Salon.com > Ted Oehmke

Sharps & Flats

Wed, 26 Jul 2000 19:00:00 +0000

Among the subset of ravers and trance music aficionados who have seen them perform live, British DJs Sasha and John Digweed are famous for exhibiting a nearly masterful control over the communal mind-set of the dance floor. Live sets, performed all over the world and always the last Friday of the month at the New York dance club Twilo, are an eight-hour tapestry of sounds, melodies, haunting vocal drones, screeches, bleeps and whistles woven together by layers and layers of beats.

Trance music sounds the way you would think the circuits of a computer would sound if they were made into music. The trick of it is that it still manages to convey the spectrum of human emotion. At this moment, in a time when a generation has grown up looking at computer screens and playing with electronic gadgets, it's the most popular style of electronic music in the world.

Fittingly, Sasha and Digweed's double CD, "Communicate," debuted at No. 149 on the Billboard charts, higher than any previous mix CD. The album represents an effort to reconcile the poundingly subtle journey of the dance floor experience, and the DJ/dancer interaction of a live show, with the demands of an album that can be listened to at home over and over again. More than any of their previous four recordings, it works: It's about as close as someone can come to hearing what they sound like at Twilo without visiting the club.

The poisoning of suburbia

Thu, 06 Jul 2000 19:00:00 +0000

Sara Aeschlimann called her mom, Janice, in typical fashion at 12:30 one Saturday night. "I just wanted to let you know that I'm OK and that I'll be staying at Garrett's house," she said. Though Garrett Harth was three years older than 18-year-old Sara, they had known each other a long time, and he lived with his parents only five minutes away in the Chicago suburb of Naperville, Ill.

Like other teens, Sara had experimented with drugs, and had recently confided to her mom that she liked to smoke pot every once in a while. That worried her mother. But Sara had a job and a wide circle of friends, and was just a few weeks from high school graduation. All in all, she seemed OK. Aeschlimann thanked her daughter for calling and hung up.

A short time after the call, as Sara was watching TV and playing pool in Harth's basement, he reportedly offered the striking blond, brown-eyed girl a potent brand of ecstasy known as "double stack white Mitsubishi." She had apparently taken ecstasy for the first time a couple of months earlier, and the round white pills were supposed to be the hottest version of ecstasy around. She washed down a few and waited for the drug's effects to kick in.

The war on information

Thu, 15 Jun 2000 19:06:00 +0000

It's a balmy Saturday evening on Randall's Island, where 8,000 people are attending the Sixth Element Electronic Music Festival, a rave-style event showcasing DJs from around the world.

In a back corner of the grounds is a small folding table behind a banner that says "DanceSafe." Several young people are peering intently into a small cardboard box, where Soren Roinick, a 23-year-old DanceSafe volunteer, is testing ravers' pills for MDMA, the only ingredient in pure ecstasy.

Three of the 68 pills DanceSafe will test this day contain DXM, a drug sometimes sold as ecstasy that has been responsible for some recent injuries to ravers. Roinick tells the pill holders at the table that DXM is not ecstasy, and, when mixed with MDMA, can lead to severe overheating. Two people say they would not take the DXM because they are already on E. Another guy says he will take it later, after his ecstasy wears off. On a humid 95-degree day, that bit of advice may have saved a couple of trips to the hospital.