Energetski bljesak (rave i dance)

If rock music talked about experience - autobiographical or fictional - rave constructed an experience: bypassing interpretation, the listener was thrown into a vortex of heightened sensations, abstract emotions and artificial energy. Rave music represents a fundamental break with rock, or at least the dominant (English) literary and social realist paradigm of rock criticism, which focuses on song and story. Rave has been about more than music and drugs from the very beginning; rave is a matrix of lifestyle, ritualized behavior and belief. To the casual observer it may seem like some twisted cult, but to the rave participants it is like a religion. In this updated and expanded edition of Energy Flash (originally published in 2008), Simon Reynolds has not changed the basic text of the 1998 book (which dealt with the basic genres of techno and house), but has only added a few chapters covering what happened later: the rise of trance, the 2step garage explosion, the retro-electro comeback of the eighties and - in a quick overview - the crisis and consolidation of dance culture and the emergence of undefined genres, such as micro-house, breakcore, grime and dubstep. In this edition - the first in the Croatian language - a chapter on DJing and remixing has been added. If the intonation of the new material in Energy Flash is largely moving towards the subject, it is still clear that the author is inclined: to measure each new development against the initial phase of the rave from the early nineties.