from alt.culture book, article by erik davis
the most ecstatic strain of pop spirituality in the nineties was spawned by the rave movement. dance cultures have always been driven by a kind of transcendent hedonism, but raves injected the heftiest dose of spiritual, pagan and paranormal desires into popular music culture since the heyday of sixties psychedelia. rather than hunting for individual sexual encouters, most ravers sought trance-like states and a more polymorphous sense of communion.djs were treated as 'digital shamans', while hindu gods, numinous extraterrestrials and computer-generated eye-candy appeared on record covers, light-show malls, posters and t-shirts. many raves were tinged with a tribal fever not dissimilar to the previous generation's Happenings. the british act spiral tribe and the much-hyped zippies were both overtly apocalyptic and psychedelic for example. the rave scene never revolutionised club culture in america as it did in britain, though it fostered numerous smaller scenes, a few of which were strongly psychedelic. meanwhile, chill-out rooms carved out space for the liquid soundscapes of ambient music to grow and develop. the aural equivalent of incense (moody and vaporous), ambient music drew from dub, sci-fi soundtracks and brian eno, and spread in popularity well beyond the clubs. the ambient scene enjoyed a love-hate relationship with new age music and thought: mirroring the continued popularity of the new age's eclectic sci-fi millennialism, some ambient and rave scenesters explored prophecies, crop circles and communal states of altered consciousness...

from alt.culture book, by daly & wice
house is an electronic offshoot of disco, developed in mid-eighties chicago. early house producers like marshall jefferson and steve "silk" hurley took the four-on-the-four principles of disco and honed them into a form as simple and strict as the 12-bar blues: thundering, 120 bpm electronic drums, with eurocentric sequenced synthesizers and bass forcefully gripping the listener's pelvis, while hammering piano and wailing soul voices tugged the heartstrings. for many, house's golden age was in the mid-eighties, when djs like larry levan (at new york's storied paradise garage) and frankie knuckles (whose chicago club the Warehouse gave the genre its name) whipped followers into a Dionysic frenzy at gay clubs. as the eighties ended, house spun off sub-genres such as deep house, garage, acid house and ambient house...

the faqs on techno and rave
all you ever needed to know on it answered

a chronological history of electronica
far from comprehensive but illuminating

another history of the scene
from a student who decided he might as well put his practice into theory