- Aug 23, 2022
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Before Ben Watkins became better known through his Juno Reactor project, he established Electrotete in 1991, releasing the Sonar 12-inch in France, on which I Love You first appeared. The track gained wider distribution and considerable success in 1992. According to some sources, however, after Belgium-based Apollo Records acquired the rights, they effectively prevented the original four-minute version from being distributed any further. As a result, the track would later tend to resurface only in remix form on various compilations — most notably the roughly five-and-a-half-minute Cubic 22 Remix. This ultimately became the version that entered the wider “canon” and became the best-known rendition of the track. Interestingly, it is remarkably close to the original, sort of like an extended director’s cut, to the point that the remix was sometimes called simply as I Love You in later releases.
An interesting urban legend surrounding the track claims that it was originally intended to feature in a television chocolate advertisement. Although that never materialized, the song did make its way onto the small screen through an official music video, filmed in Egypt and at Birling Gap in the UK. Nahoko Sasada, who appears in the video, would later provide the vocals for Samurai, one of Watkins’ subsequent Juno Reactor projects.
Another interesting aspect is that I Love You can be considered part of the musical bubble known as “Peaksploitation”, which emerged between roughly 1990 and 1992, when numerous electronic tracks drew inspiration from the atmosphere, motifs and imagery of Twin Peaks, sometimes even borrowing spoken samples from the series. The phenomenon was discussed by Record Mirror in its final issue of April 6, 1991. In the case of I Love You, this takes the form of the titular “I love you” vocal sample, taken from the opening of the show’s second season. The track also contains small samples from Pink Floyd’s Time and, remarkably, even the transporter sound from Star Trek.
The track’s afterlife would take yet another unexpected turn decades later, when I Love You found its way into Rave in the Redwoods, an expansion for the first-person shooter video game Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. Set against a deliberately retro rave aesthetic, the expansion features a selection of early electronic classics, giving Watkins’ track an unlikely second life in one of gaming’s most prominent modern tributes to the rave era.
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