Far Out

from the 7” single, Suburban Base Records, 1991



There is perhaps no musical element more integral to and emblematic of early rave music than the piano stab, those energetic bursts of chords which follow along to the song’s BPM; the influence for this, I suspect, comes from the other modern genre of music where the piano/keyboard is played in a stabbing manner (albeit, much slower)---reggae. I attended my first full-fledged rave in the early fall of 1993, and this kind of sound was still very popular then; typically referred to as “breakbeat”, this style of beats went in two major directions later in the decade: 1) slowed down breaks called “big beat”, and 2) sped up faster for what would be the era of jungle & drum-n-bass. All of the samples here mesh impeccably, from the tribal chanting that highlights much of the track to the Woodstock vocal sample that gives the song its name, “…that kid’s gonna be far out…”