RIP Robert Miles

[Gob]

DJ Robert Miles has died at the age of 47. The track that defined his career, Children, was one of the biggest-selling instrumentals in Europe and inspired a whole new genre.



But Miles had an unusual motivation for it - helping to tackle "Saturday night slaughter" on Italy's roads.

Children is one of the most iconic tracks in the history of dance music.

It launched a new genre - "dream house" - and although that did not last long, the more melancholy, cerebral sound opened the door for trance music, which would come to dominate clubs in the late 1990s, going fully mainstream into the new millennium.

That sound was a very deliberate choice by Miles, whose real name was Roberto Concina.

Although Children was initially written in response to images of the child victims of the Balkans war as Yugoslavia tore itself apart, the track then took on a different life - and a different motivation.

Miles wanted to make it big to help save the lives of clubbers.

The sound of Europe's clubs in the mid-1990s - in particular in Italy, where Miles lived - was amped-up tracks and hard beats.

But the high this music induced in clubbers - plus any substances they may have taken to enhance their experience - meant that when the night was over, they were still feeling the full effects of drugs and adrenaline.

This was blamed for a rise in car crashes at the weekends. Having danced all night and often driven many miles to get to the clubs, young drivers were losing control and ending up in appalling accidents.

In fact, so bad was the problem that it had its own term in Italy - "stragi del sabato sera" - Saturday night slaughter.


Continues here...

[RayThom]

This reminds me of Jean Michel Jarre's Oxygene.