Sit down and take your notebooks out, it's time for a history lesson kids. In 1990, when your parents were giddily necking smarties like they were, well, smarties, the soundscape was light, uplifting and harmonious. Still basking in the afterglow of the summer of love, the clubs were full of diva-sampling, piano vamping odes to togetherness, tenderness and other hippy nonesense. Then Joey Beltram unleashed this pitch black blast of pure evil into the clubbing consciousness. In his mind, he was creating a harder and darker strain of house music, but to the Europeans, he'd opened the floodgates for a form of techno brutalism a million miles away from Detroit's Belleville Three. The New Yorker extracted unyielding tension from a tough 909 program, bolstered it with the most malevolent and menacing bassline and created a classic with the addition of eerie choral vox, skewed string samples and the guttural whisper of "Ecstacy"
