Young American Primitive - 'Young American Primitive'
No. 30 in our Top 100 Electronica Albums of the 1990s
While Europe’s mainstream embraced acid house full-heartedly, America’s innovators had to survive underground and in a milieu of near obliviousness. And yet besides the origin cities of Detroit, Chicago and New York, West Coast cities emerged in the mid-1990s as incubators of a newer sound, tapping into Los Angeles’ urban funk and San Francisco’s psychedelic legacies. Along with artists like Dubtribe, Freaky Chakra, the Hardkiss Brothers and Tranquility Bass, Young American Primitive helped lead a second wave of rave music on the homefront and beyond earthly limits.
Greg Scanavino, the man behind Young American Primitive, eventually signed with Geffen Records, where his music career stalled. But his first album on the California label Zoë Magik remains a long lost treasure — what’s still remarkable about it, is its distinctive blend of old Alfred Hitchcock and Outer Limits film and TV samples, heady melancholia, and tranced-out tribalism where the metronome and the breakbeat once co-existed in an irresistible polyrhythmic harmony. Scanavino also had a real talent for crafting gravity-defying grooves — ‘Trance-Formation’ and ‘Young American Primitive’ both soar to tribal breaks and weightless bass lines; while the more earthbound ‘Ritual’ and ‘Sunrise’ still revel in the sky, they more patiently build as with arms greeting the dawn, rhythms percolating ever upwards through clouds to the stars high in the sky.
‘Trance-Formation’ and ‘Ritual’ in particular still blaze with the astonishing power of a creative spirit relishing in the freedom of a new electronic wave. Trance as a genre was still unbound from stricter and faster metronomic tunnel visions — in fact, it was just a word at the time to describe more dreamy dance excursions. And so Young American Primitive’s take on that magical prospect contains the true weightless, hypnotic and tribal power of “trance” — undergirded by swinging and robust bass notes bouncing through breakbeats that crash across its mesmerizing pulse. There’s no other song out there quite like the pair, save for Lorien Ferris’s ‘Arboreal Sunrise’ of 1996 as Universal Machine — another Bay Area beauty and kindred astronomical spirit.
As an emerging style, trance would diverge itself into many more colors on a sonic spectrum, its wavelengths going both slower and faster, from ambient grooves by the likes of Japan’s Makyo and his Sky Dancing compilations, to the psi-trance and Goa trance contingents, such as the faster pace of SF’s Ceiba, to the tech-trance of LA’s Rebirth project, with its classic ‘Pure,’ to the blissful ‘Let’s See What This Does (The Free Spirit Mix)’ by Nebula Nine. Along with a big progressive house and trance explosion from the UK, other West Coast artists took up the cause. Perhaps no excursion better exhibits this fusion than Jon Williams’ tribal acid house — the masterwork ‘Drift Apart,’ his TB-303 trance classic as School of Thought.
In LA, DJ Taylor (real name Myles Wooten), would team up with the UK’s Guy Oldham for the rainswept Ask Me release on Planet Four Communications as G.T.R., before in 1995 remixing Skylab 2000’s ‘Auburn’ into one of the most unique and unrelenting breakbeat trance numbers of all time — his ‘OneinMetropolis Mix’ — on Fatal Data Records. Sharing the same bill with Young American Primitive on Jason Bentley’s influential California Dreaming compilation, Gavin Hardkiss wrote the gorgeously trippy ‘3 Nudes (Having Sax On Acid),’ a deep techno masterpiece of winding, beguiling Pacific Coast hallucinations. In 1993, California was trancing out.
In London, over 5,000 miles away, where Europe’s rave central beamed its sound waves across the global underground, tastemakers and DJ’s began to take note. Progressive house was in full swing by 1993, pushed forward by Leftfield’s Hard Hands label and William Orbit’s Guerrilla Records. The Mixmag editorial office in particular cottoned to the “West Coast” trip, its late great editor Dom Phillips championing its scene with a feature story, “West Coast Weirdos.” He flew to California, checking it out in person, hanging out with Williams and Hardkiss; extraordinary works like the compilation, Delusions of Grandeur, astonished Europeans in the know, the Hardkiss crew hooking the likes of even Goldie.
There was a kind of sunny, trippy optimism in the early California rave sound. It was dark too, but always incredibly earnest and genuine. As Phillips observed, songs like God Within’s ‘Raincry’ were not made to make “money or noise or a fuss,” but just to create. Electric Skychurch, who apparently helped inspire Madonna’s Ray of Light, faded into obscurity, bidding adieu with a wedding song, ‘Heaven.’ DJ Galen (real name Galen Abbott) perfectly captured the heady and pretty house grooves of a generation on his classic mixtape, Surreal, bringing “trance” to a Cali distillation. Miracles in its melodies, it is wistfulness, amidst restlessness, yet dauntless.
You can hear it on a Skylab 2000 side project, Bassland Prophecy’s ‘The Blue And Purple Starship Of Trust,’ or on other works by Young American Primitive’s SF peers like Single Cell Orchestra (‘Transmit Liberation’) and Heavenly Music Corporation (‘Consciousness III’). Up and down the coast, the waves pulsed and the ocean of thought seemed to go on forever and ever. LA’s Exist Dance outfit, in the form of Tranquility Bass (‘Cantamilla’) and Eden Transmission (‘I’m So High’), were also contributing heavily to the psychedelic drift of 1993, with daring and ingenious remixes for Freaky Chakra’s ‘Halucifuge’ (‘Blind Dive’) and Deluxe’s ‘Futura’ as Commander Mindfuck (the wicked and emotive ‘Deluxe Mindfuck Mix’). Young American Primitive’s Young American Primitive took all this into hyperdrive.
“It’s contained. Decisions are quick. It’s only me making them,” Scanavino told Phillips on that “Weirdos” trip, the two overlooking San Francisco’s Buena Vista Park from his front room. He lived just a few blocks from Haight-Ashbury, the epicenter of the ‘60s rock counterculture and psychedelic revolution. Describing Scanavino’s first release, Phillips, Mixmag’s head editor, wrote that it was “a romp through progressive house that positively dripped in atmosphere and melody,” and that in London, it “had the initiated sobbing with joy.” His music had “a depth and a melancholy,” he wrote, a “melodic power unique in house music.” And it must be said, a trippy Cali humor.
The sweeping, panning disorientation of Young American Primitive, starting with its sardonic and funny ‘Intro’ — “Ooh! Well isn’t that new?” says a woman from 1948’s Hitchcock film, Rope, its grainy movie timbre giving the proceedings an instant color, answered by a man, “Yes it is! Do you like it?”; the woman probing, “Well, what is it?”; answered with affirmation, “New Young American Primitive!“ and the woman saying, “I have a new young American sister. She’s only three and her stuff is really primitive,” to melting and looping laughter and her sneering — “Dirty dog … you dirty, dirty dog!” — explodes in ultraviolet splendor, captured perfectly by the album’s violet cover, taking a simple image of New Mexico’s massive radar array, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, and shifting it up, ever so gently so, in the dimensional spectrum.
It’s a life-magic flowing through the technologic by way of Scanavino’s prodigious imagination, sense of humor, and West Coast rave birth — in a land filled with light in darkness, from the desert to the grand expanse of the Pacific. In a sense, ‘Ritual’ and ‘Sunrise’ are one song, both pulling the spirit across the waves of the infinite, its rising and falling and rising melodies scintillating over longing measures, the punctuation of breaks and the native chants that called back to humanity’s very earliest beginnings, gliding in the light of life’s ending, and yearning, never ending: each beat, each step, each turn, blinks of the naked eye, the circadian interplay of Sun, Moon and Earth; ‘Ritual’ calls to mind our ancient questions about our origins and the mysterious messages we still imagine in the sky, and ‘Sunrise’ slowly wakes and worships interstellar patterning deep inside our primal minds, the pulse of every life.
Outer space and science fiction are key obsessions on Young American Primitive. ‘Over and Out’ is a classic drift of arpeggiating lines that seem to ooze out of black holes. At its climax, Scanavino samples Dennis Hopper’s infamous “If” monologue from the film Apocalypse Now to wonderful echoing effect. “Do you know that ‘if’ is the middle word in life? If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,” Hopper spins to a blaze of spaced out waves, “I mean I’m … no, I can’t, I’m a little man.” Scanavino, a Beach Boys fan, invokes the character Lance from Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam War epic, a new young American primitive who is witness vicariously of this soul shift, a soldier surfer who survives the dark fantastic.
The ambient ‘Daydream’ conjures Blade Runner and was long a John Digweed favorite. It’s an L.S.D. lullaby filled with subtle breezes and uplifts. But the album’s biggest triumph arrives with ‘These Waves,’ a dazzling burst of sonic light and pretty string theories. Its xylophone rhythm lifts its otherworldly beauty as a chasing melody draws you into its many splendors like a surfer in a cosmic pipeline. “These waves are all around us,” says a voice, answered by another higher voice, “A thousand falling sparks all over me!” It sounds exactly like what it says — receiving the infinite.
The album’s last act is a direct call to Arthur C. Clark and Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi psychedelic film, 2001: A Space Odyssey — ‘Monolith Part One’ and ‘Part Two’ — beginning with the throb of its interplanetary alarm. Like the Monoliths in Africa and dug up on the moon in the film, they are artifacts of the heady ‘90s rave boom, what felt like the beginning of a new stage in the story of humanity. ‘Part One’ is a brilliant drift into electronic space, the breaths of “Dave” perhaps in his duel with HAL 9000, the computer losing his marbles as he faces their end. ‘Part Two’ comes on, like the confusion in his robot mind, the apes banging their drums and everybody’s head in, techno for the future masses in outer space. Party or parting? At a regular 33 RPM speed, it slams at 130 BPMs, its melodic riff zipping up and away. Slowed down to about -8, however, it takes on a dreamy house vibe; the sky sparkling with stars, it imparts, “You’ve experienced a type of hallucination that’s not at all uncommon.”
Of course, what Scanavino achieved with Young American Primitive was far from common. Phillips marveled at how clean-cut he was when they met. He looked like any other engineer that would come to typify the Bay Area and Silicon Valley. But he was cut from a different, more tie-dyed kind of cloth — he was “what happened,” when a “Californian electrical engineer from Placerville, east of San Fran, with an interest in the Cocteau Twins and a couple of keyboards is taken to one of San Fran’s famous Toontown raves,” Phillips wrote. “What should I look like?” Scanavino asked back. “People meet me and expect some otherworldly spiritual long-haired guy. You’re talking about a rock and roll image. This is not rock and roll.” It is underground.
“I first heard Young American Primitive while jumping up and down on a trampoline at an after-party in Orlando,” Digweed recounted in the liner notes of his clever Choice collection for Azuli in 2005, revealing just how much the psychedelic drift “way out west” in America had influenced he and Sasha — who cemented their place in the electronica pantheon with their Northern Exposure DJ mix series, mixing acts like Young American Primitive, God Within, Rabbit In The Moon, Furry Phreaks, and Uberzone. “Greg Scanavino made a really good album which only had a limited release, which was a real shame,” he lamented. “It should have been huge.”*
Sadly, Scanavino’s next album didn’t even escape the Geffen vaults. (In 2010, Scanavino returned out of nowhere, finally self-releasing a sequel, the African Cosmopolitan, and a healthy raft of new material.) Young American Primitive was never reissued due to legal tangles over the album’s many TV and movie samples.** Young American Primitive’s fate was a lesson for all would-be electronica artists: the freedom at the heart of electronic dance culture would be consistently challenged in the years to come. So that now we can finally ask, what was raving really all about?
Written in 1993, Scanavino’s masterpiece came just as the West Coast rave scene split apart in a dizzying wheel of techno-social implications. In San Francisco, the rise of collectives like Funky Tekno Tribe and Wicked sustained while the more theatrical, fantastical big bang of Los Angeles fretted in its urban darkness; the rise of speed-fueled trance, the anarchic battle between law and order, reaching its outer limits, thrilling to the renegade spirit in heady Mars-scapes, the breakbeats of Mojave deserts, moonlit and entrancing, the frontier of ever-searching moon-tribes.
Crazy California, the Frontier, Manifest Destiny, the West — generation after generation migrated from east and west, north and south, to make new dreams rise. Placerville, Scanavino’s hometown, was once an old Gold Rush mining town. In a bit of fitting California mythology, Scanavino was a keyboard roadie for the Beach Boys for nine months once, bringing to mind good vibrations and surfin’ U.S.A. “They’re old rock stars,” he told Phillips kindly. “They don’t have a great grasp of reality.” Maybe because reality was changing in the ‘90s, and changing in ways no-one could understand but only hear. That was the magic of Young American Primitive, a precognitive blast of genuine California psychedelic countercultural intensity.
“It’s a strong emotion, it’s the way I look at music,” he explained of his hopeful, melancholic, melodic, and supernatural sound. That’s why the name he took was so fitting. “It’s pretty much used to describe not my music, but my audience.” Clean-cut, long-haired, multiracial, beach boys, moon girls, dancers, trancers, hippie engineers of the future — as he argued passionately to Phillips that the California rave scene while filled with British expat ravers and DJs, was not a “straightforward ‘buy-in’ of British culture.” It was a part and apart. “This is going to become the global popular music,” he declared, and he was right. “It’s not a European style, it’s a world style.” And so from here, raving would become everything, shaped by the power of conviction.
Indeed, many missed or now forget just how trailblazing that scene and moment in time was, save for those who were there, like Phillips, who wrote poignantly of Scott Hardkiss — the author of God Within’s ‘Raincry’ — when he died. Phillips, who would meet his own tragic end in 2022, perceived a deeper connection across the oceans and mountains, almost like catching extraterrestrial radio waves in radar arrays. For Young American Primitive belonged to something coastal, something cosmic, a primitive future in the sense of a return to what truly mattered — what one can sometimes see driving along the Pacific, looking out into the endless.
What lay out there over the West Coast edge? From the cliffs of its northern coasts to the shores of its southern waves, washing over the decade was life as well as death, a cutting edge that cut from the ‘90s to any future decade of hard-won bliss — sublime, melancholic, perhaps even reckless. And yet California’s optimistic, tripped-out “Left Coast” spirit still lives on in every note and beat of Young American Primitive. Even cornier rave vamps on ‘Monolith’ signify a more innocent but braver time. No chemicals needed. Just an open mind.
Tracks:
1. Intro
2. Trance-Formation
3. Flux
4. Young American Primitive
5. Ritual
6. Sunrise
7. Daydream
8. Over and Out
9. These Waves
10. Monolith Part One
11. Monolith Part Two
*In Phillips’ story, he also notes that Young American Primitive had signed onto Moby’s management agency and was performing around the globe. When he interviewed Scanavino, he had recently returned from a live gig in Australia.
No extensive record details what went wrong once he signed with Geffen other than there were legal issues distributing the album with a wider release and that the sequel succumbed to major label pressures on the artistic front.
Either way, the album was a very big deal in 1993 or 1994 for an American rave act. Obviously, signing with Moby’s team shows just how much Young American Primitive’s star was on the rise and the excitement.
I recall one of my friends at the time, before I owned the album, talking about it, and how a lot of his Goth club friends in LA were abuzz. Zoë Magick’s vinyl releases were also fairly common in DJ boxes.
Promo versions of the CD also had the underground excited. Scanavino was onto something big. But in a way, its drift and unique global promise, then fade, makes it all the more bittersweet.
**Young American Primitive was eventually at last re-released via Bandcamp, where original pressings of the CD album were also made available, including all of Scanavino’s catalog and new material.
It has been gratifying to see how well received the album is nowadays with both original fans and younger newcomers.