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A huge red plexiglass prism hangs over Woking town centre. Its young proprietor, on the verge of bankruptcy just eighteen months ago, is not only wealthy now: he’s an icon. The building is Teraclub, and it’s Britain’s first and only Hyperstimulation bar. The Hyperstimulation phenomenon made its mark when the now legendary Mika club opened in Osaka in 1993. It has torn through the Japanese club scene like a tsunami. Today, Hyperstimulation is more than a cult. There are at least a dozen such venues in Tokyo alone.

Woking’s Teraclub was the brainchild of 26-year-old Samuel Levi-Cooper (’call me Sam’). He explains his story to me in The Arthritic Gaoler, an unpretentious gastropub which has been doing brisk business since Sam set up his club nearby. His evenings have rejuvenated Woking’s club scene. Unsurprisingly, many nightclub proprieters are now turning to him for advice.

‘About five or six years ago, for a whole load of people, the big clubs stopped being exciting,’ explains Sam. ‘It didn’t matter where you went. You got the same lights, the same stinking dance floor, and some old lanky DJ nodding to himself in the corner. Once you’d seen one you’d seen them all. Really high door prices, narky bouncers, a fiver a bottle. Shitty little kids with knives. Going to a club in London today is like getting mugged in slow motion. I love music, and I love going out, but big nightclubs were shit. I resented the staff, and I resented the punters who were either dog-stupid or drugged off their tits. They were barely worth looking at, and you could forget doing anything else with them. You couldn’t talk to people. Something had obviously gone very wrong, and that’s why I started Teraclub.’

Sam’s vision for the club was born four years ago when a school friend, backpacking in Japan, visited the Mika nightclub one night. His tale of Mika made a profound impression on Sam. ‘This scene couldn’t have started anywhere but Japan. The country was crying out for Hyperstimulation. Like the Japanese, the British are very repressed culturally. And like the Japanese, we’re becoming obsessed with newness and gimmicks. Teraclub had to work here, because everything’s got to be louder, faster, and shinier than whatever we had before. And we had to have it now.

‘I just happened to make the connection between Mika and my attitude towards the superclubs. By bombarding clubbers with quickly changing sounds and visuals, the Hyperstimulation concept compels people to react and adapt quickly to their surroundings. There’s no fixed reference point. I hoped that that would bring people out of themselves.’ This is how, on a rainy evening in 1999, Sam recalls that the seeds of Teraclub were sown. It took Sam, with his gift of persuasion, little time to secure the necessary capital, but he admits that the first few months were painful.

‘We almost folded twice,’ he admits, ‘and when we found that the building was subsiding, we almost packed it in. We had to redesign the roof. At one stage, I was conducting business over a payphone.’ But he persisted. Teraclub now attracts two thousand people on an average night.

When you consider that Sam is very careful about publicity, and takes every opportunity to deride his new-found fame, he is surprisingly candid. He recently refused to appear on the cover of Mixmag. When one magazine editor tried to negotiate a four-page spread about the man and his club, Sam famously retorted, ‘I’m a nightclub owner, not Peter f—king Stringfellow.’

Since he is in a talkative mood, I ask him about the dancer who lost her eyeball in his club. He stops dead, and stares at me for a few seconds like a rabbit in headlights. Just as I am about to retract the question, he relaxes and says, ‘There’s not a lot to say, really. We got a bit careless with the video screens. It was really unfortunate.

‘This girl had been dancing all night. According to witnesses she’d had a few drinks, and it’s pretty certain she was off her box on Trec. There used to be a bit in the evening when everything would just flash on and off in unison. The lights, video screens, lasers, everything. Just for a minute or two.

‘That’s when it happened. Her eyeball just fell out of her head like this (Sam demonstrates with an ice cube). She didn’t even notice and carried on dancing, but a couple of clubbers saw it all happen. The eyeball was flapping about on the end of a bundle of nerves (he continues to demonstrate). Totally harmless. But eventually, everyone saw it, and of course the whole thing just got out of hand.’

I stare at my bacon sandwich. It stares back. The rest of story is familiar. The Mail launched a knee-jerk campaign that almost destroyed Teraclub. The business was ordered to cover medical expenses and counselling charges. Finally, in 2002, a bill was rushed through Commons resulting in the notorious Entertainment Lighting Act, which prohibits unison strobing. Sam is unapologetic. ‘The Japanese clubs are still allowed to do it. It’s a different culture.’

An enthusiastic queue of young men and women waits outside the nightclub. So far, so ordinary. ‘I’m from New Malden,’ proclaims one young lady, grinning through a fug of perfume and rouge. Her announcement is joined by a chorus of approving screams. The first sign that my evening may contain anything out of the ordinary comes when I notice that the bouncers are all wearing pink suits and miners’ lamps. Sam explains. ‘I got the idea about the lamps from watching a documentary. The bright lights prepare our customers for the Teraclub experience. We don’t want to damage anybody’s eyesight. Certainly not again.’

‘Our door staff are there to assist our clientele, to protect them, and to keep the peace. They’re your friends, not your enemies. So many bouncers in London look on punters as adversaries. We don’t need that here. Anybody who tries to get in to our club looking for trouble is going to be disappointed. They won’t find any.’

So, that explains the pink suits the bouncers are wearing? ‘Yes. No other colour is right. Black suits are intimidating and clichéd; grey suits are superior and disapproving; blue suits are miserable and political. Pink is the way forward. It’s the most friendly, non-threatening colour on the planet. Can you think of a savage pink animal?’ ‘Humans?’ I reply quickly. ‘OK, but we’re the only one. That’s why you’ll be seeing plenty more of those pink suits this evening.’

As the bouncers wave us through (’All right, Sam?’) we encounter the cloakroom. Searchlights accelerate and decelerate rhythmically over our heads. It’s like being inside a confused photocopier on ‘auto zoom’. The cloakroom attendant, wearing deep cherry shades, takes our coats without so much as a gesture. There are no tickets issued here, since the cloakroom attendants are selected for their memory. It’s all part of the club’s ethos. Sam explains that delayed CCTV footage of the room is relayed into two television screens, so that attendants are automatically reminded a particular exchange of coats thirty seconds after it has taken place, and then again, one hour later.

The club is like nothing I have seen before. The walls, which undulate slowly, are covered from floor to ceiling in television screens of all sizes. Each screen shows a different cycle of images. The footage is intended to elicit associations and emotional responses from the crowd, but not in any order I can determine. After footage of the World Trade Center collapsing, I catch a film of a birth, then one of a chessboard, and then a painting in the style of Asger Jorn. In a screen at waist height, an elderly nun eats a chocolate eclair in close-up. That image is suddenly shattered by a spinning bust of Margaret Thatcher, coloured like a Warhol print. I am almost certain that the Schroedinger equation flashes past.

Close your eyes, and you can focus on the music. Or musics. The club hired high-profile DJs during the first couple of weeks, but they left Sam cold. The last booking ended in a notorious bust-up. ‘The guy was asking six grand: that’s practically our door takings. He turned up an hour and a half late in a huge bloody car, and didn’t even bother to explain himself. He brought this really unpleasant attitude with him, like he was someone special.’ he explained in the VIP lounge. ‘When it comes down to it, a DJ plays records. That’s all. A DJ doesn’t save lives, he doesn’t run a country, and he doesn’t work twenty hour shifts in a factory. He’s got a cushy job, a big house, a big f—king car, holidays in the bloody Bahamas, and our punters are paying for it all. He turns up without any gear, and starts giving me attitude about our mixer. He swore at me. I’m like, "Drop it mate, I’m employing you. Without people like me you’d be working in a supermarket." He just wouldn’t shut up. He started shouting at me. So I had to hit him.’

Sam quickly realised that for the same price as a Seb Fontaine or a Paul Oakenfold, the club could hire fifty local DJs. So that’s exactly what they did. The music that happens at the club is created by about sixty DJs, most of them spinning decks. The more experienced DJs are given the task of mixing other DJs together. The concept takes some getting used to, and the resulting music certainly does. It’s definitely an acquired taste, like modern jazz with a beat. Sam says that this actually helps people to get used to their surroundings. ‘Many new visitors to this club are a bit self-conscious when they come in, because they’re used to the London scene. The best thing about this music is that anyone can dance to it. It doesn’t matter whether you bop demurely or you just spaz out on the dance floor: we’re all equal. If you can’t dance, it just looks like a deeper form of self-expression.’

At the bar, I hear Sam ordering a ‘Trec’ for himself. The drink, a speciality of this club, is a combination of absinthe and crushed caffeine tablets. It is named after Toulouse-Lautrec, a French artist who drank himself to death. ‘If punters are going to have to pay a tenner for a couple of of drinks, they expect some punch for their money,’ Sam shouts at me. Meekly, I look at the menu. I turn down a Trec, and consider a Mary Celeste: four parts vodka to one part Worcestershire source. I decide to try the intruigingly named ‘Gringo Monk’, a heady blend of mead, lime juice and Tabasco.

In the chill-out room, house DJ Ermine Sopp provides a considerate background, sometimes mixing long, single tones together, sometimes slowing house records down to a third of their normal speed, filtering them until they are little more than a couple of wavering notes. Sometimes, he takes five minutes to complete a single crossfade. The whole room, about the size of a converted loft, is lined with acoustic tiles and furniture upholstery, and sprayed with day-glo stars, signs of the zodiac, and unicorns. We are illuminated only by their eerie phosphorescent glow and the lights from DJ Sopp’s record decks.

Sam goes off to have a word with Ermine. I sit and listen to the music, a deep, plangent clarinet note. It seems to come from inside my head. The low lighting, the slow music, and the imposed tranquility is disquieting but unthreatening. I feel suddenly very weary. I am kept awake only by the amorous activities of a young heterosexual couple sprawled across an opposite corner. Their behaviour does not go unnoticed by a pink-suited bouncer, who ushers them to their feet and back into the club, using few words. The clarinet metamorphoses into a quiet, unsettling chord: an organ of some kind. Sam has disappeared.

A Gringo Monk later, I take to the floor. The music is at first confusing, and I content myself by shuffling and bouncing with my head spinning, watching the crowd. My arms feel lighter. I reckon I probably look like an uncle dancing at a wedding. Yet perhaps I look like every uncle at every wedding, all at once. I’m out of my depth, but drowning in Teraclub feels warm and comforting.

Perhaps it’s the alcohol, or maybe it’s the eye-rupturing video screens around me, but my confidence grows. The limping beat, which at first seems to career uncontrollably, eventually makes perfect sense. I find the beat within the noise and my head pounds in and out of rhythm with my heart. Some time passes. I cannot tell how long — my watch no longer makes sense, and Hyperstimulation plays havoc with one’s biological clock. At some stage, I remember ordering a drink, and yet I don’t remember ordering it: I suppose you really had to be there.

I figure that Sam has long disappeared. I make for the cloakroom. As my coat is retrieved with paranormal efficiency, the attendant speaks. ‘Sam wants me to tell you he’s gone home. He …’ Whatever she was about to say, she thinks better of it. Her half-smile and a knowing glance suggest that there is more to the story. I let the silence pass like a beat between us, and eventually find myself stepping outside. Immediately, all is darkness, except for two miner’s lamps scrutinising my taut, aching face.

Sucking in the night air, the sights and sounds of Teraclub rattle on inside my head. Which way is home? I laugh: the answer is, of course, every way. When one arrives at Teraclub, the first sensation is one of discomfort. New arrivals are visibly nervous and jumpy. The senses succumb to the information around them surprisingly quickly, and the mind picks and chooses from the imagery and the rhythm around it.

The complex drinks get to you in bizarre ways. The discontinuous information swimming through the eyes and ears and body make no sense, but eventually the brain gives in to them: it has to. The world swims. At once nothing is connected to anything else, yet everything — music, sights, thoughts, places, and the people around you — become one phenomenon. Your body resigns itself to its own beat. Hyperstimulation overloads the senses, fuses the mind, and leaves you exhilerated. I emerged from Teraclub feeling mentally, spiritually, and physically satiated. I can’t say any other club has done that for me for years.

The morning after, I am still reeling from the impact of a thousand rhythms. As my mind pirouettes, two Gringo Monks, and the cocktail I can-and-can’t remember, turn sympathetic somersaults in my stomach. British teenagers and twentysomethings, Sam argued to me, are already Hyperstimulated. Television is getting slicker and more rapid. Computer games are approaching a filmic level of realism. The Internet has brought the whole world, its culture, its knowledge, and its people, right into our living rooms. We can demand anything, and just about anything we desire we can receive immediately. Each new generation of electronic music is more frenetic than its antecedents. Every new rock music movement is louder, bigger, bassier, than anything before it. We live in a world where Class A stimulants are eaten like sweets. We ask, and it is given. We do not seek, but we find anyway. Such instant gratification makes deeper spiritual satisfaction almost impossible to achieve, and this is where Teraclub comes in.

More conservative bystanders grumble about youth ‘dumbing down’. They are missing the point entirely. What we’re seeing now is nothing short of a revolution: an unquenchable thirst for new meaning, for new information, and for new stimulation. Whatever this may be, young adults clearly want more of it, they want it faster, and now they’re getting it: hyperstimulation.

I reckon they’re welcome to it. Sam’s words reverberate around inside my headache. My hangover explodes painfully with every heartbeat, as every thought blurs with the ringing in my ears. The ice-cold water which I am now forcing myself to drink tastes like bile. I must have slept through the revolution, I decide, as the Schroedinger equation flickers again across my consciousness.

Published in barefacts 1058 • 15 May 2003