How dance music lives and dies

I am listening to the astonishing KLF's White Room album. I cannot praise it highly enough. It is really extraordinary.

Most dance music, being some glittering illusion like a shell fished out of the ocean floor, loses its shine almost immediately. You have to be on the nightclub floor the day it comes out to catch the reflected physical luminosity of its ritual composition.

Then, more horribly still, the mainstream radio picks up the most substantial dance songs and plays them on work and car and kitchen radios. The ritual charge of the music is dissipated thereby. It is not that the context changes alone: the actual energetic rush of the song vanishes, and is replaced by the distaste you feel finding a dead thing of the deep on the beach.

The KLF is that remarkable combination of deep unconventionality and profound physical illumination. Their music never made it, or made it only briefly, onto radio. It simply worked... and works.

Listening to "Last Train To Trancentral" I am astonished over and over at the PHYSICAL INTELLIGENCE of the creators. They knew on a physical level exactly what movements the body in ecstacy wants, and exactly what sounds will imply those movements, and exactly what words will ward off the too-superficial enquiry of the listener unititiated into physical intelligence and physical ecstacy.