1993.02.13 – Rave New World, The Academy, New York, USA

Date: 13th February 1993
Event: Rave New World
Venue: The Academy
City: New York
Country: USA

Tracklist:
Music Reach
We Are The Ruffest
Maxim Rap
Charly (Alley Cat Mix)
The tracklist is incomplete.

Extra info:
Review by Jon Pareles, The New York Times:
If techno music is going to make the leap from dance clubs to the pop charts, its starkly propulsive dance rhythms are going to need melodies, identifiable stars or both. Moby, a one-man band from New York City, could be the techno performer whose showmanship carries him to a wider audience without turning techno tracks into pop songs.
He performed last Saturday night at a rave concert at the Academy that had the requisite eye-popping lights, recorded dance music and an audience dressed in bright, loose clothes. Moby’s techno has bits of rap in it, but it depends on dissonant electronic syncopations and booming drumbeats and basslines.
On stage, Moby himself was nearly as hyperactive as the dancers on the floor. He delivered the occasional lyric: a shouted “Go!” or, in “Electricity,” a rap that praises largely wordless techno music for providing “no questions, no answers.” He jumped around the stage, poked at two keyboard setups, leapt up on a table and held out his arms in a crucifixion pose. Between songs, he named song titles and did unusual things for a techno performer. He told listeners they could have a good time without drugs and dedicated a song to Jesus Christ. But with strobe lights flickering and spotlights sweeping as the music pumped with clout and clarity, he was at once master and servant of an unstoppable electronic engine.
The Prodigy, from England, showed how techno is already splintering. As Americans borrow from hip-hop, British techno looks to Jamaican dance-hall rapping; Liam Howlett, the Prodigy’s keyboardist and composer, works with a dance hall-style rapper, Keity, and two male dancers. The music is more changeable than its American cousin, shifting texture every 30 seconds. But on stage, the Britons talk too much. Instead of letting dancers appreciate the Prodigy’s cleverness with melodic hooks and speed shifts that felt like a zipper opening up the rib cage, Keity kept up exhortations — “Wind it up” — that sounded like badgering.
Cybersonik, a pair of keyboardists from Detroit, was less polished, using flat video-game sounds and cold, often unsyncopated drum-machine rhythms. As momentum gathered, it became clear that the music was deliberately primitivist, stripping away fancy rhythms and elaborate sound-shaping to get to a raw, punky version of techno.

Flyer:

SPIN Magazine, June 1993:

The Journal News, 1st February 1993: