EON — VOID DWELLER (Vinyl Solution UK 1992)
Written and mixed by Ian B. Loveday and J. Saul Kane.

Side One

1. Basket Case
2. Inner Mind
3. Fear the Mind Killer

Side Two

1. Infernal Machine
2. A kind of Living

Side Three

1. Spice
2. Final Warning

Side Four

1. Electromagnetic Waves
2. Infinity
3. Dawn on a New World

While British youth was celebrating it’s “second summer of love” i was holed up in a remote farmhouse in North Wales, figuring out what to do with my life that might not have to involve getting up in the morning and doing something unpleasant for money. 

With Ecstasy at £15 a throw, and most of the music sounding like a bad hangover banging in the back of your head, i did not engage much with the Rave scene or the music. One of the few electronic dance records I did buy, on the strength of a Peel session, was Eon’s Void Dweller. I skipped through it once at the time and left it to gather dust, assuming i would one day ‘get it’.

With ecstasy now a mere £2, 6 months ago I felt it was probably time to experiment, especially as it was 15 years after the event and i was old enough to know better.

Well, it was a totally incredible experience and Void Dweller was my (and my companion’s) soundtrack. What had previously sounded like harsh inhuman pounding, began to make perfect sense. Melodies and humour lept out of the record and layer upon layer of complex interlocking electronic sound revealed itself. I listened to it again after the E had worn off, just to make sure I had not imagined how good it was, and I still loved it. A truly psychedelic record of rare imagination.

I have since discovered that there was a great deal of repetitive, boring and mindless music recorded under the rave banner. There are also some mind-blowingly good records from that era too. Records by Smart Systems, Earth Leakage Trip and Eon amongst others give me exactly the same thrill I got from listening to Chocolate Soup Vol 1 for the first time. The beauty is, it is all very cheap at the moment — you should be able to score this LP on Ebay for around a fiver. But with Rave, perhaps more than most genres, you should definitely try before you buy. 

I still haven’t figured out a way to earn money without doing anything, unfortunately.