Rave Culture

This essay concerns the dynamic tension between resistance and reappropriation in the youth subcultural practice of raving. We argue that the transgressive potential of underground rave culture lies primarily in its privileging of communion, which is facilitated along the intersecting axes of social space, authorship, the body, and the drug Ecstasy. The commodification of rave culture is demonstrated to be linked to a shifting consciousness reflected in changing attitudes toward Ecstasy, the relocation of dance culture into clubs, and the redefinition of the DJ as artist and superstar. A concluding section considers the implications of resistance and reappropriation in rave culture for social change and the exercise of power.

Without a doubt, the question of rave culture’s politics – or lack thereof – has polarized debate concerning the cultural, social and political value of rave culture not only within electronic dance music culture (EDMC) studies, but in disciplines that look to various manifestations of subculture and counterculture for political innovation. It is time for the groundwork of this debate to be rethought. Ask not what rave culture’s politics can do for you; nor even what you can do for it. Rather, ask what the unexamined account of politics has ever done for anyone; then question all that rave culture has interrogated – from its embodied and technological practices to its production of ecstatic and collective subjectivities – and begin to trace how it has complicated the very question of the political, the communal and the ethical. This complication begins with the dissolution of the boundaries of labour and leisure and the always-already co-optation of culture. To the negation of ethics, community and politics, this tracing calls for the hauntology of technics, precarity and exodus. And it ends with a list of impossible demands demonstrating the parallax gap of rave culture’s politics.

(Individual proposal)
The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994 made attending and producing raves illegal in the U.K., which were defined as “gatherings on land in the open air of 100 or more persons at which amplified music is played during the night… [and whereby] ‘music’ includes sounds wholly or predominantly characterized by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats.”1

Reaction to the bill’s enactment included challenges from electronic dance music (EDM) pioneers such as Aphex Twin, Autechre, and Orbital, who began disrupting beat structures in their music and/or issuing warning labels on their CDs. They asked: What if the “repetitive” beats in question were randomized, syncopated, or otherwise altered in order to comply with the bill? Would broadcasting or performing that music still be criminalized?

It struck me that there were likely other musicians influenced by the bill in similar, yet subtler ways. Such began my quest to explore the ways in which EDM evolved in reaction to the Criminal Justice bill. Using the “Hip-Hop Word Count” project as a research model, I’ve begun to trace the musicality of EDM before and after the bill was passed to see if distinctions could be made in the ways the music was produced. Using BBC Radio 1’s “Essential Music” archives (the U.K.’s first public radio EDM program) as well as archival audio files from local pirate radio stations, British-based dance music charts, magazines and other rave culture artifacts, I will establish that a pattern of behavior emerged that deemphasized repetitive techno and acid house music in favor of break beats, garage, and more bass-driven EDM.

I would like to introduce my preliminary findings at the 2015 EMP Pop
Conference and use this data to further investigate the ways that criminalization has impacted EMD culture worldwide, sometimes in seemingly innocuous ways.

1 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, 1994, c. 33, Part V: Powers in relation to raves.
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1994/33/part/V/crossheading/powers-in-relation-toraves#commentary-c1980912

(Bio)
I am a postgraduate student at King’s College London. My current research
investigates the criminalization of rave and underground dance culture in New York City and London. I began my inquiry whilst a Riggio Writing and Democracy Fellow at The New School; my undergraduate thesis chronicled the criminal history of dance culture in NYC. “Breaking the Beat…” is an innovative project that aims to extend my research and engage others in my topic of interest.

This is my dissertation proposal which I submitted to the Department of History, CEU. I upload this material so that I can get comments and critics from other scholars who have similar interests. If there is any question, opinions and remarks, please do send me messages. I welcome any of them. It is about my on-going dissertation project, therefore please do not use for your citation, thank you.

The events around the Mauerfall provided conditions for encounters between Detroit techno producers and a nascent Berlin scene celebrating a new – short-lived – openness. Cemented in Berlin’s Wende era, techno reached across decades-old geopolitical barriers between divided Berlin and the Fordist heartland of the American Dream. This essay argues that the music brought together enthused communities to live out energetic experiments in conditions informed by past suffering and hope for the future. In Berlin, displaced Cold War identifications met the placelessness of Detroit techno’s utopian-dystopian form. Detroit techno and re-unification met on this territory, where a social imaginary of radical difference strongly appealed, and experiments with social forms seemed possible. The music had long explored a placelessness that left behind earlier struggles, connecting it with the “transitional” experience of the Wende. Berlin’s nascent club scene became the place to play out Detroit techno’s alienated relation to identity. The article foregrounds alienation within Detroit techno and techno’s break with the past via Afrofuturism. In Berlin, Detroit techno becomes a trace of the future in a setting dedicated to the future’s exploration.

"The most wide-ranging and detailed of all the books on rave. More than the study of a musical movement or genre, Technomad offers an alternate history of cultural politics since the 1960s, from hippies and Acid Tests through the sound systems and 'vibe-tribes' of the 1990s and beyond.... Like Greil Marcus’ Lipstick Traces, Technomad makes unexpected but entirely convincing connections between people, movements and events. Like Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Koolaid Acid Test, St John’s book introduces us to unknown heroes, committed geniuses and genuine revolutionaries. Beautifully written, with a genuinely international perspective on electronic dance music culture, Technomad is one of the best books on music I’ve read in some time."
Professor Will Straw, Department of Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University
Download Chapter One  - see files above

The Cold War’s end infused electronic music in Berlin after 1989 with an ecstatic intensity. Enthused communities came together to live out that energy and experiment in conditions informed by past suffering and hope for the future. This techno-scene became an ‘intimate public’ (Berlant) within an emergent ‘structure of feeling’ (Williams). Techno parties held out a promise of freedom while Germany’s re-unification quickly broke into disputes and mutual suspicion. Tracing the historical movement during the first years of re-unified Germany, this article adds to accounts of ecstasy by considering it in conjunction with melancholy, arguing for an ambivalent description of ecstatic experience – and of emotional life more broadly.

Where on Earth can you find tens of thousands of people gathering together in a gigantic festival intended to provide a huge variety of forms of entertainment? Where can you find people costumed, covered in glitter, or in feathers, riding unicycles, wearing funny-hats, body paint of
every color, or nothing at all? Where can you find hundreds of art cars and extraordinary vehicles, from star-lit UFO taxicabs to mobile taxidermied horses, giant glowing lobsters, Viking ships, or enormous flame-belching dragons? Where can you find endless miles of participatory ‘theme camps’—with names like Astral Headwash, Lingerie Planet, Mad Cow Country Club, Technofartz Camp, Porn Star Lounge and the Temple of Atonement—where festival-goers artfully offer up to one another a bizarre concatenation of spiritual and carnal sustenance and
smart, regressive, pop-culture-inundated, ironic fun? Dozens of radio stations? An immense range of art, from massive sculptures made of books to digital kaleidoscopes? Where? You can find them about 120 miles east of the city of Reno, in the middle of the desert near the center of the state of Nevada, in the United States of America. For one week every year, you can find this combination of unparalleled weirdness and breathtaking inspiration at Burning Man, and at no place else on Earth.

This article explores the meaning of taharrur (self-liberation) in an emerging Palestinian rave scene in Israel, which includes dancing to electronic music and consumption of illicit drugs. While identifying how the Israeli state enforces soft power on its Palestinian citizens by producing complicit and resistant Palestinian subjectivities, the article explains the connection between Palestinian nationalist and social religious moralities towards the ravers' unproductive pleasures. Shaped by the liberal discourse of individual rights in regard to pleasurable activities, taharrur is described by Palestinian ravers as an act of disengagement from both Israeli state biopower and conservative moralities in their own society. Drawing on Bataille's work, the article argues that the potency of excessive pleasure lies in extreme sensual acts of self-loss, the endurance of risk, and involvement in illicit activities to claim internal feelings of authority. Based on literature on play, sociality, and the experience of ecstasy in raves, I further argue that an intended process of subjectification occurs when ravers reduce their individuality to the rhythm of the group and external agency of drugs, to transgress their subject position and conjure a reality in which self-liberation can be momentarily felt. This experience may

The history of electronic dance music is a long and colourful continuum. Since its inception in the underground house, garage and disco scenes of Chicago and New York, it has developed an ever-increasing matrix of techno-tools and cultural manifestos. It has inspired competing and collaborating worlds of gadgets, gizmos and garments; circuit boards, synthesisers and electronic drum patterns. Rave, its enfant terrible, now stands as a global phenomenon. Born in colloquial terms in the United Kingdom during the Second Summer of Love (1988 – 1989), the cultural significance of rave has oscillated from counter-cultural ekstasis to humdrum corporate leisure-activity. Yet, despite its pre-88 genealogy and current state of techno-globalism, it was specifically the UK Rave scene of the late 80s and early 90s which fuelled the tsunami of electronic dance music that soon swept the world. Attuned to these brief and emphatic years (1988 – 1994), the purpose of this dissertation will be to critically analyse the social and experiential history of UK Rave through the current ecological discourse of Dark Ecology. Published in 2016 by philosopher and ecologist Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology is a bold manifesto for a new form of ecological awareness—or ecognosis—heralded by the urgency of our contemporary geological era – The Anthropocene. Faced with objects so far beyond the limits of human epistemology, the primary task of this new ecognosis is the ontological restructuring of human and non-human relations, or the radicalisation of post-Kantian philosophy toward a weird metaphysical realism. Moving beyond straightforward environmentalism to the corollary proposition of an 'Ecology without Nature', I will look to the work of Morton, supported by further engagement and comparison with the writings Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, to argue that the heyday of UK Rave culture is in many aspects better understood through the concept of Dark Ecology: as the dismantling of post-Kantian correlationism and the opening up of human experience to a truly symbiotic ecological awareness. Furthermore, I will argue that the countercultural phenomenon of UK Rave is thus less a question of social escapism and rather a positive drive towards this new ecognosis. A will to both access and be accessed.

O presente trabalho é uma autoetnografia que se debruça sobre os festivais de psytrance. A análise socioantropológica do tema busca evidenciar um ponto de vista nem sempre comum para quem não vive esses eventos: o caráter místico e espiritual dessa realidade. Nesse sentido, ao trazer luz para essa questão, faz-se uma comparação com eventos espirituais ancestrais, muito presente na cosmologia primeva da cultura das américas e do mundo: o xamanismo. Nesse sentido, a pesquisa pontua os distanciamentos e discorre diante das similaridades, contendo um vídeo etnográfico que ilustra as observações de campo da pesquisadora.

Keeping the question of what constitutes the “underground” open, this reading group seeks conceptual tools that are adequate to the task of analyzing the forms of pleasure, community, aesthetics, and politics that take shape in and as queer nightlife. If one aim of the group is to track the conditions of possibility for the resurgence of such scenes in recent years, another is to reckon with the ways that their viability is threatened by a virus that is both novel and all too familiar. Over the past two years, the COVID pandemic has nearly extinguished all in-person queer nightlife in cities, shutting down bars, clubs, illegal warehouse venues, bathhouses, sex parties, as well as rural festivals and gatherings. Already subject to much greater risk of poverty, unemployment, and illness than the general population, queer people who make their living in nightlife (especially trans people and people of color), find themselves in even more precarious circumstances. This is the situation for tens of thousands of producers, DJs, drag performers, dancers, sex workers, promoters, bartenders, drug dealers, graphic artists, set designers, and all those people who temporarily inhabit the worlds fashioned by them. Even for people who are steeped in the arts of the underground and a history of plagues, the COVID pandemic raises the specter of extinction.

Over the course of our five sessions together, we will ask how such queer ecologies are produced and sustained, and what flourishes (or doesn’t) within them. How is queer nightlife being reshaped to accommodate yet another virus that thrives on physical contact, that is hardier than HIV, that dwells on surfaces and infuses the air with its reproductive needs? Which spaces and infrastructures are threatening or nourishing in this moment? Which are being rethought, harnessed, or built? How do queers calculate and reason with risk? How has queer nightlife adapted to hostile and indifferent nature/cultures? How does inequality operate in underground nightlife, and how is it being challenged? How are transformations of the self and the social sought and realized? What kinds of intimacy and care are fostered on the dance floor? What technologies and aesthetics does nightlife afford or demand? Which practices of pleasure and survival might be good to think with now? Our readings are resolutely interdisciplinary, intended to equip us with theories, methods, and vocabularies with which we might construct a history of queer nightlife’s present.

This chapter addresses an assemblage of spiritual technologies implicit to ' electronic dance music ' (EDM) movements, with a specific focus on psytrance, in which the author has extensive fi eld experience. It explores technologies of the senses – spiritechnics – that are harnessed to optimize liminal conditions within EDM cultures, an exploration that assists understanding of ' trance ' as it is identified within these cultures. In the optimal dance event-centred cultures of EDM (e.g. raves, clubs and festivals), with the assistance of an assemblage of sensory technologies, DJs, sound engineers, visual artists, event enablers and dance floor inhabitants themselves typically collaborate to affect the dissolution of normative modes of consciousness. The phrase ' technoshaman ' is often deployed by commentators in efforts to draw favourable comparison with universal shamanic ritual practice. But while EDM producers can and do act as intentional agents of transformational – for example, with postliminal therapeutic – outcomes, assemblages appear more commonly committed to the cause of liminality itself. As discussed in this chapter, EDM productions are often devised not so much to orchestrate the transformation-of-being and status that is the common objective of rites of passage and shamanism, but a superliminal state of being in transit – an experimental field of experience optimized by technicians and event-habitués with the aid of an assemblage of sensory technologies.

Debruçada sobre mais de dez anos de trabalho de campo, esta pesquisa propõe lançar luz sobre a experiência do festejar rave focando seu inacabamento e os planos em conflito. Trata da performance rave, que entrelaça imagens de espetáculo e de ritual, a fim de explorar pontos de contato entre a antropologia, os estudos da performance e o pensamento de Walter Benjamin. A pesquisa é disparada por fragmentos residuais de anotações realizadas durante trabalho de campo em festivais brasileiros de música eletrônica instalados em territórios distantes das atividades urbanas cotidianas, locais de natureza exuberante como praias desertas e no entorno de cachoeiras. Nesses cenários paradisíacos, outra imagem de sonho emerge: a Tribo Global. Agrupamento de uma cultura transnacional, a tribo global rave é construída através dos encontros das festas de música eletrônica e uma intensa troca pela Internet. Pela dinâmica social da festa irrompem utopias, esperanças e tensões.

Taking place in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada for one week every August, Burning Man is a unique event, with a distinct event-culture. Over the course of thirty years, it has evolved from a
summer solstice festival, first held on San Francisco’s Baker Beach in 1986, into the world’s largest temporary city. With Immediacy, Radical Inclusion, and Civic Responsibility among its diverse Ten Principles, Black Rock City is a uniquely contested context for the performance of dance music. While the chapter recognizes that the event is not a music festival, EDM or otherwise, navigating the history of this dramatic field of contestation, it examines how the
composite art form of dance music has established its place in the event’s attention economy. At the same time, the chapter demonstrates how policy initiatives seek to distinguish Burning Man from other events, notably EDM festivals. From the outlaw “rave camps” of the early 1990s to the Techno Ghetto, and from the Large-Scale Sound Art Zone to Mutant Vehicles mobilizing in an escalating charms war, the chapter explores solutions, policies and compromises integral to the evolution of electronic dance music culture in Black Rock City. Based on the author’s experience
at four events and analysis of extensive online discussions, with a focus throughout on event-tribe the Space Cowboys, the chapter demonstrates how Burning Man’s unique principles have had a shaping influence on electronic dance music culture at the event.

La expansión de la música electrónica y las fiestas para bailar durante
largas horas ha sido un fenómeno cultural muy significativo en el cambio de siglo. Varios estudios se han referido a estas prácticas de baile y
a sus diferentes escenas. Sin embargo, la figura del Dj en tanto músico,
junto a sus sucesivas transformaciones durante el proceso de legitimación social de la electrónica dance, se encuentra escasamente problematizado. Este trabajo se propone hacer una aproximación a los diferentes momentos que atravesó la figura del músico/pinchadiscos desde su
aparición en el contexto local como musicalizador y Disc jockey hasta el
reconocimiento del Dj como artista y su incorporación al espacio de la
producción musical.

This book analyses the aesthetic and utopian dimensions of various activist social movements in Western Europe since 1989. Through a series of case studies, it demonstrates how dreams of a better society have manifested themselves in contexts of political confrontation, and how artistic forms have provided a language to express the collective desire for social change.
The study begins with the 1993 occupation of Claremont Road in east London, an attempt to prevent the demolition of homes to make room for a new motorway. In a squatted row of houses, all available space was transformed and filled with elements that were both aesthetic and defensive – so when the authorities arrived to evict the protestors, sculptures were turned into barricades. At the end of the decade, this kind of performative celebration merged with the practices of the antiglobalisation movement, where activists staged spectacular parallel events alongside the global elite’s international meetings. As this book shows, social movements try to erase the distance that separates reality and political desire, turning ordinary people into creators of utopias. Squatted houses, carnivalesque street parties, counter-summits, and camps in central squares, all create a physical place of these utopian visions

How can we conceive the cosmopolitan ideal of travelling and experiencing exotic difference, so much embraced by 'countercultural' practices, once it is aestheticized into phantasmagorical dream-worlds? How can we think of people getting wasted due to drug-fuelled, long-lasting dancing without resorting to idealisms of 'alter-nate experiences' and romanticisms about ideal ways of belonging? This article explores psytrance festivals-a cultural product of the Electronic Dance Music (EDM) carnivalesque celebrations, drug consumption (for the most part LSD and MDMA) and euphoric travelling of the 1960s-with an emphasis on cosmopoli-tanism, aesthetic intimacy and the care of the self. By examining the mobility of Greek aficionados in EDM festivals in Europe, which have gained great popularity since the first decade of the twenty-first century, I discuss the enactment of the chemical celebration in accordance with the sensorial formations, desiring-images and narratives that weave the imagination of psytrance music culture. In contrast with most of the academic literature that views EDM events as a 'heterotopic'

One of the inchoate yet defining features of journalism in the twenty-first century has been the profession’s unannounced but nonetheless consequential repudiation of the time-honored journalistic ethos of ‘‘objectivity.’’ In this paper, I argue that the gradual renunciation of the ideals of objectivity in contemporary journalistic practice, especially in the United States which birthed the concept, is both a return to journalism’s roots and
a back-handed, if profit-inspired, embrace of certain hallmarks of ‘‘alternative journalism,’’ which emerged as a counterfoil to nineteenth-century notions of ‘‘objective journalism.’’ I demonstrate my thesis by historicizing ‘‘objective journalism’’ and linking its emergence to multiple impulses: industrial capitalism’s desire to capture as many eyeballs to consumer goods as possible using the instrumentality of the mass media; the seduction of nineteenth-century positivism, which conduced to the uncritical valorization of epistemic precision, measurability, the ‘‘scientific method,’’ detachment, and other manifestations of naıve empiricism; and the turn-of-of-century delinking of political parties from newspaper business. I also argue that the progressive abandonment of the tenets of ‘‘objective journalism’’ by the legacy media is an artful hegemonic containment of alternative journalism’s age-old ideals and singularities. This, I point out, is actuated by the imperatives of survival in an increasingly uncertain and fragmented media market, made even more so by the unexampled discursive democracy and diversity that the Internet has enabled, which has contributed to the flourishing of citizen and alternative journalism.

Feast or rave?
A study of the feast with Josef Pieper

What is a feast? It seems that when asking this question, one encounters the same difficulty as St Augustine when he was asked to define what time was: “If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain to him who asks, I do not know.” A philosophical study would lead us more surely to an understanding of the essence of the feast than a socio-historical study could. A feast, in its essence, is the affirmation of goodness of existence, and the substance of a feast is living out this affirmation. This central affirmation provides us with multiple keys to understand what is festive, and one is not. A feast pre-supposes a sane rapport to work; it is moreover an activity which possesses its end in itself. The fast is also a certain relationship to sacrifice and time, and this is at this level that a feast and a rave are most clearly opposed in our society. The rave falls within the realm of a form of consumption walling itself in the present and inciting one to withdraw into himself, the feast on the contrary encourages participation to a mystery opening the soul on the infinite horizon of time, in communion with others.

Of course, feasts are not typically Christian, and non-Christians can celebrate in festive ways; but the feast par excellence is Easter, and through emanation, the Christian Sunday. Drawing from Josef’s Pieper writings and wisdom on the subject, this article concludes that the feast is radically opposed to the rave, and hopes to encourage the reader to think about his or her own manner to celebrate the diverse events of life – for the capability to celebrate in a truly festive manner is nothing less than the sign of true existential richness.

Starting with an empirically based analysis of techno culture and anti-globalisation protest movements, this book investigates the transformations of religion and politics in an era in which economics and market-forces have become dominant. In so doing, it challenges secularization theories and sets the table for an analysis of ulterior political movements such as Occupy. In a way, this research investigates how the mainstream of our societies function by a focus on the margins. The book also includes thorough discussions on concepts such as religion, the sacred, secularization, recuperation, transgression, and sketches a methodological approach for contemporary phenomena.