THE BRAIN by Sean McLusky I was running club nights with Mark Wigan in a basement bar in Mayfair which had now outgrown its self. Scouring Soho for a new base, I saw a sign that said Apollo Club. Up a flight of stairs, I found a run-down drinking den with potential, I asked the owner if we could move our party there, and the week after we packed the place. After we had shown them what we could do we asked if we could do it every night of the week plus re-design the interior and change the name, they said yes and The Brain Club was born. The venue was over two floors, it had a long bar and small lounge on the first floor and a dance floor and bar on the second, it also had a flat roof out the back with access across the top of the buildings. We moved in some renegade builders, freaks, and techies to transform the venue, all held together with Mark Wigan’s floor to ceiling wall paintings, executed in fluorescent colours for that full psychedelic UV experience. The Brain was a hit from day one, always packed with queues down the road, acid house had taken London by storm the year before and people were going out seven nights a week, so why not have a club that was open seven nights a week? House music gripped the capital. ‘Where’s the Acid party'? The Brain quickly became the nerve centre of the new scene, the meeting place for DJs, promoters, artists, and musicians, everyone in the ascendance was there; The Stone Roses, Andrew Weatherall, Bobbie Gillespie from Primal Scream, Paul Oakenfold, Danny Rampling, Darren Emmerson (Underworld), Leftfield, Tim Simenon (Bomb The Bass) Neneh Cherry, Dave Dorrell (M/A/R/R/S), Goldie, The Happy Mondays to namedrop a few. We were programming mainly House music at the club and we were the only venue playing cutting edge sounds every night of the week, there were some variations and hybrids with rare groove, old school hip hop, funk/disco, and jazz. At its peak The Brain's programme went like this; -Tuesdays, ‘THE CAPTAINS TABLE’, with DJ Harvey, Chocci, and the Tonka Sound system, Harvey was doing amazing things with a couple of disco 12 inches and some acid even back then. -Wednesdays, ‘MEGGABYTE’, with Graeme Park from The Hacienda as resident with live electronic artists every week including some real heavyweights like Orbital playing live on the tiny dancefloor upstairs. -Thursdays, 'FUNKTION’, with Giles Peterson, Roy The Roach, Patrick Forge (a little house but more funk, disco, and jazz). -Fridays, ‘GOLD with Glenn Gunner, Al McKenzie (later of D-REAM), and myself all playing UK, US, and Italian House. -Saturdays, 'EXPLODING PLASTIC INEVITABLE', with Steve Bicknell (Lost) and Billy Nasty playing proto techno. -Sundays, ‘ECLIPSE’, Wayne Shires' LGBT house night with Phil Perry (Full Circle), and Ashley Beadle as residents, plus a very suspicious milk and Malibu punch that was extremely popular for some reason! The Brain became known for its live electronic music performances, we wanted to keep the programme very contemporary so we just featured new electronic acts at the club. Wednesday’s nights became the main live event and over the weeks we featured most of the new wave of the machine-led scene - ORBITAL, A GUY CALLED GERALD, RAMJAC, IRRESISTIBLE FORCE, NEXUS 21, MR MONDAY, AUDIO ONE, ADAMSKI, SHEEP ON DRUGS, to name a few. I recorded these live performances, releasing two live compilation albums of standout performances on my label BRANIAK RECORDS. The two LIVE AT THE BRAIN albums are documents of the throbbing heart of The Brain Club, with the banging music, the applause all interspersed with anthropological field recordings of the inhabitants' mating calls, conversations, outbursts, and wild declarations recorded around the building, on the stairs, at the bar, in the toilets, and on the dancefloor. The Brain live tapes were recently discovered in their time capsule and they still sound contemporary, this recording, a live jam session by Irresistible Force & Ramjac, is an illustration of what could be achieved by real musicians on the limited portable equipment available at the time, playing live together on keyboards, drum machines and samplers, all midi leads and floppy discs flying, bouncing ideas off each other, building the tracks live in the room. For the first time ever, here is the full live set - Irresistible Force vs Ramjac Corporation one sweaty summer night in 1990, live at The Brain. Sean McLusky, 2020 THE BRAIN by Joe Muggs Back in 1991, everything flowed. There were still no boundaries between the subgenres of dance music, everything was up for grabs, parties and raves were still a total meltdown of class, race, and sexuality. And old school friends “Mixmaster” Morris Gould (aka The Irresistible Force) and Paul “Ramjac” Chivers had a live set that flowed together out of necessity: so limited were their samplers that they had to take turns jamming out a track while the other reloaded their sounds from floppy disc to prevent pauses in the set. But as with everything in that brave new musical world, they made a strength of limitations and produced a groove as futuristic as it was primitive. And, as the recording of their set at London’s notorious Brain club – promoted and introduced on this recording by the equally notorious Sean McClusky – shows, they perfectly captured the sweat-drenched interzone of the dancefloor in their sounds. Gould and Chivers had known each other since the age of eight, and both gravitated to the postpunk scene in London as teenagers. The collisions of punk attitude with world music, dub, electronics, jazz, and more with the freedom afforded by squatter culture would set them both on exploratory musical paths and extremely catholic tastes. Chivers would gravitate to “real” instruments, learning Afro-Cuban percussion among other instruments, while Gould – always a technology fanatic, and working with computers in his day job – was experimenting with synths and tape edits from the start and got his first sampler around 1985. He took to DJing too, playing at gigs and private parties, soaking up lessons from the likes of Colin Faver and Coldcut in the warehouse party and alternative gay club scenes of London, and went to his first all-night rave in Berlin in 1984 – so of course, he was primed and ready when acid house hit big time in 1988. For Chivers, acid was a bit more of a surprise. He’d been immersed in On-U Sound style experimental dub, and was working on a live project with Aniruddha “Dr.” Das – who would later found Asian Dub Foundation. They were using a drum machine, a TB-303 to make basslines, “and lots and lots of percussion”. One day, Chivers was tinkering with the gear in the studios of the Brent Black Music Cooperative in Dollis Hill, when a face peered round the door and said “I like what you’re doing, I’m having a party here later, if I give you £100 will you play a set?” This was acid maven Finbar O’Brien, and the party – full of 500 people, with the renowned Nick MindScape atop a ladder changing coloured gels over a spotlight by hand – and Chivers was an instant convert. More than anything it was the “fluidity” he loved, and the fact the DJ (and him) were hidden away and that the crowd was reacting purely to sound, not to a performance as such. Acid house kept Gould busy as a DJ – his own club The Madhouse was one of the first regular acid nights in London, and he manned the chillout room in Heaven among other places. He expressly set the Heaven ambient space up as a democratised counterpoint to The Orb & KLF’s “White Room” in the same space another night of the week: “Actually, it was better because their room was only for VIPs, for the elite, but I’d been reading about Prometheus, and I wanted to bring fire to the people!” Chivers was also out and about being booked as a percussionist to jam over DJ sets. And both were in demand for live sets; often playing to tens of thousands at the foundational orbital raves outside London, and really honing their skills when the Shamen set up their endlessly mutating Synergy tour, bringing on Ramjac and The Irresistible Force as residents, as well as hard industrialists turned rave converts Meat Beat Manifesto and newcomers Orbital. It was this latter environment more than any – where DJ and live sets were all part of a continual stream of sound, and sounds, visuals, as well as the crowd were all part of the same experience – that brought together the set you hear from the Brain. You can hear Chicago and New York house in it (as well as acid trax, the pair were both devotees of the likes of Mr Fingers and Pal Joey), you can hear Yorkshire bleep and clonk, you can hear the breakbeats and big riffs that were beginning to be known as “hardcore”, you can hear Chivers’s Afro-Latin percussion training, you can hear Gould’s confidence with beatless sections, you can hear elements that would soon become integral to trance, progressive house, and other subgenres but in 1991 were still part of the same flow. And most of all, you can hear that direct connection to the dancefloor that Chivers first experienced in that studio party: the sense that this isn’t a performance to a watching crowd, but the music is part of a single system with the people hearing and reacting to it. There was a literal truth to that: the upstairs room of the Brain where live music happened on a Thursday night had no stage and held less than 50 people. The sounds that you hear flowing through this record are a document of that intimacy: you can almost feel the sweat evaporating off them, and you can hear in McLuskey’s declaration of “FUCKING BRILLIANT” at the end, not just praise of the music, but the enthusiasm of someone who’s just been through the full dance ritual. This kind of live set – genuinely created on the fly with no technological or musical rules beyond the steady beat, made to flow like a DJ set and react to the dancing crowd – would continue to have important offspring. The kind of studio and warehouse parties that Gould and Chivers would play at, as well as Synergy and the Brain, directly gave rise to live experiences like The Drum Club & Club Dog’s Midi Circus tour (which would feature Aphex Twin, Orbital, and many more), and Underworld’s Experimental Sound Field at Glastonbury 1992 with its weekend-long stream of all-live music. But it would not be long before these scenes would also generate star acts playing on stages in concert halls, and DJ culture itself would generate new idols for the audiences to face and focus their attention on too. In 1991, though, everything still flowed, and everything was still new. It’s been hard for writers and other documentarians to capture that, given that the understanding of it is dependent on duration and immersion – but impressively, amazingly, this recording manages it. Forget what you think you know about the era and its signifiers, try and absorb this as sound created in the moment, and you’re there. Joe Muggs, 2021