Christoph de Babalon

*2023 repress* Christoph De Babalon was a key member of Digital Hardcore, the mutant Berlin-based splintercell who fused UK rave music with more experimental, Teutonic techno, Ambient and hardedgepolitics to brutal effect during the mid-late ‘90s. CDB was always somehow on another level tomost of his peers and labelmates at DHR, less interested in purely aggy breakbeat energy, his was asound that also embraced windswept, ice-cold ambient atmospherics and a bleak sort of romancethat was at odds with the almost cartoonish “sound terror” aesthetic of the label.

‘If You’re Into It, I’m Out Of It’ really distills a feeling of that era, as the utopian outlook ofrave’s early years had given way to something much darker, more maudlin, perhaps symptomaticof an ennui with dance music’s hyper-commercial land grab, a kind of pre-millennial tension.Either way, it provided the perfect soundtrack to ravers who were spending more time developingvirtual lives online, or (speaking from experience) who weren’t yet old enough to go raving, butwere shelled with media images and 2nd hand impressions of the culture, which had by thenmorphed into the prevailing trends of garage, trance, and prog house, and was but a ghost of itsoriginal, loony self.

It’s an album torn between extreme states; on the one hand going harder than the rest in killer ravemoves such as the hardcore rattler ‘Dead (Too)’, the epic amen + drone blow-out ‘My Confession’, orthe cut-throat beast ‘Water’. But on the other, it gets properly haunting on the remarkable 15 minuteopener ‘Opium’, or with the sublime, Gas-like suspension system of ‘Brilliance’, and the funereal,bombed-out bliss of ‘High Life (Theme)’

Christoph De Babalon effectively plotted out terrain that bridged DJ Scud’s rugged jungle breakcorewith soundscaping more commonly associated with Thomas Köner or Deathprod, and in theprocess set the ground for myriad contemporary producers and sounds ranging from Raime and Blackest Ever Black to Demdike, Pessimisst and beyond. ‘If You’re Into It, I’m Out of It’ was, and stillis, a deadly statement of intent, with an aesthetic that still strongly resonates and influences today.