Amp power

MTV's hour-long strange trip

by Dan Tobin

For '50s parents who said rock and roll sounded like sex, Elvis swiveling his hips on Ed Sullivan was the undeniable proof. For '90s parents who say electronic music sounds like drugs, Amp may be that smoking gun.

Conceived as MTV's showcase for the suddenly hip genre of electronica, Amp is a 60-minute master mix of new and old artists accompanied by visuals that hover somewhere between Trainspotting and a Mac screensaver. With no VJs -- or any regularly appearing human at all, for that matter -- songs segue club-style, as pictures and music melt into each other. In essence, it's an hour-long strange trip with one hell of a soundtrack.

"We want to present electronic music as a genre and let America decide whether they like it or not," explains Amp creator and producer Todd Mueller. "We want to avoid pushing it as the next big thing; we think there's a lot of passion and beauty in electronic music and we're trying to present it like that."

Clips range from Josh Wink's fluorescent stop-frame animation to Atari Teenage Riot's on-stage performance attack to Future Sound of London's computer-generated psychedelia to C.J. Bolland's terrifying puppets in bondage. There are even high-concept works, like Orbital's "The Saint," which divides the screen into nine boxes, each containing one camera's view of a small British town. With constant movement in all nine, the trick for the viewer is deciding where to focus; when characters leave one box, they immediately appear in an another, skewed camera angles adding to the surrealism. Meanwhile, a vociferous beat rages on, and the melange creates a dazed, hypnotic effect.

"There's a borderline between watching Amp and dreaming," says associate producer and Boston native Owen Bush. "It's a somnambulistic show; I think it transports people to some interesting dreams."

And with an airtime of Fridays at 9 p.m. and 2 a.m., Amp strikes many of its viewers just as they're about to meet Mr. Sandman. "It's a show designed so people can turn it on in their apartment when they get home from a bar or a rave," says Mueller. "We designed it as an hour-long piece of entertainment with a lot of visuals rather than just 12 beats, 12 songs. It's a thing to hang out with."

The real beauty, though, is that this is essentially electronica's grand presentation to the masses. Sure, MTV played the Chemical Brothers' "Setting Sun" and Prodigy, but Amp marks the first program wholly dedicated to the genre and its history. "As much as we can, we tip our hats to the old school," says Mueller, who boasts of playing German electro-pioneers Kraftwerk as much as British torch carriers the Chemical Brothers.

In one segment, Eric B. & Rakim's old-school rap "Paid in Full" turns into the techno-pop "In Nin Alu," by Ofra Haza. This segues into MARRS's seminal "Pump Up the Volume," the first dance mix to achieve mainstream popularity; then it all goes back to "Paid in Full," illustrating the give-and-take of electronica sampling. Finishing off the homegrown mix, and showing where the music is today, Morcheeba chimes in ambient-style with "Trigger Hippie." It's a tour through the past, present, and future of electronica, and it's long overdue.

Amp also helps to further the two trademark elements of the genre: a lack of artistic persona and an abundance of trippy vibes. With no Kennedy-like character to jabber between clips (most of which are personless), the music becomes an entity of its own. Those videos that do show people rarely display the artists -- or if so, only for scant moments. Just as DJ Shadow never injects himself into his albums, relying solely on sampling, Amp's videos keep the presence of their creators to a minimum.

So the show heightens this separation of identity and art? Mueller disagrees. "I think it brings you a lot closer. For the first time, we're getting videos made by the artist, not a director representing the artist's vision. Now, the person producing the music has a large hand in making the video."

As for illicit substances . . . "Drugs are totally unnecessary to enjoy the show," Mueller asserts. "We present the genre out of the drug scene and into the home on an intimate level." Of course. But try watching Howie B's "Music for Babies" -- surreal, tessellating animation that looks like Salvador Dalí caught in an Escher painting retouched by '60s experimental artists the Fool -- and tell me you don't think someone soaked your remote control in acid.