It’s a remix! The expanded/updated edition of the classic rave chronicle Generation Ecstasy!

25 years since electronic dance music and Ecstasy revolutionized pop culture, Simon Reynolds’ landmark history of rave is available for the first time in America in uncut form and bearing its original title Energy Flash. A longtime writer about rock and rap, Reynolds started watching––and partaking in––the rave movement in 1991, experiencing firsthand ecstasy’s sense-heightening and adrenalin-surging effects on the music and the scene. In telling the story, Reynolds goes way beyond straight music history, mixing interviews with participants, DJs, and producers with ultra-vivid description of the ever-changing sounds of the dance underground, social analysis, theory-fueled speculation, and personal reminiscence.

Blending sharply observed reporting, probing research and passionate opinion in the style of the acclaimed postpunk history Rip It Up and Start Again, Reynolds guides the reader on a thrilling journey from the birth of house and techno in 1980s Chicago and Detroit, through the druggy daze of Ibiza and Manchester, deep into London’s pirate radio underworld of jungle and drum & bass, then on to the hedonistic chaos of America’s East Coast and West Coast rave scenes. Picking up the story in the 21st Century, the new chapters added for this edition track the scenes and sounds that have kept electronic music at the vanguard of pop culture, from trance to grime and electro to dubstep.

Now more authoritative and comprehensive than ever, Energy Flash is the essential document of rave’s quest for the perfect beat and the ultimate rush.

Simon Reynolds is the author of seven books including Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-84 and Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past. Born in London but now resident in Los Angeles, he contributes to The New York Times, Slate, The Wire, Frieze, Spin, and The Guardian.

Praise for Energy Flash

"A classic chronicle of the nineties rave movement." —Rolling Stone

“Reynolds combines the scholar's informed perspective with the fan's lived experience in a work of history that feels truly alive.”—Pitchfork

"An impressively detailed and well-informed chronology of the last decade's transatlantic nightclub soundtrack." —Newsday

"Lucid, comprehensive, and smart . . . the best available way into what has always been a closed-to-the-grownups world." —Village Voice


STOP PRESS: WATCH THIS SPACE FOR NEWS OF A NEW UK EDITION OF ENERGY FLASH, UPDATED/EXPANDED, OUT IN 2013