Haywire Sessions - November 2nd 2001, 1.04 a.m - It's not necessarily the drugs kicking in that is about to leave everyone in this room breathless. Nor is it the musk of smoke and body heat that is closing in around us in this overcrowded melee of electro enthusiasts. Somewhere in the opposite corner, a male/female duo called Adult are about to launch into 'Hand To Phone', an ascerbic electronic punk-funk workout that will mash your befuddled mind into tiny squares.
You will dance. You will pogo. You will scream and shout. You will hear those synthesizers zapping your cranium like sonic lazers.
Some of you, if you're that way inclined, will think back to the first time you ever knew what electro music was. You will remember trying not to blub as you grazed your elbow trying to pull a windmill while your brother and his mates rinsed Egyptian Lover on their ghettoblaster. You will hear the sledgehammer of Adult's rough electro breaks and wonder how the fuck things ever got this way.
This is the future, they say. But aren't we here already? And what the funk is 'electro' anyway?
It's been around longer than house music, but after more than two decades in existence why aren't there as many people jacking to the sound of electro funk as to the 4/4? Why does it keep popping up before disappearing back into it's own k-hole? And if it does rear its head for long enough, can it take over the world?

"You can take the 808 out of electro, but you can't take the electro out of the 808." - Albert Einstein.

Well, actually not Einstein. The quote comes from Simon from the Kansas City Prophets, an up-and-coming Brixton-based electro producer explaining the crucial component in the convoluted story of electro - the Roland TR-808 drum machine. "The Roland 808 is undoubtedly the sound of electro, along with all the other analogue keyboards that were around then," affirms Keith Tenniswood aka Radioactive Man - speaking from the Rotter's Golf Club studio where he records as Two Lone Swordsmen with Andrew Weatherall - mentioning the seminal Streetsounds Electro compilations that had every mother's son ripping up the kitchen lino and throwing down to a sound that, at the time, was indistinguishable from hip hop.
The basic technology involved is clear, but the way electro captured the collective imagination with such force that the reverberations would still be felt almost twenty years later is a conundrum perhaps better suited to Einstein than the bass-ravaged, electro-shocked minds of those of us who fell under its spell.
"I suppose there was this other element that was like space funk" explains Keith. "A lot of the music was left over from 70's funk, and when people started using machines it became electro funk".
If the birth of electro were an experiment in a laboratory, the most widely accepted formula would cite the Teutonic synthesizers and machine-made imagery of Kraftwerk as the raw material, Black Music Culture as the catalyst, with the resulting precipitate being Afrika Bambaataa & the Soulsonic Force's Planet Rock - appearing in 1982 as arguably the first ever electro track.
The paradigm had shifted - the warm, human voice of soul music had been usurped by robotic monotones; the strings and breaks of funk shredded into the machine to be replaced by analogue keyboards and 808s. The newborn hip hop child had reared its head out of a pool of electric plethora and rhymed: "Look, Mother! The machines have taken over!" in a vocodered infant voice…

Looking at electro in 2001, however, the two decades following its' conception have witnessed the covert evolution of a genre that in many ways shrugged off its' original doppelganger, hip hop, only to discover a new bastard sibling in techno.
"As Sherman [co-promoter with Andrew Curley of the legendary Electrocuted weekly] once said: It's techno's harder cousin" Tenniswood explains. "But I reckon out of all the styles of music we have - and it's an outrageous amount - electro has as many different forms as house and techno".
"It's all branching off in different ways," agrees Phil Klein aka Bass Junkie: electro aficionado since the early 80's and one of the UK's finest exponents of bass-heavy electro on labels like Breakin', Dynamix II and his own Battle Trax. "I mean it won't be called electro soon - like everything it just keeps on evolving - it's a bit of a beast, isn't it?"
And indeed it is. A beast with many heads and body parts too numerous to easily pin down - with virulent spores spread all over the globe. Germany, Holland, Florida and Detroit are just some of the electro hotspots, while in the UK alone there is a formidable posse of notable activists including Weatherall, Dave Clarke and Carl Finlow (of 20:20 Vision) who have remained consistent supporters.

Some of the recent resurgence, however, must be attributed to a flurry of successful releases by a 'new wave' of electro artists, heralding claims from some, to the chagrin of others, of a full-scale electro revival.
A case in point are Miss Kittin and The Hacker, originally from France, who represent a growing faction of artists - including Fischerspooner, Adult and The Kitbuilders - that to varying degrees draw heavily from electro but echo synth-pop of the past ("like toughened up Human League" according to Keith). The cynical retro-sceptic fingers are bound to be pointed.
"If everybody's into an electro revival now, next year it'll be something else, maybe New Beat?" proposes Miss Kittin in defence of this notion, hinting that their injection of 'kitsch' should perhaps be taken as a by-product of more admirable intentions: "I'm not from the past: my lyrics are not talking about robots, space and dark rooms. I live in the present, not the future. If it sounds like the past, it's not my fault! It's about fun, laughing at us, laughing at absurdity. We decided to put in vocals and make electro in this serious world of techno. Anyway, nowadays, everything can be called electro - everybody's using computer and voice effects. Look at Britney's new record…"
But while pop catches on again in its' own tardy manner, the obsession with technology and the future binds electro inextricably with techno and all its underground catacombs, a fact evidenced by the number of top-flight techno producers like Juan Atkins or The Advent, who have successfully experimented with both. This relationship between the two styles, however, is cloudy.
"I just think there's more funk in electro, and it doesn't take itself quite so seriously. It can draw from anywhere - hip hop, techno - and it'll continue to grow until one day when it'll take over the planet!" Phil Bass Junkie's bid for world domination may be tongue-in-cheek, but the desire to see himself and his peers expand their popularity is real. "There's loads of us who've been trying to get it to that point for years" he enthuses. "I thought it was gonna happen in '95, but it didn't: it only seems to be coming to the fore now. But then again it might die a death and go back underground for ten years. I like the underground element to it - but I'd also like it to get the recognition it deserves."

Deserving of such recognition in the UK alone are a number of headstrong producers, DJs and labels such as Transparent Sound - a south-coast collective now approaching a decade in existence and set to release an album on Billy Nasty's Electrix imprint early next year. "I think the scene's starting to grow now because the production's getting better," label-boss Orson Bramley explains. "Even if it is made in a bedroom the standard of equipment is so much higher now. I was saying the other day, when listening to some nu-skool breaks, that if our production was as polished as, say, the Plump DJs, it probably wouldn't sound like electro. So is the rawness of the sound the essence of what it is?"
A good question. This rawness and underground spirit in many ways defines electro, and fizzes through some of the more enthralling music that exists within the whole dance music oeuvre. But how does your down-trodden producer 'keep the faith' and retain their musical integrity - without facing bankruptcy or turning to the 'dark-side' of commercialism?
"A lot of it depends on whether you've got big balls or small balls" is the explanation from Transllusion, one half of legendary Detroit outfit Drexciya and author of the recent solo album, 'The Opening of the Cerebral Gate'.
"The young guys who really wanna be groundbreakers go out and find their hardware, find their sound, then keep it top secret. That's exactly what we did. Nobody has ever been in our studio, and in fact it was only breached once... and afterwards we totally reconstructed it."
"I would like to go beyond the existing technology for this decade" he continues. "I don't want it to be an abrupt change... you might hear bits of 808 here and there, but let me put it this way: some of that hardware we never even possessed."
For Orson too, whatever the restrictions, the key is progression. "The 808 isn't dead, but the purist side has been done to death - it's all good stuff but for me it's time to move on and push boundaries…"

"I think the challenge is in working in new sounds while keeping the essential machine funk and the rhythms in place," concurs Simon Kansas City Prophets, who also cites the meeting of minds that occurred at Curley and Sherman's Electrocuted as instrumental in allowing the scene to converge. Seen simply, in the absence of many other regular, successful electro clubs, nights like Electrocuted, the Haywire Sessions and the booty-shaking Wide crew have provided London's most obvious clue as to what the potential appeal of electro might be, yet it seems that most promoters (and distributors for that matter) don't want to take the risk of finding out for themselves. To such people, and on behalf of every frustrated electro-head just itching to burn sneaker-rubber every weekend, Transparent Sound's Orson has these words: "People want to do everything safely... I don't know what to say - it's fucking annoying. Wake up!"
Whatever the truth, the passion is certainly there in multitudes... and for those who've not yet had a personal awakening to the sound of electro funk, just listen closely and you might just hear the faint metallic clunking of a robotic heart beating inside you.