Obsession Hyperspace

Obsession’s 1993 events show how porous rave’s genre boundaries still were. Hyperspace placed a Detroit techno figure at the centre of its flyer while recordings and tape catalogues from the same night preserve names associated with hardcore, breakbeat and the UK techno circuit.

Rave Archive UK’s direct survivor is DJ Sy with ScratchMaster Tekno. Separate event tape records also document sets connected with Derrick May, Colin Dale and other DJs from the night. Taken together, they show a broader event than any single surviving cassette can represent.

The flyer establishes the event identity; the tapes let us hear fragments of what survived. Collector pack order is not presented as the actual timetable.

The event artwork points strongly toward techno history — including Derrick May — while surviving recordings show how much broader the night actually was. Colin Dale’s exact-event set is reconstructed as techno / acid techno / rave, while Rave Archive UK preserves DJ Sy with MC ScratchMaster Tekno from the same Plymouth event.

That contrast is the story. Hyperspace does not need to be squeezed into either a “techno rave” or a “hardcore rave” box: the surviving evidence shows both strands sharing the same event identity in August 1993.