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Ollie Olsen has always been at the edge of Australian music from
the 1970s, from the industrial noise of No to his current work
as Third Eye and with his label PsyHarmonics. His music as Third
Eye is a curious blend of deep house and ambient techno that works
to draw the listener in deeper and deeper into the slowly mutating
sounds. Nothing happens quickly in Third Eye's epic tracks yet
the sounds he works with are constantly changing, almost imperceptibly
as knobs on analogue synthesisers are effortlessly twiddled. Third
Eye's music can indeed be called 'trance music' for it is exactly
that which is induced in the listener.
"The thing that drew me to acid house in the first place
was its kind of trance inducing effect. I find it a politically
liberating experience because you lose all that baggage that you've
been carrying around with you for the rest of the week. Trance
music . . . really is the oldest form of music in human history.
I don't mean any particular style of techno music as in the labelling
of certain records as 'trance' by the British music press (they
may as well call it 'boring music') - by trance music I mean music
that actually sends you into a trance in the right environment.
Every now and then there are nights when it really does work,
and these may be one in fifty but those are the nights that I
do it for". Ollie elaborates, drawing on various historical
points as being crucial in the loss of 'trance states' in Western
societies. "Different cultures including European ones used
trance music in ritual and celebration, but with the years of
the Crusades and the like a lot of that music was purposely wiped
out . . . When Black music came into Western culture through blues,
jazz, rock'n'roll, a lot of these (new) Crusaders carried on about
it. A lot of that early rock music had the same trance inducing
effect, putting the audience into quite a state at live shows,
but not to the same degree as we have now with electronic music
- they only ever played for forty minutes". But with techno,
new avenues have opened up, and, coupled with mass consumption
of trance-friendly drugs albeit artificially-made in someone's
garden shed, unless you are fortunate enough to chance upon some
rare seeds, there has been a rediscovering of the potentials that
trance states hold. "There is something
magical, incredibly basic, and incredibly awesome about dancing
outside allnight, at some free party, watching the sun come up
in the morning whether you're out of it or not. That's been missing
out of our culture for centuries and its good that its come back
to us in such a bizarre way through the use of electronics . .
. The reason electronic music was invented in my mind was to attain
all those sounds, frequencies and scales that you couldn't get
from traditional instruments, and that was the original thrust
for people building synthesisers, and it is those undiscovered
frequencies that are leading the charge back into trance music".
As techno has matured and become a mass cultural form, not everyone
goes to raves to experience trance-like states or indeed to hear
the music at all - they go to be seen (scene) and to escape the
drudgery of work, burn off some excess cash, or just because their
mates are going. "I think that the people who get into techno
for escapist reasons don't seem to last very long because they
are always associating their enjoyment with the consumption of
escapist drugs like those that begin with the first letter of
(e)scapism. There seems to be a huge turnover in the techno scene,
at least here in Melbourne, and each year I see a whole new band
of youngsters getting into it. Some of them stick around and get
into the deeper aspects and they are the ones that are going to
be interesting to watch".
Wherever techno has spread, people have begun to see the potential
to make money from the music and the parties, and whether they
actually are making money or not, the motives for getting
involved are often less than pure. As far as techno's claim to
being the "one true world music" as one recent flyer
put it, the potential to make dollars has lured many individuals
and organisations into running clubs, and putting out less than
satisfactory records. The formula in these cases has often been
one of cultural exploitation and imperialism - slap a 4/4 beat
down, turn on a Roland 303, twiddle some knobs, search out a tribal
recording and steal some sacred chant, loop it and Dragonfly's
your uncle. Ollie disagrees, "House music, techno music is
really world music. There are plenty of people from various cultures
all over the world making it now. I don't think its exploitative
really because its something that comes naturally to everyone
regardless of race. I think the exploitativeness lies in the extreme
commercialism that comes to the dance party scene from time to
time, but not in the music itself".
Deep in developing India lies the ex-Portuguese coastal colony
of Goa. Fabled for its magnificent beach parties and hippie-atmosphere
it, together with Thailand is a favoured destination amongst middle-class
White twenty-somethings finding their inner-children. Maybe, though,
there is something more that transcends these qualms, maybe there
is something worthwhile happening and emanating from Goa.
"Goa has been an incredible influence. Even in terms of myself,
I've never been there and I have no desire to go particularly,
mainly because I tend to travel to places have nothing to do with
what I normally do. Despite this its had a huge influence on me
because of friends of mine who have been there for years. Fred
Disko is probably the original Goa DJ, he's been DJing there since
the mid seventies possibly was the first person to play electronic
music on the beach there. Other people, Steve, and Andrew Till,
too, have influenced the way I listen to the music and the way
I DJ. They have been able to get hold of music we could never
dream of getting over here and they have a great open-mindedness,
to it all. It is a hip place, and there's no doubt in my
mind that a lot of great events have happened there and a lot
of the people on the cutting edge of the techno scene have been
there and stayed there. Its like a huge meeting place and its
been so for years as part of a long established hippie trail that
also stretches through parts of Thailand - now even Byron Bay
is becoming like a little Goa". On the other hand, Byron
Bay is not the most transcendental of destinations what with the
beer yobs and middle-class dropouts with designer dreadlocks,
hair extensions and patchouli oil. . .
Amongst the underground, feral techno scene, 'Goa' has become
the name to drop, the place to say that you've visited,
its sits alongside the South American Festival Of The Sun in the
prestige stakes. Is it just another marketing ploy in the guise
of 'alternativeness'? Ollie continues, "There are
labels such as Dragonfly that are marketing what they call the
Goa sound and its true that it might be what they play from 12
to 2am but its not the whole thing, its much deeper than that.
I'm particularly interested in the stuff coming from Japan at
present, which is also heavily influenced by Goa, like Yokota,
two CDs PsyHarmonics is releasing - Sonic Sufi and Maseray - SMILE
and Blissed. There are so many tracks from Goa that I've heard
and I don't even know what they are".
PsyHarmonics has led the charge of Australian techno labels with
a prolific and almost unheard of number of releases in its first
two years of being, however it appears that Psy is still very
much a labour of love for Ollie. "We're still scraping around
for money. Fortunately I had a MIDI studio when we started out
so we could make recordings and get them out for distribution.
The way it is at present, the records sell enough to pay themselves
off and then we go and press some more. But when push comes to
shove we don't really care if we don't see anything from it. We're
doing it because we want to see our own music get out and the
people who we like's music. In terms of what has happened, though,
Psy been terribly successful. We've had two bands tour Europe
and the response to most of the releases has been extremely positive.
What we've done is help push 'real contemporary Australian music'
to the world, unlike the crap that the majors are pushing like
Johnny Diesel [who is rumoured to have said some rather nasty
things about techno in an interview in a widely distributed Melbourne
magazine]. On a local front we are selling at least 1000 of each
release and they all go into a second pressing so we have built
up a good groundswell of support, which is more than can be said
for our ex-club Psychic Harmony". Featuring live techno acts
each week, some of Melbourne's best DJs and a live Internet chat
room, what happened? "Basically people got sick of the venue
which I feel is a pretty weak excuse and then they started to
complain about the $8 cover charge. They didn't seem to understand
that nowhere else was providing the facilities that we were, not
even at the supposedly 'big production' raves".
Yellow Peril