The deep throbs and snare-drum smacks of Chicago house music are audible before you even step foot inside Electronic, the Design Museum’s inaugural post-lockdown exhibition. It’s an indication of the sensory feast ahead — the type we’ve all been starved of recently.
That music comes via French DJ and producer Laurent Garnier, whose encyclopaedic mix plays loudly throughout. On entry, we’re also met by Andreas Gursky’s wall-spanning image of sweaty revellers at the Union Rave in Düsseldorf, Germany. It’s all thrillingly transportative.
A detailed timeline travels from the first bleeps of electronic sound in 1901, through to what would become known as dance music — electronic music above 120bpm, the exhibition defines — and up to 2020. We meet the “mad scientists of sound”, pioneers such as Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire whose early experiments laid the foundations of club music. It’s here we see the first of the exhibition’s many great relics: the Croix Sonore, an early electronic instrument from 1932. Invented by Russian-born composer Nikolai Obukhov, it looks like a space-age crucifix.
Other fantastic keepsakes are dotted throughout: battered old Roland synths, a well-travelled vinyl box once used by techno legend Jeff Mills, vibrant fliers for club nights back in the Eighties — snatches of history salvaged amid all the hedonism.
Things are broadly split between the dance music Meccas: Detroit, Chicago, New York, Berlin and UK spots such as The Haçienda nightclub in Manchester. Generalist appeal is paired with geeky depth. The 3D Kraftwerk experience is great fun, and the installation by 1024 architecture — sound-reactive rods that illuminate in response to the music — is mesmeric. There are niche dives, too: one section explores the relationship between early dubstep label Hyperdub and design studio Optigram.
It’s striking to experience Electronic in this new Covid world. First shown in Paris last year, this London edition was in the works well before lockdown. It lends a spooky prescience (one section is dedicated to DJs’ face masks) but with nightclubs across the UK still closed, it transforms into something of a rallying cry for club culture.
There’s a section towards the end collating breathless newspaper headlines about free raves — “11,000 youngsters go drug crazy”, “Evil of ecstasy” — which sit beside a long list of laws that, over the past quarter-millennium, have been used to quell public gatherings and, as time went on, stop the party. It starts with the UK’s Disorderly Houses Act of 1751 and finishes with France’s Anti-Rave Bill of 2019. It brings to mind the illegal raves that have emerged during the pandemic — and reminds us that, no matter the circumstances, dance music and its devotees have always found a way to wriggle loose from authority’s grip.
The final set piece cements all of that. A dark, club-like room is enveloped by a smoke machine and screens an audiovisual performance of Got To Keep On by The Chemical Brothers. The music pounds, with surreal on-screen figures and intense, disorienting strobes. It’s riveting, and as we leave in a pleasantly dizzied haze, there’s a lasting conviction that dance music — with all the culture, art, history and humanity that goes with it — must be saved.
Runs July 31-February 14, Design Museum, designmuseum.org
