulverizing bass and booming beats, chants, and inventive funk bordering on a kind of alien speech. The eponymous ‘Implant’ sounds something like an alien abduction, but from behind the pilot console of a badass flying saucer. It zips to a relentless groove while a cascade of grooving synths whip out of thin air. Its twisting TB-303 line fries the atmosphere as a euphoric cloud hovers in over the mystery, until silence is greeted by the supersonic pow of our quantum traveler: “There’s something different about Larrrrry!”
‘Dzhopa Dream’ marks the album’s shift to outer space. It floats above the Earth, its twitching synths chattering like droids and aliens in call and response, echoing in the halls of our spaceship, as flashes of light laser through the body. Setting the controls for interstellar propagation, ‘Panspermia’ drifts into deep space, its slow tribal drums melting away gravity — and erasing the imaginative boundaries between Earth’s ethnographic and psychographic worship of the beyond — we, the astral lorn.
In the run up to their quantum head trip, they had signaled that they did not really worry about what was cool or what was hip; the techno hippies extraordinaire were onto something much bigger as the album’s third act moved. As Willmott lamented, yet joked, in his own NME report on their live prowess, “just as you’re starting to look at Eat Static as the pioneering dance warriors you wanted them to be, Merv blows it all up by announcing his personal goal for ‘94 — to finish the model UFO that he wants to cover in lights and fly over the heads of the audience on the next tour. ELO flashback! Hippy stereotype reactivation! Bummer.” Save with Implant, they did him one better.
Eat Static has to be taken with a grain of salt. Their goofy UFO schtick is as humorous as it is aspirational — and it’s that slap of laughter in the face that readies the mind for their bigger gestures of musical ambition: hard, fast, zany and often beautiful. ‘Area 51 (Nucleonic Mix)’ is a gentler jaunt into nocturnal bliss; its dreamlike sonics flicker like some beckoning pulsar until the intercom growl of a martian pilot lets loose subsonic bass and trails of melodic wonder. But that’s not all. Building with its throaty welling, ‘Area 51’ peaks with an explosion of low frequency oscillations — like a spaceman’s tether sending waves out into the infinite void. “How’s it going out there?” a voice asks. “There’s something out here!” another answers from beyond the edge.
Eat Static’s play on sonic imagery is less about little green men and more about the great unknown. ‘Cydonia’ kicks it up a parsec — “Martian computer control! Martian computer control!” The Earth shrinks away in the distance as warping synths snarl like cosmic harmonicas and tribal drums wind up the flight deck. Planets and stars fly by as Eat Static throttle things into hyperspace, a calm sweeping over the bridge as if we’ve entered a new dimension, time slowing down as light-speed lands us in the ultimate relativity high. We’re moving between matter, energy, and light.
Floating down from a spaceship hangar with ‘Uforic Undulance,’ Implant plants its freak flag on a magical moon, a Pandora before there was a Pandora. The cries and squawks of zero-gravity animals. The breeze through purple branches of a fractal jungle. The climbing undulations of liquid lightning. Then, one of the most wicked grooves this side of Pluto kick-starts the moon buggy, drums skitter-scattering overhead as crystalline melodies rain down from pink morphing clouds.
Everything soaring, the plaintive flute of an alien Orpheus calls to us from afar, scanners scouting the distance, plasmic lashes of electricity ricocheting from inside, as bright little riffs, sounding like the buzzy buttons of some cockpit keyboard, answer the quantum question in funky technological reply. It’s pure genius.
Track Listing:
1. Survivors
2. Abnormal Interference
3. Implant
4. Dzhopa Dream
5. Panspermia
6. Area 51 (Nucleonic Mix)
7. Cydonia
8. Uforic Undulance
*The 1990s outdoor rave scene emanated from London, with famous events like Energy and Helter Skelter. This “Big Bang” mixed with the 1980s “New Age travelers” scene, which in turn accelerated the rave scene as sound system tribes like Spiral Tribe and Desert Storm took rave to the countryside.
The travelers were essentially roaming hippies who kept the psychedelic rock scene alive and at times thriving from the ‘60s to the ‘70s and onward. In the ‘80s, this persistent wave culminated in a Stonehenge festival that triggered massive government pushback as more free-wheeling lifestyles propagated from it.
The Ozric Tentacles were part of the travelers music scene. Eat Static in many ways represented this cultural convergence, which was resisted by some and welcomed by others in the respective New Age traveler and rave scenes. Planet Dog, which came out of Club Dog and Megadog, was part of this confluence. The cover art of Abduction features a flying saucer hovering over a circle of stones.
As Bob Dog, one half of the “Dog” operation — Michael Dog was the other half, spearheading the Planet Dog more than the events — postulated to Willmott, “Having converted a lot psychedelic people to dance music, it could well be our mission in 1994 to convert dance people to psychedelic music.”
Whether on the same or different sides of the techno-psychedelic spectrum, British expats in San Francisco, many who arrived in the early ‘90s, also set up outdoor rave scenes, like Wicked and The Gathering in the Bay Area. This in turn inspired American “tribes” like Moontribe and Integral in Los Angeles.
While in New York, you had Stormrave, and in the Midwest, Children of the Atom and especially Drop Bass Network, who threw the infamous “Further” and “Even Further” outdoor festivals, as well as outdoor event series like Frequency and Area 51. In Florida, you had DJ Icey’s Hyperreal parties as well.
**The key difference between Implant and Abduction is that Implant has that extra meta sound, narrative and dimension, what Hinton described as “ambient.” This gives it a sense of scale and impact, accentuating the space and contact between notes, ideas and Hinton and Pepler’s playing. It breathes and feels more alive.
Also, I’ll mention here that my play with the “quantum” metaphor is not to directly associate quantum mechanics with techno music, but to draw a resonance in terms of observing the phenomenon of how energy and matter interact and transform between particles and waves, including even sound waves.
I believe sound and music can model and “articulate” some of these transformative concepts, realities, and “fantasies,” and is one of the reasons electronic music was a major paradigm shift — it brought in that “cyber” dimension, and its technological effects, which diagonally allowed for new perceptions.
And this is where “psychedelic” and “electronic” come together, where Eat Static, along with so many other artists, helped shape the noise or “static” of hidden then overwhelming social change into a new music.