London, 1997... nearly twenty years ago now. Time flies!

It was a time of many changes both for me personally and for the music always in the air. The original acid house and free party movement was being suppressed harder than ever before via both the recent Criminal Justice Act and the changing of licensing laws for clubs to encourage people away from the forests, fields, quarries, hillsides, henges, beaches and abandoned buildings - and back into legal, sanitised, surveillable, controllable and financially exploitable surroundings. What remained of the more hardcore party resistance had returned underground for a last stand against the authorities, and small though the illegal parties became they had now switched into a kind of militant and fierce Electro/Techno approach that was as much about the mentality as the music. The parties had now become just as much about confrontation with society and fighting til the last breath for what we all believed in as much as partying all night just for the fun of it like the generation older than us used to in better days before. It echoed resonantly the dark final days of the free festival movement in the mid-1980s that had preceded and anticipated the contemporary rave culture of the day. Doomed though everybody knew the struggle inevitably would be, it was certainly compelling and worthy, and I'm happy to say I was an enthusiastic participant.

On the other side, rock music to anyone who truly loved it had hit its lowest point ever, and it was clear to all that the classic days had gone. I was 19 years old, and was a guitar player already tired of the impossible struggle of finding people with similar tastes to be in bands with, or even worse trying to get into bands I didn't even like just for the sake of getting a gig. The sounds I was listening to were moving in a different direction too. I was becoming obsessed with the new Electro styles emerging in the UK in various special record shops on both imported and domestic 12"s that I was also hearing at the raves and through friends, now-mythical and legendary names like Drexciya, Aux 88, Dynamix II, UR, Jedi Knightz, Anthony Rother, The Hacker, Dopplereffekt, I-F, Rude 66, Sem, Octagon Man, Mat-101, Mr Velcro Fastener, Battle Trax... to name just a few. I'd also been discovering vintage electronic masterpiece albums from Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk, Manuel Goettsching, YMO, Newcleus, Vangelis, Mike Oldfield, Hawkwind, Giorgio Moroder and Patrick Cowley, and this all seemed to be gloriously revived in spirit in music from the time like Aphex Twin, Biosphere, Autechre, B-12, Speedy J, Warp, R&S/Apollo, and so on. I used to (and still do) spend many an hour listening to and totally lost in the exotic and futuristic soundscapes they presented. This was a time when the future was still "the Future!" in music, and also had discovered its own history. This was, all added up, encouraging me to take my love of such music to the next level by taking the first steps in a new direction and trying to make it myself. With that in mind I got my first synth that year, a Roland MC-505, and started to mess around. What instantly appealed was that I could now do everything on my own (just about!), with the help of a 4 track tape recorder and an effects rack, and soon after - inevitably - more synths! It might have been a hard road in life sometimes since then, but I've never looked back.

1997 was also the year I bought my Technics turntables (abusing a student loan) and started to DJ, and on a trip to Manchester met fellow electro-heads Human Shield. Meeting Ali Renault, Danny Webbox and Peter Mangalore at that time was the start of too many adventures to come to recount here, but enough to say that the seeds of Cyber Dance, Magic Waves and all related that would follow were sown by our meeting then and our growing involvement musically together over the following years.

These recordings were collected and compiled from boxes of old cassettes I recently re-discovered from those early days, and with some sympathetic and astute mastering from my old and dear friend Mike Wright (who some of you may know as Brassica) it's been possible to cut through the hiss and distortion (not to mention the hazey green mist and clouds of aerosol fumes that accompanied everything I did around this time) enough to present some of them to you now. I hope they may be of interest to anyone wanting to know what really went on in the late '90s in London behind the drum 'n' bass and hard-house facade that dominated the media and clubs, and instead what shook our suburban bedrooms (and a few fields!) in all-night music-making sessions while most of the country slept, happy to be ignored by the mainstream and living simply for the music itself. And for anyone who's ever wondered while listening to Magic Waves on a Sunday night on Intergalactic FM or picked up a Cyber Dance vinyl, or come down to one of the festivals over the years, it may be interesting to see where some of it all started way back when. I hope these tracks will be taken in the spirit they were meant - late-night trips into synthesised sound made with no expectation of anyone else ever hearing them - made purely for the sake of making them. "Music First", after all!

Thanks to my Mum for putting up with the racket at the time, and Anna for encouraging me to put the racket out there now.

James Penrose/Casionova, Berlin 2016