Book: Simon Reynolds — Energy Flash / Generation Ecstasy

In “What to Read”, we discuss books about electronic music. Today, we have Energy Flash by Simon Reynolds, a thick volume of 765 pages, with minimal information about substances and the maximum about the music itself, the creation of labels, track recording, musicians’ confessions, club nights and genre formation. Reynolds isn’t always easy to read: his texts are full of fancy words and colourful epithets (the names post-rock and neurofunk are the fruits of his imagination).

Reynolds met the birth of rave in his native UK as a 30-year-old rock journalist. Over the next decade, he wrote year after year in various music publications about the music of the hardcore continuum, which is pretty much all of the British electronica that emerged after the Second Summer of Love in 1988. It makes sense that in the late 1990s these notes became the material for the first edition of Energy Flash (published in the US under the title Generation Ecstasy), which became a bible for many.