I’ve used some samples of different speech synth voices saying “algorave generation, we love repetition” for a while. It’s a great joke, because you can keep doing it forever, over and over again, and it keeps getting funnier (maybe). The ever-curious Lu Wilson asked me “where did it come from, how did it become ‘the line’, and why, and so on”, and this is what I replied:
Heh well when I was a (failing) student the first time around in the 90s I came up with “mdma generation, we love repetition” as a joke while messing around with a synth iirc and later reappropriated it..
For me though “algorave generation, we love repetition” as a statement sits in the context of UK university computer music departments around 2010, with their institutionalised electroacoustic music culture where virtuosity is all about the number of genelec speakers in your multichannel array, and where repetition was regarded more or less as pure evil. I don’t know whether you’ve heard of this guy Adorno but for some reason he’s taken seriously by music academics despite every quote I’ve read from him coming across as unhinged.. He reckons repetition is “psychotic and infantile”. Believe it or not, these people group together all music that isn’t electroacoustic or european classical as ‘popular music’ and repetition would be a mark of that. I think there’s a small world mindset inherent in rejecting repetitive dance music and it doesn’t take much imagination to link it to racism, homophobia, classism etc.
So basically to say “we like repetition” is a kind of rejection of that kind of weirdo performative seriousness that we were talking about in the pub. 😉
I can understand why some music academics have rejected repetition, I think it comes from a rejection of fascism. But people have danced to repetitive music forever, everywhere, it’s an important part of being human.. and repetition isn’t about listening to the same thing over and over again, unchanging, it’s about really getting to know something, through spiral loops, as it’s changing, and as you’re changing…